The Secretary

For some reason, growing up our living room was this abandoned Museum of Social Decorum. Pristine couches and glass ashtrays and weirdo porcelain statuettes and fancy candy dishes which were never filled with anything much less candy and overgrown plants and it was very, very white and very, very clean and we were never, ever in there. Ever. The dining room and living room were conjoined and while we did use the dining room during big family get-togethers, the dining room was a room completely devoid of people. It kind of scared me.

Anyway, my parents kept this God-awful ugly secretary desk in the living room. It had a yellow painted finish with purple birds or flowers or some shit all over it. Perhaps for the late sixties or early seventies it was the height of fashion (probably not) but as time wore on it became and more hideous. After probably 40 years of ownership by my parents and then by my mother alone after the divorce, it ended up in my house after I was forced to admit my mother to the nursing home where she now resides and is cared for. My wife arranged to have it stripped and refinished by her father, who is after all a furniture refinisher. It now sits in our home, completely transformed by his hand. Quite beautifully, I might add.

When I was a kid, I do remember impressions of the secretary. Within it were contained the notions and detritus of adulthood: checkbooks, stamps, appointment calendars, greeting cards, ribbons, correspondence, labels, bills to be paid, telephone numbers. When something adult and fairly far removed from my world required completion, the secretary was consulted. It smelled weird, artificially sour like printed money yet bucolic and comforting like open land. It was mysterious and a little imposing. What, exactly, was all that stuff FOR?

Well, now I’m an adult with a wee one on the way. The contents of the secretary are all too familiar to me. Perhaps my child will look upon the same configuration of wood and nails and brass pulls and knobs that I did with a similar sense of bafflement. Having been reimagined, stripped of its odd paintjob and finished anew, awaiting a brand new life to be lived around it, I hope that the secretary in its new clothing blesses my home, my wife and my child. And me, too.