Lewis Thomas lab (blocking view of dumpsters)
On days when I am able to complete my swimming laps and the
post-swim ablutions expeditiously I am able to catch the 7:53 campus shuttle
bus leaving the so-called “South Campus” stop en route to the Butler
Apartments, where the bus either terminates or begins, depending on one’s
perspective, about a hundred and fifty yards from my front door. What a convenience! If I have a minute or two to spare I am
able to raid the dumpsters just behind the Lewis Thomas lab to pick up an
excellent cardboard box or two.
I
shall return to the cardboard boxes in just a minute, after pausing to note an
important personal anniversary. I
have now completed a half-century of dumpster-diving on the Princeton
campus. Leaving aside those near
the dining halls, academic dumpsters are of course somewhat different from
those dotted around industrial parks.
The bonanza time is the end of the spring semester, with graduating
seniors wanting to exit swiftly and travel light. Over the past fifty years I have gathered, literally and
metaphorically, the materials one would need to write an economic and social
history of my age.
For
instance one can reify in material culture the social leavening of the
Princeton student body, and no doubt that of many other institutions often
regarded as socially elite. In my
earliest years here a celebrative senior threw out of his windows high in
Witherspoon Hall an eighteenth-century chair, possibly a real Chippendale. Naturally it smashed upon impact,
demonstrating in a single act a combination of philistinism and stinking
affluence probably unreproducible today. I can also vouch for the truth of the following
story. A graduate student in art
history, who lived in the undergraduate dorms in Wilson College during my first
stint as master there, found discarded in one of the Commencement dumpsters an
unequivocally genuine Piranesi print, one of the gloomiest of the famous
“Carceri” series devoted to the horrors of imaginary dungeons and prison
cells. It had a very slight tear
just starting along one edge. There
was a smear stain from what appeared to be ketchup on the backside, but the
paper was of such high quality that it did not show through.
I
could also write an essay on the rise of the Chinese export economy and the
growing power of the American big box store. Television sets, small appliances of every kind,
dollar store cookware and crockery, every imaginable storage receptacle made of
plastic or imitation wood veneer—these things overflow from the garbage bins. Twenty years ago bookcases made of
two-inch boards and cement blocks became all the rage. I was able to scavenge enough
cinderblock to lay a foundation four feet wide and fifty feet long for a
particularly impressive section of the stone wall in my garden. Now the abandoned bookcases are usually
IKEA prefabs.
However
what I mainly collect these days is cardboard boxes. I use these for storing various things, especially the
steady stream of incoming books for which there is nary an inch of space on my
open shelves. I also use them as
containers for my own domestic paper trash, to be collected from the street in
front of my house. Since almost
everything manufactured seems to be more shoddily made than in years past, it
isn’t surprising than even the cardboard box is not what it once was. It was
with surprised delight, therefore, that I came upon the dumpster behind the
Lewis Thomas labs. Thomas, a
famous doctor and writer, was a Princeton graduate; and our university honors
his memory in its impressive and jaw-droppingly expensive molecular biology
operation. The study of molecular
biology obviously requires a certain amount of valuable and fragile equipment,
which in its turn requires careful packing to protect it from the robust
mediation of UPS and FedEx. So you
can still find a cardboard box with aspirations to be a cedar chest if you dig
around the midden of an academic laboratory,
One
of my favorite boxes is less grand.
It is a very solid and conveniently sized (10x10x15) specialty of the
Microflex Corporation of Reno, Nevada.
In it no fewer than one thousand latex examination gloves, packed in ten
boxes of one hundred each, leave their Malaysian sweatshop to wend their way
(via the Biggest Little City in the World) to such places as the Lewis Thomas
laboratory at Princeton University.
I am not entirely unacquainted with this forbidding prophylactic
apparel, which I associate with the less pleasant features of my periodic
visits to the urologist. I am glad
to say that it is the empty boxes, not the used gloves themselves, that show up
in the recycling dumpsters.
Speculation
concerning what, exactly, our undergraduates are doing with two or three
thousand ambidextrous diamond-grip latex gloves per week would be
unseemly. Yet it must be
permissible to ponder the motto of the Microflex Corporation, proudly printed
on their boxes: The Most Trusted Name in
Gloves. I’ve never really
thought about the names of gloves in terms of trust before. In fact I can’t think of too many
gloves that even have names. A catcher’s mitt is generally
safe. I suppose Isotoners are
reliable to a point—that point being about 15 degrees Farenheit. You can absolutely count on a velvet
glove having an iron hand to go with it.
How about Ellegants? If
that’s not a name, it should be.
