from an earlier age

An Olive Street recollection.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been forty-three years since I graduated from college. As the Wallace Shawn character in the movie Princess Bride kept saying, “Inconceivable!” (“I don’t think that word means what you think it does, boss.”)

When I moved into the Olive Street apartment after graduation with my roommate George we kept expenses down and our needs were simple. Our dining room table was a pice of plywood on two saw horses. Georges’s desk was a door from the lumber yard (long before Home Depot and Lowe’s) on four orange crates. For compartmentalization and document storage he used empty Pringle’s potato chip cans.

I had a small desk that I had acquired from my patents and slept on a roll away bed from the same source.

Orange crates, by the way, weren’t what you might expect. Originally they were in fact made to hold oranges. But when Sunkist switched to cardboard boxes from those wooden crates a smart entrepreneur moved into the Sunkist warehouse by the railroad tracks and started making orange crates that never held oranges. He astutely priced them so they were affordable to college and post-college folks like myself who, almost universally, used them for furniture and shelving.

So when it came to candle holders we were equally frugal. An empty wine bottle made a great candle holder. And sometimes, as now, I simply need to go back to that place.

It’s not such a bad thing, really.