Mincey’s Musings
Year Two, Week Twenty-Four

I had the privilege of seeing several of my elementary school classmates last week. One of them, my friend Kevin White, reminded me of a circumstance that happened in third grade.
That was the year we received new reading books. We began the year with a book titled Looking Ahead. This book was the first of two third grade reading books from the same series as the famous (at least to my generation) Tip and Mitten. I loved that series—even the books had a special smell, and the pictures were inspiring in ways that I cannot explain. The first story in that book was “Eddie and the Desk”.
It was about a father who was going to chop up his father’s roll top desk for stove wood. Little Eddie and his brothers each wanted the desk, so the father told the boys that whichever one of them could get the most firewood from another source could have the desk. Eddie came upon some men who were changing a light pole, and he convinced them to bring the old pole to his house so his dad could chop it up for firewood. Eddie by this means won his grandfather’s desk.
It was because of this story that I always wanted a roll top desk. I began to notice that often in old western television shows that there were lots of roll top desks, and this just increased my desire to have one of my own. In our fifth grade text Language for Daily Use, there was an explanation of how the word “blizzard” became part of English usage. At the top of that page, there was a picture of some kind of businessman (telegrapher, newspaperman) who was watching a winter storm through his office window as he stood next to a roll top desk.
During my first year of teaching, a good college friend of mine and I would take occasional trips to East Towne Mall during its heyday. We walked all over both levels and through it seemed practically every store every time we went. One day, while walking through the furniture department of the now closed J. C. Penney, I walked upon a beautiful roll top desk. It was made by Riverside Furniture. It had a matching chair and an attachment that went on the top, both optional.
I wanted that desk so bad I could smell the varnish during the night. I looked at its $700.00 and something price tag and thought hard. That was not much less than my take home monthly salary as a beginning teacher, but the salesman told me that I could apply for a J. C. Penney credit card. I was reminded how vehemently I had argued with a former love against the evils of credit cards and had vowed that neither she nor I would ever have one should we join in the holy bonds. (Perhaps this is the reason we never chained ourselves together in matrimony!)
At that point, I had never purchased anything. I was terrified at the thought of owing over $700.00, but my covetousness won out over my frugality. It’s easy for a salesman to sell someone something they want badly. I looked over the desk with a fine tooth comb, and pointed out to the salesman that there were dings and scratches in its dark oak, walnut stained wood, hoping to make a bargain; however, this was not a rummage sale, this was J. C. Penney, not a rummage sale or flea market. The salesman told me that this was only a display, that my purchase would come straight from the factory, brand new.
I bit the bullet—I bought the desk, though I was too intimidated to purchase the matching chair and attachment. On the day of the delivery, I was so excited I could barely teach school. I rushed home at the end of the day, and there to my joy was the desk, sitting in the exact place I had told my mother to have the men set it up. Today that desk graces my home library, and my appreciation for it has never lessened. It has set the tone for my entire library—most of the furnishings are dark stained. I did not know that I could have purchased that same desk in a natural oak finish, and that is what I would have preferred. I didn’t even know enough to ask if the desk came in different finishes.
In later years I was to buy my wife a roll top that was bigger than mine with a lighter finish. She offered to trade with me, but I do not particularly care for her desk. It is set up more as a computer workstation than a traditional desk, and being bigger does not make it better to me. My wife did through her toils of rummage find me a very appropriate solid wood office chair to match my desk almost perfectly. I never did get around to that attachment, however, and now I have built my home library around what I have to the point that my pendulum clock and Abraham Lincoln would be inconvenienced with the addition.
I never did get around to telling you in this article what Kevin White and I discussed that day. Perhaps next week . . .