Many years ago, before the days of cellular phones and rolling blackouts, I was in school, and I had a desk.
I specifically remember my sixth grade desk because it was the first one that had a storage area. Thus, I could stockpile all sorts of important items inside: pencils and rulers for making those helicopters when I was bored, triangular paper footballs for flicking, and these heavy things with pages, I think the other kids called them textbooks. I liked gliding my hand across the scarred top of my desk, feeling the ball point indented braille left by other grammar school kids who had come before me.

I can still see that desk being moved to the wall of the classroom when our music teacher once let us have a dance party. It was the first time I danced. I was doing "The Shag" to "Stuck in the Middle with You" by Steeler's Wheel. Cindy Hardie sent me her wool hair ribbon to tie around my neck. This signified us "going together." It was a short courtship though, as I broke up with her because it was wool and it itched. Afterwards, safely returned to its rightful place, my desk held a smiling, dancing fool.

Humming in my desk, the Paul Williams' classic "Just an Old Fashioned Love Song," I would smile up at Mrs. West. I was totally in love with her. I can remember laying my head down on the cool surface and praying in the Winter of that year, when she was late to school during an ice storm. Word had gotten around that she was in car accident. I imagined her in her car sunken underneath the ice at this nearby creek.

It turned out her car simply wouldn't crank in the cold weather. I would later have daydreams about saving Mrs. West's life by either fending off cold weather crocodiles with nothing but a protractor and compass or, by making a bomb out of just the parts of a ball point pen.. A Nixon-era McGiver, I was. Like a marine recruit I could tear apart and reassemble those click-type pens in record time; top shell, bottom shell, silver spacer sleeve, pen tube, spring and push button. Over and over I would drill myself and of course the dastardly principal was the villain.

This is probably where I acquired my need to 'rescue' every woman on earth. It took a few years till I would learn, (or they would teach me) "they" weren't the ones who needed rescuing. Before the Computer, before the CD Player, before even, they invented an industrial cleaner that didn't smell like vomit, I had my desk; my first true icon of
security and structure. That was the genesis of my infatuation with things that hold stuff.

Today, I don't know where Mrs. West is or, where any of that junk is, though my old textbooks are still in great shape. I hardly dance anymore and I haven't played paper football in a while. Yet, when all is boring and mundane and, you know, adult, I go deep inside my little brain and I take out my pencil and spin that ruler.