An Old Desk Finds A Home

Nearly 33 years ago my roommate in Columbia, SC sold me her desk for $20. She needed the money. I needed a desk. It was a fair and sensible trade. At the time, $20 was a sizable sum of money, but I figured Mary Lee needed the money more than I did and she was, after all, my best friend - and on occasion, perhaps a little more. But that's another story.

Giving the desk up was hardly a sacrifice for Mary Lee. She had been using the desktop principally as a staging area to stack boxes of books and old clothes destined for donation to the Salvation Army. Although the charity had conveniently located its headquarters only a few blocks from our house on the University of South Carolina campus, Mary Lee, as was her nature, procrastinated. And I guess with good reason.

I would often hear the gritty, unpleasant sound of a cardboard box sliding across our old, buckling hardwood floors punctuated by Mary Lee's swearing to no one in particular that this box, and no other, contained an illusive pair of shoes or an old bathing suit she intended to use for a river tubing expedition down the Broad River. In some ways, I thought my purchase of the oversized 1920's office desk was good therapy for Mary Lee. I figured it would force her to finally fill the cargo bay of her her signature red, rattle-trap Toyota truck with the boxes and share her bounty with others.

As it turned out, that transfer of wealth never happened and moving Mary Lee's desk into my room down the hall just made it that much easier for her to pry off the faded, dogeared box tops and dig through the contents with greater frequency. Had Mary Lee's therapist known about the boxes, and I suspect maybe she did, the therapeutic value of purging her room of the containers would have had value beyond measure.

Perhaps carrying the worn boxes one by one down the stairs and across the small lawn to her beloved truck would have allowed Mary Lee to leave the demons of abuse and disappointment behind and get on with her life. Unfortunately, as far as I know, that never happened.

In fact, by the time I left for Austin, TX two years later the number of boxes had grown considerably and Mary Lee referred to the neatly labeled containers in her room as storage units. I remember one of the boxes she labeled as Things I really, really, really don't need! THROW AWAY! A good sign, I thought. Upon closer inspection, however, I discovered that the words THROW AWAY had been scratched out and beside the potentially therapeutic words Mary Lee had scibbled the word maybe. That was sad I thought and a little hurtful.