The Desk...From Hell

And old desk appeared today...curbside just down the street from us. Free to anyone who might care to  pick it up. Unloaded from a recently departed hoarder's house that is busy filling its fifth large dumpster of trash after its elderly owner moved on.

It's a small, simple desk popular in the 70's.

I went through grad school at the Medical College of Virginia on one of these...along with way too many cigarettes and a candle.

At the time, I was an Air Force Medical Service Corps selected officer and candidate sponsored by the Air Force Institute of Technology.

Back then, you could pick up one of those pathetic little objects for around a hundred hard-earned bucks. We stuck ours in an upstairs room of our rented Richmond, Virginia townhouse and went to work.  Me studying and Julieann carrying the entire rest of the family load as she has for most of our 50+ years while I messed with various schools and jobs.

If my old desk could speak, it would go on about moans and groans that came with memorization of healthcare management trivia.  It would also boast of a comprehensive knowledge of each and every form of swearing.  It would have a chronic smoker's cough.  But it can't speak and we are all the better for that.

Meanwhile I still have scars from it all and seeing one today pissed me off a little.  It would give me some satisfaction to put it in my backyard and take a sledgehammer to it or perhaps just run it over where it sits.  But I won't - after all, I admit Julie and that desk helped me make it.

There is more of course...there is always more:  "Grad School Kicked His Ass."