The biggest purge I've made so far is my folklore stuff. I took my books to the Friends of the Library, keeping only my heavily annotated copy of More Man Than You'll Ever Be. I looked through all of my graduate school notebooks and tossed everything except papers and journals. And then there was this box:
This box was what was left from previous grad school purges.It contained the course packets I made my students buy for the composition and the folklore classes I taught. There were some of the articles that I'd copied for my general exams and my dissertation research, and the floppy disks with my data. It even had the tape recorder and cassettes I used for my Masters thesis and for my very first fieldwork project: an interview with my office mate Tom Burns (now director of the Perkins Observatory), who told me the story of the Denney Hall Elevator Ghost.
A professor was in his office on the 5th floor of Denney Hall one night, waiting for a student who never showed up for her appointment. He walked down to the 4th floor for a cup of coffee before going home, and just as he pushed the down button for the elevator, he heard screams from the floor above. When the elevator arrived, he pushed the button for the first floor and left the building. The next day, the body of his student was discovered in front of the professor's office. The professor was wracked with remorse, retired immediately, and died a few months later, a broken man. But ever since, when you're on the 4th floor of Denney Hall and you summon the elevator, the elevator always goes up to the 5th floor before opening on the 4th.Tom is a great story teller, and his version was much better than mine, with an actual appearance of the ghost in the elevator to tell his own story to a grad student.
It wasn't as hard to toss all this as I thought it might be. For all of grad school, I was Mr. Folklore (or "Captain Folklore," I told people, "like a superhero, with a cape and tights.") It was harder getting over the lingering sense of failure after I'd abandoned my dissertation and my academic career. But I'm happy where I've ended up, and I don't feel much guilt and shame over that "road not taken." (Besides, occasionally Rose asks me a question about folklore and the Internet, and I get to feel smart, and convince myself that I could have succeeded on the tenure track, I just chose not to).
3 comments:
So what did you do with the cassettes and floppies? I think I still have them from my PhD. And there are at least 3 different types of floppy disk, none of which I have the equipment to use. But somehow they got kept for ages.
It was not a waste. Though keeping old course packs seems a bit weird. ;-P
Don, you most certainly could've succeeded on the tenure track...but I like to think of you as a rogue folklorist (in the good way, not the Sarah Palin way). You're out there bringing the folklorist's perspective to bear on far more germane things.
(Had you gone the academic route, you'd have a whole *office* full of books, old coursepacks, and papers that you wouldn't seem to be able to part with--talk about mildew.)
I have my own "road not taken" qualms about not becoming a librarian sometimes, especially after having taken a permanent detour into YA lit land. But I think I like teens on paper better than the ones in real life, so I'm probably in the right place.
Congratulations on the continuing basement clearout--it's inspirational!
I'm always intrigued by the thought of shedding those old selves, but I also realize I don't want to get rid of my philosophy books yet -- hell, I still have my Elementary Chinese Readers from freshman and sophomore years in college!
I'll happily trash all my old teaching supplies, but the books -- the books still reassure me that I, too, was once of a tenure-track caliber.
There's absolutely no way I'd ever consider going back, and, like you, am pretty happy where I've landed.... Maybe it's just a function of continuing to work at a university that I want to keep at least some of my academic cushioning around?
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