Hide the Paper Clips

It occurred to me today that I have not written on this blog about some of my favorite things: office supplies.

Only a few people on the planet know that a trip to Office Max for me is like a day at the mall for most other women. I could go crazy there, or at any office supply store, and I often have.

I think it goes back to my childhood when I sometimes visited my parents' workplaces and marveled at the depth and breadth of their supply cabinets, which I often organized as a surreptitious way of taking inventory while staying out of trouble.

I couldn't believe they had all of these supplies at their fingertips -- boxes and boxes of pencils, pens, rubber bands and paper clips, with letterhead, staple removers, triplicate forms, and, in my mother's case, working at the airport, luggage tags and hand cancellation stamps. It was heaven! I could be entertained for hours in the room behind the ticket counter or at my father's secretary's desk rolling pages of paper into IBM Selectric typewriters or adding columns of numbers on a 10-key machine for the sheer fun of it.

It's still a thrill. When I go into my husband's office, I'm surrounded by temptations: bulldog clips and Post-It notes and manilla envelopes and colored cardstock...

I can't explain it -- I just have a weakness for office supplies.

But of course there is a quote behind all of this, and it's in French because it was originally coined by Napoleon when he established a post-revolutionary meritocracy:

"La carriere ouverte aux talents"

(The tools to him who can use them.)

(The literal translation is 'the job is open to the talented ones.' Thomas Carlyle

changed it to the above translation.)

An English teacher of mine introduced me to this phrase when we were studying a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, Pied Beauty, which he wrote in 1877. We were discussing line 6 at the time. In my opinion, it's one of the greatest poems ever written:

Glory be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow ;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.