Jim Mazza read this piece on Saturday, April 27, 2019, as part of the Tompkins County Public Library Readathon fundraising event.
We sent my childhood desk to the dump this week.
It was not an especially nice piece of furniture — just a small, wooden, two-drawer, rectangular desk — drawers on the right and a place for your legs and feet on the left.
It was purchased when I was ten and my father said I could paint it any color I wanted, so I chose sunshine yellow — which for unexplainable reasons — seemed better than my favorite color, fire-engine red.
I was proud of my bright-yellow desk.
Later, in my teen years, the yellow was covered with a mahogany stain, which looked a bit more mature, I suppose.
My childhood desk held what all desks hold: scissors, a stapler, pens and pencils, and pads of paper — lined and unlined.
This is the desk where I spent endless hours drawing floor plans for houses that I imagined living in someday. This is the desk that held my first electric typewriter — a powder blue and white portable, manufactured by Brother.
It was the place I sat to write my first love letter and it was the desk where I kept the first love letter written to me.
That was many years ago. More recently, the desk had been relegated to our basement — being sort of ugly and a bit too small for practical use by an adult.
It sat there, in a dark corner surrounded and covered by many other discarded bits and pieces of the past thirty years. So, when it came to our recent basement clean-out, the desk wasn’t the only item on the “to-be-tossed list.”
There was the 1950s-era cookie jar, covered with raised ceramic flowers — also yellow — but a dingy yellow pretending to be gold or mustard or, perhaps, butterscotch… a wedding gift to my parents, later handed down to me for my first apartment.
There were bottles of beer left over from an open house 15 years ago.
There were two decades of Utne Readers — the first ever printed — that Nancy had been saving. (We decided to keep the first two years and selected covers of others.)
There were old lamps with broken shades; glass vases covered in heavy, opaque dust; decaying plastic planter boxes and more.
None of these objects added to the junk heap brought back fond memories — or really any memories at all.
But under this mountain of non-treasures, these throw-aways, stood my tiny desk — forlorn but resolute. In fact, I was sure the desk was looking out at me from beneath the piles and saying, “After all we’ve been through, how could you?”
I closed my eyes and opened them again as the desk was lifted onto the truck, destined for the dump. As it reached the tailgate, I caught my breath.
For underneath the mahogany stain, in places that had chipped away, I could not only see the 50-year-old bright-yellow paint but the memories of my childhood, too.
