LAS CRUCES - A slightly-larger-than-life-size head of the
cartoon character Dilbert perches atop my file cabinet, overlooking my newsroom
cubicle.
Dilbert’s age and provenance are a bit obscure, lost in the
shifting of newsroom migrations and reconfigurations. I think he entered my
life when grandson Alexander the Great was about 7, and was briefly considered
and then rejected as a Halloween costume candidate.
But he was called into duty as a playmate when Alex
accompanied me to the newsroom, and hung around in the days when there were
enough reporters with small kids to justify our own little play station cabinet
of toys.
For more than a decade, Dilbert has stayed around as a kind
of newsroom mascot.
He’s worn a bobbing heart headpiece for Valentine’s Day,
beads and a glam feathered mask for Mardi Gras, and sported shamrock sunglasses
on St. Patrick’s Day.
His spring Easter ensemble has included bunny ears, and a
cascade of fluffy yellow chicks marching down his tie. Summertime has seen
wreaths of flowers crowning his distinctive cylindrical head.
On Halloween, he’s had his pick of anything in my extensive
costume closet. He’s been King Tut, President Obama and even, briefly, Donald
Trump.
Through it all, he’s been a good sport and weathered a lot
of hazardous duty. On longtime patrol on a pass-through counter bordering the
newsroom in our old building, he attracted some attention from the critters in
the canyoniverous quarters that constituted a kind of urban wildlife preserve.
There were free-range mice, humungous cucarachas, a colony of bats and even a
resident little owl. As first-in-newsroom early bird in those days, I once
caught the owl in a face-to-face encounter with him, appearing to be demanding
credentials.
“Who? Who?”
Dilbert didn’t answer and I would later wonder if it was an
omen, the owl attempting to call his name.
But Dilbert survived our 2011 fire, albeit in quarantine in
my garage until his smoky-rubber fragrance dissipated a bit. He found a new
home when we moved into our brand new building a few years later.
And here he has remained, in all his seasonal rotating
exhibit glory. I sometimes suspect many of my busy colleagues rarely notice him
and some may not even realize he’s there, unlike earlier days when we would all
pitch in and deck Dilbert and the halls around him for Christmas, offering
paper-clip stings and festive do-dads on loan from our desk.
And this year, I confess, I’ve sometimes succumbed to what a
once stalwart source has dubbed “fiesta fatigue,” in a year in which several long-term
events and festivals downsized, changed venues and formats or called it quits
altogether.
Dilbert went naked, or at least under-accessorized, all
summer and fall. Even on Halloween, the dashing lad who had once glittered as a
gilded Egyptian king’s famed mummy mask, had to settle for a shopworn gag
arrow-through-head.
Usually, in November, he would be wearing a pilgrim’s towering,
buckled black hat.
But this year, I decided to do something a little different,
when I had a Santa hat left over from an early Healthy U Magazine shoot. I
decided to give Dilbert the cheery red and white hat and leave the
head-piercing arrow, a little getting-your-own back gesture to the First
Nations peoples who graciously welcomed the first Pilgrims, shared that iconic
first Thanksgiving feast and were rewarded with smallpox, slaughter and
centuries of cultural desecration.
Not that good old Santa Claus had anything to do with all
that. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, a victim of idiosyncratic
prop rotations.
Will Dilbert move into curmudgeonly pundit mode in 2016, or
return to his merry seasonal fiesta self? We’ll keep you posted.
S. Derrickson Moore may be reached at dmoore@lcsun-news.com,
@derricksonmoore on Twitter and Tout, or call 575-541-5450.
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