The Saga of the Desk

The Ex showed up last night to pick up the desk. He arrived promptly at 8:30, as the storm clouds rapidly closed in on our little town. He had an open pick-up truck he’d borrowed to transport the desk, and was anxious to get it loaded up so he could move it before the skies opened up.

He came upstairs, entered the apartment and headed straight for the cherry secretary I have. [history: We purchased this desk perhaps ten years ago. He wanted a desk he could use to pay bills at. That lasted about two months, before the desk and chair become inundated with papers, boxes and debris and he could no longer find anything in it.] I just stood there with a big dumb look on my face.

When I wrote to him I told him I needed to get rid of the “office desk”. It never occurred to me he’d think of the secretary as an “office desk”! I can’t believe he’d thought I’d ever consider throwing out a beautiful piece of furniture like that. I guess that rather speaks to the level of respect he pays my higher cognitive functions.

When he realized that I meant that el-cheapo piece of office furniture rescued off the trash heap some fifteen years ago, he hemmed and hawed for a few minutes. I did allow him the grace of backing out, since this was not the piece of furniture he’d been expecting to leave with, but in the end his pack rat ways won out over common sense, and he did indeed leave with the old desk. The Professor and he got it loaded to the pick-up truck just as the first tiny drops of rain began to fall. I watched him pull away, feeling sad and hurt.

Things have a way of working out though. He thought I was stupid enough to throw out an expensive piece of well crafted furniture. I thought he was stupid to take a used desk for which he had no use. Sometimes marriages fail for big reasons, and sometimes they fail for lots of little reasons. I just can’t decide if this would be a big reason, or a little one.