My boss is really pretty cool. While walking around the grounds today, I saw a large backpack up against a fence.→[More:] I had also seen it yesterday, but left it there, thinking someone had just set it down. Here it was, still -- and now, all wet with last night's rain. So I picked it up and brought it to the president's office, to put it in the lost and found.

We opened it up to see if there was an ID or anything. It was instantly clear that this was not just a school backpack, it was a survival kit for a homeless teenager. It had a few cans of Chef Boy-ar-Dee, a lot of quarters, a roll of toilet paper, some disposable razors and deoderant, some rock T-shirts, some library books, and things like that. It was a very poignant and youthful collection of essential stuff. My boss remembered someone calling him the other day to tell us he kept seeing a kid on the porch of one of the buildings in the evening, smoking. My boss had seen the kid around, too, and thought he might be a little drug-burnt or perhaps otherwise not all there. In any case, he seems to be living at our museum, at least nights.

I thought my boss might call the police and turn the backpack in to them, file a report, something like that. Instead he said to me "Grab a plastic trash bag from upstairs to wrap this up in so it won't get any wetter, and then put it back where it was. If he were to return and find it gone, he'd be panic-stricken."

So I did that. I guess we'll keep an eye out for the kid and see what happens. But I really liked this glimpse at my boss' moral sense.