Home For the Holidays

We’ve had our family back for the holidays – our daughter Amelia and son Jeremy, their spouses Pete and Mary, and our granddaughters , 4-year-old Ellie and 3-month-old Abby – and it’s been one grand time, at least for us grandparents, if not always for the whole brood (we don’t do things always the way that our children do). In various combinations, we’ve played games, watched movies, taken walks to the park, and of course spent all of Christmas day exchanging gifts, eating brunch, driving to an expanded family gathering, eating a large dinner, and exchanging more gifts. Excess as the season requires. It’s satisfying to see that our children and their spouses are all readers and are instilling that virtue in our grandchildren (though I’m not quite sure what to make of their fascination, if not obsession, with playing games on their smartphones; perhaps it’s just a way of passing the too many down times that seem to happen when we’re around). My main – almost sole – contribution to the gathering is the cooking. The night after Christmas was easy in that I could fix a (leftover) turkey tetrazzini, one of our children’s favorite dishes when they lived with us. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a particular hit with Ellie, nor was the accompanying green salad, though she did try to pick at what I told her she might like (not to much effect). She did though enjoy her first viewing of The Wizard of Oz (one of the scores of gifts she received), demonstrating at one point a precocious pre-school interpretative ability by announcing toward the end of the Oz color sequence of the film that she thought it was all Dorothy’s dream. I’m not sure if we’ll be able to repeat this holiday gathering. The kids each live on opposite coasts, and certainly as their families and the cost of air travel grow, it will become more difficult for us all to come together. But for at least this year, we were.

Writing Desk

I don’t recall when or where I first became aware of the tiny writing desk, though it must have been at my maternal grandparents’ house, probably in the basement where my cousin and I would spend the occasional weekend night, listening to a gothic-shaped wooden radio from the 1930s, playing board games, and steeping tea ever so slowly over a steam radiator until tepid. When my grandfather died, my grandmother moved into a smaller house and then later, when her health declined in her late-80s, into an assisted-living apartment. It was sometime during those moves that I as a college student with some aspirations to be a writer took interest in the desk and asked, informally, if I might have it when the right time came. When my grandmother died, the desk ended up in my parents’ house, and when my father went into a nursing home and my mother moved into an apartment, the desk found its way to the back of a walk-in closet. I kept my eye on it and my bid for it with each move. This past week, while visiting my mother, she said that she’d like to make room in the closet for a shoe rack and asked if I would take the desk. Of course I would. It fit easily in the back of my car. No problem.

I have no idea why I took an interest in this desk, let alone kept that interest up all these years. As a college student, living in small apartments, writing my papers on a kitchen table, or maybe the floor, it probably seemed the perfect size to fit a textbook or writing tablet or my portable Smith-Corona. But back then there was no chance of me gaining possession. And as to its qualities qua desk, it’s a tiny thing, three feet tall at the back, two feet wide, a top shelf of seven inches, an interior shelf of seven-by-three inches, no drawers or cubby holes, a pull-down writing surface one foot by two feet in front and one foot by one-and-a-half foot inside, all perched on four simple (and simply) turned legs. There are two small square rods with ceramic knobs that pull out to support the hinged door/writing surface, and a lock, long-since missing a key. In all, it’s as minimally functional as one might find. And it’s not at all in that great of shape. There has been at least one broken piece in the front, below the door, patched back together with a row of screws. There are any number of nicks and dents. There are several serious spills of what appear to be ink from inkwells, as well as considerable wear overall.

But whatever interest I might have originally had in this tiny writing desk, the story and the peopling of the desk infused it with a family history – mostly unknown to this day – that is only hinted at by the posted note in fragile cursive from my grandmother: “Elmdale, Illinois Wood from 1850.” In a brief note I’ve seen elsewhere I suspect that she intended that space to be filled in with something like “a walnut tree on my great-grandfather’s farm.” Her great-grandfather (my great-great-great-grandfather), a Dixon if he was on her paternal side, I don’t know what if it was her maternal side, apparently felled the walnut tree, hewed it, cut and lathed it, constructed and finished it (all without power tools), on his farm in Elmdale, Illinois, in 1850, and it has been passed down – and apparently used – for the past 161 years. Perhaps he was furnishing his first house. Perhaps it was a gift for his wife or a child. Perhaps he had his own aspirations to be a writer. I can’t imagine ever knowing anything more about the desk’s origins or first 100 years. But I know of its past 61 years, a quiet period, and it now rests comfortably in my home, next to the dining room table my wife and I bought when we first moved into our house with our inheritance from my grandmother’s estate.