Desk Set

My parents were frugal. We always lived in a nice, well furnished, middle class home. We always had food on the table and a car or two in the driveway. But we didn't have the extras. Apparently my parents considered a desk for a student an extra. Why couldn't I do my homework at the dining room table or the kitchen table with my siblings? No one seemed to understand how badly I wanted my own desk in my own room (well, the room I shared with my sister). One day I discovered a solution. I took the Samsonite card table from the garage, dusted it off, and set it up in my room for my very own work space. I borrowed a chair from the dining room and I had my first "office." Slowly I began making it my own. To say I put my mark on the Samsonite card table is an understatement. I covered it with cut out pictures and words from magazines and plastered it with the neon plastic adhesive flowers so popular in the 1960s. Mother made me promise I wouldn't do the same to the dining room chair, because we still had to haul it back into the dining room for holiday dinners.

Eventually I got a real desk, but by that time homework and studies had been replaced by activities that didn't require office furniture. Somehow the draw of the desk remained with me throughout my life. My husband brought his grandfather's antique office desk into the marriage. We had it professionally refinished and thirty years later it is still in use as a computer desk in my living room. Across the room from it stands another desk, my husband's desk, an antique roll top desk we purchased from an antiques dealer. Years later I inherited my Great Aunt Opal's antique roll top desk from a cousin who had no space for it. This desk has history and personality. My Great Aunt Opal's desk came out of the old-fashioned drug store she and her husband owned in a small Texas town. My aunt was rather fond of frills and the color pink, so it was no surprise that the desk had been painted pink at some point over the years. It has received a new paint job and is in the corner of my bedroom where it serves as a repository for all things necessary - magazines, lip balm, newspaper, books, framed photographs, a tissue box, and hundreds of other essential items.

Based on my childhood trauma of not having my own desk I made sure my daughters had a desk of their own. When they were small I brought home a wooden school desk from a garage sale and put it in the kitchen where they could sit and read or color or talk while I was cooking or doing other kitchen duty. My youngest daughter will inherit this desk some day, because in my heart it belongs to her. Every day of her childhood she ate her breakfast sitting at that desk. I would wake her up, scoop her into my arms, and carry her into the kitchen for breakfast. Family lore insists that I did this until her feet suffered carpet burns as I carried her down the hall.

When my oldest daughter wanted her very own desk in her very own room we searched every antiques store in town until we found the right one for her. It is still in her childhood room, supporting a massive three volume set of The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, copyright 1971, complete with leather case and magnifying glass to enable the reader to see the small print. My youngest daughter's desk came with her bedroom furniture and I am typing this blog at her desk, her room having become my home office when she left home.

What is it about a desk I find so appealing? Is it the scholarly image of a desk? Perhaps it is a paraphrasing of Virginia Woolf's famous remark, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Perhaps a desk of my own was the beginning.