Recently our friend Ken gave us an antique desk from the 1830s. On the inside of it, directly on the wood, someone wrote the prices of ‘kegs,’ specifically: 5 gallons – $0.75, 10 gallons — $1.00, 15 gallons — $1.25, and 20 gallons — $1.50. The writing is the kind of elegant, cursive font that reminiscent of say, the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights and other documents that have come to mean so much/so little (your choice!) in the post-war era. I remember being in grade school and how even then — although I was hardly conscious of this — I wanted my writing to be similarly elegant in appearance, as if it could transport me to a different period. I also remember being obsessed with John Z___’s handwriting, which resonated with an effortless fluid self-assurance that I could never quite match with my own shaky script. We were friends until junior high, when he became a ‘freak’ and I was a ‘jock,’ or in any case, not someone who hung around the smoking area.
I like to imagine the many people who have sat at this desk, and if they wrote anything meaningful — or more meaningful than the price of kegs — or to picture the different items that have passed in and out of the drawers. I wonder where this desk has lived, and if it traveled outside of New York, and how it feels to have ended up in Washington Heights, or if it likes/does not like having cats around. For the moment, we have kept the desk empty except for ‘hard copies’ of the 500,000 financial documents we had to submit to the ‘underwriter’ in order to obtain clearance for our ‘refi.’
Similarly, I sometimes wonder who before me has sat in this rocking chair — much younger, only mid 1900s — to watch the setting sun, and if they had the same kind of dreams or fears (or cats) that I have, and if that is why we ended up together for a little while. I wonder if they looked down at their hands in the bronze light and wished for a second they could just evaporate in the ephemeral beauty of the fading light.
