The desk....it's funny, but its location here in the front window gives me memories of my paternal grandfather, whom I barely remember. (He died in 1976, I was 7). But he had a small home office set up in their house - the main living area was a big, mostly-open space. As you came in the front door, on the right, there was his little office area, on the left was the chest-high wall that set the small kitchen off from the rest of the room (it wasn't exactly like a snack bar; there was no flat top you could sit at and eat). Further in was the living room - with the big piano, which is now off to my right hand here - and the dining room, on the left, right next to the kitchen.
They had two bedrooms, also (one had been my dad's and his brothers' room when they were young teens, the other was my grandparents' room) and the former garage had been converted into a bigger office/storage area/library.
I vaguely remember my grandfather working at the little desk in the main room though. I think he had it positioned so he could see and talk to my grandmother when she was working in the kitchen - it was right across from the kitchen and the entryway would have been just ahead of the desk on the left. He also had, as I remember, some openwork metal shelving units (more like the fancy metal-and-glass units some people used for houseplants) on his right where he kept paperwork. (This may have been the "office" he used for the management of the rental cottages they had, and the big office that was the garage was where he wrote? Maybe?)
After he was gone and my family would go up there I remember sitting at the desk to draw...
But it's funny - the location and arrangement of my desk is not all that similar to how his was, and yet I now have vivid memories of that desk and of their house. (The last time I was there was in 1981, before my grandmother went into the hospital for the last time).
I didn't know a lot about my grandfather while he was alive - as I said I remembered him mostly as an old man who smelled like pipe tobacco and had a cough and a shock of white hair. I've learned more about him in recent years from reading the preliminary copy of his memoirs that my uncle is editing. And like I said a couple Christmases ago, after reading the memoirs - I'm not sure what he'd make of me and my life; he seemed to have a very firm belief in "traditional" gender roles and it might have been disconcerting to have an unmarried granddaughter who was a science professor. Though I don't know, maybe he would have been fine with it. He certainly did value education, though maybe more the "classical" liberal-arts kind rather than the STEM kind. But it is interesting - I now have his piano, and I've told my mom I might someday take the Underwood manual typewriter that was his from back when he worked at the Trib, And now I have a desk located in a front window, where I can look out over the front yard - kind of like he could all those years ago in their house.
I wonder if he watched for the arrival of the mail like I do. Or found himself staring at birds instead of writing. I know he certainly never had quite the circumstances I am in right now (though he did live through the 1918 flu - he was a newly-qualified pilot, prepared to ship out to France, he arrived in New York City on the train practically on the day the Armistice was signed, so he never went overseas....I guess he missed all the horror of the 1918 flu, and of course, there was less mobility back then, so it probably didn't spread quite as extremely as the current thing is...)
But yes. My little desk, with my little lamp (scavenged from the guest room no one uses now, that I mostly use for storage) and the photograph of my brother and his family that was part of their birthday present to me, and the old, old "Columbus rolling globe" that my father passed on to me - that had been passed on to him by a much-older mentor, and the paperweight containing minerals from the Homestake Gold Mine that was my dad's for years and which my mother gave to me when I mentioned I had always liked it. And my Groot head full of pens that Anj sent me....
Added: I think this desk is the best $200 I ever spent. Yes, I cringed at how exorbitant the cost felt (a colleague, at the start of this, suggested piling up books and laying a board across them for a homebrew desk when we started wfh and I said I didn't have a good desk). And then I worried: "but if I ultimately lose my job, wouldn't it be better to save that $200 and have it to buy food with later?" and similar worries. But I am able to work more efficiently (and comfortably, now that I brought in a folding chair from elsewhere in the house, so my back doesn't gripe me now). And there's something to be said for being able to see out a window:
1 comment:
I am glad that you have a desk and that it makes you feel tied to your past in lovely ways. And good point about the handsewing!!
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