I was in the office for most of Monday, doing various small tasks- unpacking a couple last boxes, arranging some furniture, and a modest amount of actual thinking. My daughter was with me, and spent most of her time in the “kids’ area.”

This is a corner of an open room that was originally intended as a cafe and dining space, but when she saw it my daughter declared it would make a great space for kids. So a couple weeks later, we went to Ikea, and we picked out furniture that she thought (and I thought) would work in the room: some small chairs, a couple giant leaves that you mount on the walls and provide some shelter, an easel, and a few other things. (I also got a lot of organizing stuff for the grown-ups’ area, too.)

This week, since most child care arrangements are thrown out of whack by the Christmas-New Year’s interregnum, the room is really getting a workout. There were two other girls there this morning, and they ended up having a very nice time.

I hadn’t thought about this for years, but I spent a fair amount of my childhood in and around my dad’s office. I was a bit older, but when my father was teaching at Vanderbilt and I was going to a school just off-campus, I would go over to his office after school, and hang out until dinnertime (or later, on what must have been graduate seminar days). I’d spend a little time in his office, but usually head off to the bookstore or student center, the library, or very occasionally the computer center.*

The bookstore was my hands-down favorite place, though. I spent hours in the science section- the astronomy books were particular favorites- reading the science fiction books- I went through the predictable pre-adolescent boy phase of thinking that Isaac Asimov was not only the smartest individual who’d ever lived but a stylistic genius to boot (about the same time you couldn’t go into my room without hearing Frampton Comes Alive)- and wandering what I thought were the scientific instruments- the mechanical engineering stuff, slide rules, and very early handheld calculators. (In retrospect, I was exhibiting an early fascination with the material culture of knowledge work that the Levenger store has since learned to exploit.)

If I had an allowance, I think all of it went to the bookstore- at least until I was old enough to have a record player. But then this weird thing called “Pong” showed up in the student center, and the epicenter of my spending shifted back.

Then I’d walk around the campus, feed the squirrels, and eventually wind my way back to the Center for Latin American Studies, where Pop’s office was. If I was lucky, he had some snacks in the desk; if not, I’d play with the office supplies, pushing the envelope (as it were) of staples as a construction material. At the end of the day, we’d pack ourselves into Pop’s light blue VW beetle, and head home. Just a typical day.

So maybe the fact that my daughter asked me this afternoon whether she could go back to the office tomorrow, and bring a couple computer games to show one my colleague’s daughters, isn’t such strange behavior after all.

[To the tune of Cookie Monster, “C Is For Cookie,” from the album “Songs From The Street: 35 Years Of Music”.]

* This was back in the days when the campus computer center was an actual place where people would congregate, stacks of punch-cards in hand, and queue up for time to run their programs. My sense is that at some schools the computer center became a kind of meeting-place, an unintentional interdisciplinary center where people from different disciplines could have fruitful, not-quite-random encounters. If memory serves, Feigenbaum has written something about this, but it strikes me that it’s a dissertation waiting to be written.

As for a 9 year-old getting time on the mainframe at this time, forget it. In my childhood, computers were for looking at, not interacting with.