Illustration by Mary Kirkpatrick
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I text my son and daughter-in-law. What does Lylah want for her birthday? My granddaughter is turning eight and I don’t always know what’s cool in her world. I want to get it right. There are the popular video games her friends play. There are mountains of movie tie-in toys. She has outgrown dolls and she’s not into clothes yet.
She wants a desk, says my daughter-in-law, where she can do her drawing and homework.
This is a child after my own heart! How many eight year olds want a desk for their birthday? I am charmed by the ask and more than happy to set her up. One’s relationship with a desk, after all, can be formative.
My own desk is solid oak, probably dating from the 1920s, and built in the heavy, squarish arts and crafts style. It has a drawer on the front and open shelves on either side, and the vertical slats characteristic of the period. I bought it second hand when I was at university, over 40 years ago. In my undergraduate and then graduate days, I studied there, typed there, spent caffeine fueled nights there sweating out English papers. I fell in love with swathes of English literature as I hunched there over the pages of Milton and George Eliot and Henry James.
The desk was heavy to move when I changed addresses, but it was sturdily built and survived several upheavals. When I married and started my teaching career I spent countless hours marking at that desk. Piles of student essays and tests almost buried it and I remember weeping onto its surface when I was overwhelmed with work and couldn’t face one more mangled, illegible student essay about bloody Macbeth’s tragic flaw.
When our first son was born the desk underwent a transformation. I laid a soft pad on its hard surface and it became a change table. The avalanche of paper gave way to baby wipes, talcum powder and board books. A mobile of stars hung over it like a blessing.
The children grew up and I returned to teaching, once more transforming my desk into a different kind of work station. More marking. More lesson planning at that familiar site.
With retirement came the opportunity to do some writing of my own and the desk that supported an electric typewriter in my university days is now home to my laptop. The desk has outlasted a century of change. But now it doesn’t work. It was designed in a different age, for writing, with a pen. The height is all wrong for a laptop. I usually end up with the laptop in my lap.
So when I started looking online for a desk for Lylah, I wasn’t looking for an oak antique. The vast majority of the desks on offer are sleek and minimalist. Just a surface, really, for a screen and a keyboard. No drawers to hold the paper clips and staples and sticky notes and highlighters.
I scroll and scroll until I find it. It has the sleek wood and metal look that will suit my son and daughter-in-law’s minimalist townhouse. But it also has three shallow drawers across the front for the crayons and markers that will need a home.
I want Lylah’s desk to serve her for many years. Maybe not as long as my oak desk has been with me, but certainly through the rest of her childhood. With its built in power strip and RGB LED lights for gaming, it will take her through high school and perhaps follow her to university. The tech features might be obsolete by then. But I hope that it will serve, in the meantime, as a companionable assistant in whatever work she is engaged in – growing up, drawing and writing, figuring out who she will be.
Virginia Woolf wrote about a woman’s need for a room of her own. Perhaps all we need is a desk of our own for the many kinds of work that shape who we become. Despite its flaws, my old desk has always felt like a place where I was at home and in charge and doing my best work. I hope Lylah’s desk will do as much for her. Happy birthday dear granddaughter. May you always know what you want for your birthday.
Mary Philp lives in Orangeville, Ont.