He is a 69-year-old, standard, professor figure: disheveled, with thick-black-framed glasses and pipe nestled in the small stretch of bare gums beside his teeth. He walks with a pronounced limp and a hunched back. The top of his head is bald, but the sides drip long, wet-looking hair that licks the collar of his aged undershirt. Over the undershirt, a vest, and over the vest, a sports coat, which is just a little too big, making him look smaller than his 5 feet 3 inches. Add some tears, holes, and frays to his clothes. That’s Robert Morin.
But, maybe Robert Morin is better defined by his work as a Dimond Library media cataloger.
Morin sits in his office during the day entering information about new media that enters the Dimond Library. He is the man who writes the short descriptions of DVDs, enters the ISBN numbers of CDs, and catalogs book after book of sheet music.
Maybe he is defined by the single incredible fact that he hasn’t taken a sick day since 1966.
Morin began pulling 12-hour days cataloging for Dimond Library in 1965. After a few months, the overtime pissed off his appendix and it had to be sliced out. The wound healed, and he hasn’t missed a day since.
* * * *
Twenty-one-thousand movies, 2,000 1930s-era books and $1 million dollars will be important later on, but right now what matters is the water seeping into my sneakers. It’s 7:25 in the morning. Headlights are still on as cars park behind New Hampshire Hall. Professors eye me, wondering why a student is standing in the middle of the lot, in the drizzle. I’m waiting for Morin.
He arrives, steps from his 1997 Plymouth Neon, approaches And begins telling me about a police chief who was framed for murder.Yesterday Morin was reading a typical mystery novel from the 1930s.Tomorrow Morin will have another book to tell me about.He has been reading 1930s books in chronological order for the past decade.
Why? "Because 1 like the l930s." He estimates lie’s gone through about 2,000 books. Currently, he’s in year 1936.
With his inflection, his tone, and his serious description of the book’s
characters, while he puffs his pipe, I forget to ask Morin to describe his life, I forget the interview and begin wondering, who killed the damn dame?
* * * *
Morin’s desk is V-shaped within a large cubicle. A lamp hangs from a shelf above a new computer, a three-ring binder lays open and in a chair sits Morin smiling his smoker-brown teeth.
Beside his computer is a DVD: "Facing the Challenge: working with children who use challenging behavior?." And across from him, on a shelf, sit about 100 other DVDs. He’ll need to enter their descriptions into the Library’s database one by one, including every little bit of information
someone can search for to find their movie.
"How many media entries have you put in since you began working," I ask.
"Since 1965? Thousands," Morin says.
I tell him that he must get distracted with all the movies he could watch instead of work, but he says it isn’t a problem. He says that he’s tired of movies. He has already seen 21,000 (he counted).
When VHS tapes hit the market in 1980, Morin "decided to see what was going on in film," because he hadn’t been to a theater since 1968. So, over the next 17 years, Morin watched about three movies a day and didn’t stop until "it got to the point where all I hadn’t seen was made for TV movies."
* * * *
Morin tried drinking once, didn’t like it, and hasn’t since. He has never been into a bar or a Chinese restaurant. He tried cooking, but that didn’t work out either, so he makes sandwiches which he keeps in his sports coat pocket until lunch time. He microwaves TV dinners at home.
"I like a nice smooth life—machines don’t work all the time," he tells me when I ask if could use a tape recorder. He also doesn’t like cameras. Morin has only taken two pictures in his life, and he doesn’t want to be photographed for this article.
* * * *
Despite his strange numbers, Morin has social skills. He’l1 run up, shake your hand, ask your name, and joke about your family heritage. An odd comment and you’re reeling with laughter—then he is gone, off alone, doing what he likes the most, being quiet and comfortably isolated.
Raised in Nashua, New Hampshire, his father believed that owning a house cost more than renting an apartment, so every time the Morins moved he had to make new friends. But Morin isn’t like that anymore.
"Sure I get along with people," Morin says smiling. Then in a calm voice—entirely serious—unlike when he’s usually laughing as hard as the other people around him, he says, "Aristotle found that one of the goods was friendship. He found friendship to be very important. I don’t."
"I’m the black sheep of the family, I guess. I never got married. I was
so different from the rest of my family. For me, marriage is more of an inconvenience. It’s just not worth my while to compromise. She wants the window up, I want the window down... to settle differences and so forth."
* * * *
Here is another number: the million. Morin has limited his life—cutting it down to the bare minimum. Eating little, buying little, and all the while paying into his retirement fund since 1965. Plus his life insurance, long term care plan, investments in two banks, and the value of his house: Robert Morin is a millionaire.
He tells me that before his mother died she was the beneficiary. I ask him where the money will go now.
“It’s a secret," he says, smiling.
"I like reality for itself that's why I enjoy real life and don’t imagine hitting a home run in Fenway Park or bedding-down Meryl Streep. People who live in Never-Never land have a dreadful problem when a real problem comes up. If, for example, you have a family and you have a
little boy get run over by a car, that’s a slap in the face. But I don’t have a problem with that because I have no family," says Morin.
So Morin disconnects, he chops the ties. He is a man that has laid his own ground work. He mixed the mortar and set the bricks. He designed the floor plans and chose the roof. And the window is open or closed whenever the hell he wants. But he is also here in this world, he is in this reality. There is no delusion when it comes to Morin. The world is what it is, and he is what he is:
Robert Morin is Robert Morin
