At My Desk

My Space has two focal areas.  In the center, I placed a recliner, one probably no longer even suitable for a yard sale as its Naugahyde has been punctured in many sites.  I purchased a navy velour cover with its surface texture of mini diamonds which conceals the tears.  The recline mechanism works adequately, as does its infrequently used rocking capability.  It does not rotate but faces forward to my big screen TV which gets watched most evenings. Once I finish My Space to its optimal appearance, that chair will get replaced as the reward for multi-year diligence.

The heart and soul of the room, though, has been my desk.  It began decades ago with a trip to Conran's, once a trendy home furnishing boutique, a small chain run by a once popular British interior designer.  I drove to the King of Prussia Mall, a gleaming complex with the finest named stores.  At Conran's I  purchased two low file cabinets painted with off-white enamel and matching plastic drawer pulls.  The unit with two file drawers I placed on the left, the one with one file drawer below two small drawers went on the left.  Straddled over them I centered a 72 x 36 x 1 inch thick board of black laminate.  It left the surface a bare tad in height above a commercial desk, but it became and remains my personal work destination.  A mat of Rhinolin 35 x 19 inches defines my immediate work area.  Lighting has evolved over the decades.  Now I have two sources, an architect lamp secured from IKEA affixed to the left with a clamp, one with springs that allows its lamp portion with its 60-watt bulb to direct light most anywhere.  This provides most of the needed light.  I also have in front of me a Banker's Lamp with a cylindrical halogen bulb.  This brightens the Rhinolin surface, though it is obscured by the laptop screen when open.  When the laptop goes to its closed position for daily or weekly planning or other writing, the Bankers Lamp makes my work area sparkle, bouncing just the right amount of reflection from the bulb to desk to my rods and cones.

While now quite personalized with zones for papers, stationery, writing implements, and clocks dominating the mostly covered black laminate, this desk, or at least its Rhinolin portion, serves as my hub for creative output.  I plan my time every morning, connect with friends across distances, write my thoughts, record my weekly YouTube video, all at this designated place to do these things.  My finances have their monthly review.  Phone conversations are conducted with a wireless hand set, while I stare at a screen or recline in the basil green swivel chair harvested from a DuPont Surplus furniture sale decades ago.  My weekly grocery shopping list gets assembled from the Shop-Rite circular, one page at a time, with the newsprint portion to my left and a tall writing pad to my right. To avoid a reflection from the incompletely shaded window behind me, Zoom conferences require minor repositioning of the laptop but still on its Rhinolin surface.

My desk supplies comfort  I keep tubes of Voltaren and Icy Hot within reach. A whiteboard, with its semi-annual projects on its left side and my most fundamental values on its right, receives periodic glances into my direct line of sight as I work or as I reflect.  My desk invokes memories with a photo of one of my two children in each direction.  Their early attempts at ceramics hold my large paper clips. The first vacation that I contributed to, a few days in DC the year JFK entered the Oval Office, brought my first souvenir, a bronze White House replica.  It sits straight ahead, adjacent to a partially painted stone created by my daughter as a pre-schooler.

My desk has its share of the obsolete.  Five spiral notebooks where I generated my thoughts as a frequently entered personal journal.  Audio tapes, full size and micro.  Clocks with hands, one plastic run by a AAA battery, the other Seiko brass with an LR 44 button battery.  A retro radio capable of tape recording, AM/FM, and shortwave, complete with telescoping antenna.  Smaller than a boom box but with a handle that makes it portable once I add C Batteries.  Files that contain Index Cards, one for 3x5, the other for 4x 6.  I have a slide rule, once a high school and college essential.  There is a PDA. never extensively used.  At one time, I found the free maps available at gas stations worthy of taking home.  A sample of that collection appears on my desk. So do picture postcards from my travels, never filled out and sent.  A place for hobbies that never developed.  Calligraphy, a decent art kit in a wooden box.  Loose Leaf Notebooks with zippers, once a school essential.  Each remnant of a past era was once integral to my personal timeline.  Items all set on the periphery, not to intrude on active workspace, though not discarded.  All important to my reflections about where I've been, where my remaining years might take me.  None a serious legacy, however.

My descendants, those obligated to dispose of my possessions when life concludes, might find this nook something of an archeological dig.  What was their Dad like?  What motivated him or frustrated him?  Why did he collect and retain so many unused things?  Let's read what he entered in all those spiral notebooks when we were kids.

Monarchs have possession of kingdoms with varying levels of absolute autonomy.  My Desk has been my statement of autonomy, a place for me to seek out every day.  Tasks performed.  Respite sometimes. But always my territory, always a private display of what value and what captivated me.

Lower Desk Functional

In my pursuit of having something to show for my effort each day, I devoted attention to my lower desks.  First, my two desks are part of my identity, not fully attained until I entered private practice where I purchased a massive wooden executive model at a DuPont company clearance sale.  As an employee I had a desk to call my own.  At home I purchased a top and two metal files from Conran's as my primary work space which serves as the focal destination of My Space now.  And our living room has a nook just right for a secretary style desk, pleasantly styled but not frequently used, to demarcate the part of our living room that I consider mine.  The desk in My Space has a dedicated place for lighting and for my laptop and for my coffee cup.  The wooden downstairs desk has been more an invitation to place stuff that needs a flat surface when you enter the house from the nearby front door.  It also functions as a receptacle for papers that need to be relocated from the kitchen table to enable eating.  For weeks, maybe even months, it has housed a pile of papers on the right half surface, books and assorted non-papers on the left half.  Making it functional has been on my daily task list almost as long.  Finally, clearing this became the afternoon's principle initiative.

Taking some unused files and adhesive file folder labels, I took all the papers off the surface, sorting and filing as I went.  A few things needed to go upstairs, either for filing or to be placed in a more proper location, a few things could stay.  Not only do I now have a surface suitable for sitting and enjoying the massage unit on that desk's chair, but I have sorted papers that can go in usable files.

Despite my possessiveness about that nook, I do very little there.  Write checks, mostly.  It is an attractive space though, nicely decorated, pleasant to look at, and the massage cushion keeps it as a destination.  And most importantly, perhaps, I retain possession.

Clearing Desks

Among my most valued possessions over the years has been My Space.  I shared a room with a brother, then a roommate assigned by the University, but come medical school I had a solo apartment.  My car became a reality for the second half of medical school.  Not only did it get me to where I needed to go and sometimes wanted to go, but I could be by myself, even if halted in traffic amid a thousand other vehicles.  Marriage meant sharing living space again, but the front seat of my car could and did remain a sanctuary most of the time.

Amid the house and car, workspace was sometimes the best definition of mine and nobody else's.  Not exactly though.  The University and my landlords each provided me a desk, often too small a top surface.  My father built a long table in the basement for study and homework.  I disliked the fluorescent lighting and did the written homework at the dining room table.  However, I measured one-third the length of the basement table, marked mine with masking tape, installed a bulletin board next to that third, and kept my supplies there.  A better chair would have helped.  Residency meant no desk at work, a shared surface at home which I did not particularly find inviting, even though I chose the final desk myself and still have it in nearly pristine condition forty years later.  My first job provided me a somewhat battered metal model with a stationary chair and overhead fluorescent lighting but the office had a door and some storage though also the features of a converted patient room.  It was my retreat, maybe the first one I ever made an effort to personalize with doodads that pharmaceutical representatives used to give away.  And I worked there, logging flow sheets for lab results each morning, writing my admission and progress notes, using the telephone, deciding what goes in the drawers.  Fellowship returned me to the shared work surface and fluorescents.  Private office meant freedom to personalize and I did.  Massive wooden desk from a corporate clearance event, shelves, credenza and my splurge, the best desk chair I ever had, chose by me.  Employment for my final eight years got me a utilitarian pressboard desk and a comfortably but slightly battered swivel chair.

At home I made my own workspaces, two of them.  One a 3x6 foot tabletop straddled over two off-white metallic low file cabinets purchased from Conran's.  This was to be My Space, and it still is though the desk surface is a little higher than optimal.  At a corporate surplus sale I got a garish green swivel chair, a shade that probably would not sell well at a paint store, with slightly chipped metallic base and vinyl arms.  Not great visual appeal but the ultimate in comfort.  I added a bankers light and a rhinolin writing surface.  My Space, almost.  Like other desks I have had, my quest for surface area has proven insatiable.  Books held by stylish bookends to the right, a B&W 9" portable TV from a yard sale to the left, eventually retired when the FCC made analog televisions unwatchable.  School supplies go on sale each August so the far left corner has a stack of loose leaf paper and spiral notebooks far in excess of what I can ever use.  Loose leafs go on sale too, and I got some good ones kept in my line of sight.  There is a good wooden storage box with nothing in it just to the right of the rhinolin pad.  Drawers have remained mostly empty.

Since the study could really not be a personal space if it housed the family desktop computer, I declared another space as mine,  Our living room has a reasonably defined corner nook which I filled with a secretarial drop down desk.  K-Mart had a suitable wooden swivel chair.  Journals filled the surface though with some effort I can still close the drop-down portion to expose a pleasant carved design.

So now I have nominal My Space, usable about half the time when I get motivated to creating surface.  Even when not usable, with a stereo upstairs and an electric massager on the chair downstairs, the chair makes the destination.  The surface will get protected in due time.