Requiem for a Desk

I told you the other day about the apartment where Ernie was living when we first met. It was basically one room with a Murphy bed stowed away in the wall and there was a small kitchen and bathroom. The room was dominated by this desk. A large, almost square, no nonsense desk. A professorial desk, on which you could find various works of Plato, collections of essays and translations waiting to be graded—and the occasional slice of pizza.

When the time came to leave, Ernie packed the desk and the works of Plato and his big salad bowl into a U-Haul, hitched it to his Buick and started off for Iowa and thence to Michigan. In this photo he has reached Taos, New Mexico.

The desk was hauled up to the upper duplex where we lived for three years and after that to our current house. It spent a year or two in the basement, where Ernie had his first office, but he soon relocated to a room on the ground floor and the desk was carried up into the daylight, where it lived happily for a long time, still home to books and essays and the occasional slice of pizza.

After Ernie retired, he didn’t feel the need of a handy professorial desk and it was hauled up another flight of stairs to the “computer room”, where it supported the Xerox machine and a pile of papers for another few years.

This year Ernie craved a daybed. The desk had to go. I’m not quite sure how it was decided which of the kids should inherit it, but no blood was spilt. Jeff came with his father’s van and the desk made the hour-long trip to Canton. I am sure it will be its final resting place.

Well done, good and faithful desk.