The Seat of Learning

We've been cleaning out our dad's house. It's painstaking work - plus every dust particle disturbed dislodges a fragment of memory.

When we first began to tackle the garage, our efforts seemed futile. After weeks of hauling out recyclables, barrels of kindling, piles of firewood and stacks of good lumber, rusty folding chairs, old garden hoses, newspapers, bags of dirt, boxes of sawdust and abandoned woodshop projects, it looked like we'd barely made a dent. Behind sheets of OSB and plywood, we found pieces of our old kitchen cupboards leaned neatly against the walls. I looked up into the rafters and there were the countertops with the daisies painted over the cigarette burns (our mom's special touch). The wooden ceiling panels from my sister's old bedroom were sandwiched in there. Crates full of empty bottles never returned to The Pop Shop. Pieces of foam insulation. And there, in the corner, was the telephone desk.

Covered in sawdust and cobwebs and a little scraped and battered, but nothing a good sanding and coat or two of paint couldn't fix.

My brother and I just stood there staring at it. Couldn't quite believe it was under all that.

When I was growing up, our house was in a constant state of remodeling. I don't have any significant memories of the little white desk whose seat folded neatly into itself. At one time, it sat in a corner of our kitchen, holding the telephone and piles of phonebooks. I always thought it was kind of cool, but it didn't really fit with the Danish-modern design plans for our 1920s bungalow. So when I was in college and getting ready to move to a house off campus with friends, dad gave me permission to take the desk to East Lansing. I knew it had been mom's, so that made it a little bit special. It went with me to a few other apartments - even to Buffalo. Somewhere along the line, it apparently found its way home.

J chuckled. He remembered the desk in its youth. But seeing it on this day evoked a specific memory: of our pretty young mother chatting gaily on the phone while perched at the desk in the hallway of their apartment one afternoon. With its shiny white enamel, smart, space-saving design and slender legs, the telephone desk suited our chic mama perfectly.

On this particular day, J had just learned about a fantastic pool with underwater lights that allowed the swimmers to see where they were going. "What a brilliant idea!" he said to himself.

The boy who stuffed beans and pennies up his nose had a plan.

So while mom chatted and giggled, and doodled on her notepad on the little desktop, J began to run water in the deep, claw-footed tub. Next, he trotted down the hall in his birthday suit, wearing swim goggles and gripping a desk lamp. He figured it took mom only about a nanosecond after he left her line of sight to catch on to his plan.

Then she caught him just as he was hoisting a leg over the tub ... and right after he'd plugged in the lamp.

"Man, that was the worst spanking I ever got," he said. "I gotta have this desk."

I had to agree. Oh, and I'm pretty sure this is where the phrase "naked as a jaybird" originated.