CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter
In this current pandemic era, an old man gets strange ideas, like, “I have lots of time on my hands; why not rearrange my study/office room?”
Because, you cannot do one thing.
The reason for the rearrangement was to get easier access to the drawers in my four-drawer metal file cabinets. Now I don’t know why I thought that was necessary. There are just old journals and copies of old correspondence in there. Not stuff one needs very often, maybe not at all.
I used to have four four-drawer file cabinets and one two-drawer cabinet. 18 file drawers. That was when we lived in bigger houses and my study was a bigger room. It was also before computers, a time when everything was kept on paper. If you wanted a lot of file folders for sermons and letters and half-baked manuscripts and such, you needed a lot of file cabinets. Now all that stuff fits on a computer push drive the size of a stick of Juicy Fruit. Nobody needs a metal file cabinet. I don’t know how I’m going to get rid of my two remaining four-drawer file cabinets when they take me to “the home,” or to the pyre. Nobody wants those anymore.
Before we moved here, the desk in my reading/writing room was always arranged so that I could just swivel in my chair and get into any of my file drawers I needed. When we moved into this condo, though, my room was not big enough for that. So that my back would not be toward the window when I sat at the desk, I had the movers put the file cabinets in the corner.
I was disappointed. I had to get up and walk around the desk to get at those drawers. Once or twice a year.
Then pandemic isolation. Lots of time. No more half-hour trips to the library or $ Tree to interrupt my nap schedule. And in five years, nobody has snuck up to my window to look over my shoulder at my computer screen, to try to plagiarize what I was writing, so why not rearrange the room so that I could get into those file drawers, even if it meant having my back to the window? Why not, indeed!
I’ll tell you why. I had to take off of the desk and put into a big box all the photos and the mementoes and the lamp and the stapler and the roll-a-dex that I don’t use anymore, because all the people in it are dead, and the pen holder, and the paper clip holder, and the radio, and… you get the idea. Lots of stuff gets on a desk top in five years.
The desk was heavier than it was five years ago. To be able to move it, I had to take all the stuff--like envelopes and those return address labels people keep sending me--out of the drawers and then take out all the drawers.
When I put the drawers back in, the biggest one got stuck and now will not open. So I had to put all the stuff from it into a box I can keep under the desk.
Then I realized that the back of my desk, which is now where people would see it if they walk down the hall, looks like somebody’s back end, so Helen had to make a cover for it. [And why I am worried about anybody ever again being in the house to walk down the hall, I have no idea.] The desk back did not want a cover and kept shedding it, despite Helen’s attempts to keep it mounted, until she used a hammer and railroad spikes on it. Looked very… strong.
Then I realized I couldn’t reach my trash and recycling cans anymore, so we had to take half the cover off.
My printer is on a little table under the window. There is no room for it beside the desk now, so now the printer cord won’t reach my computer.
Then I realized that the little extra table--not the one for the printer, for holding work in process, work that won’t fit on the desk top, along with the computer and all my photos and staplers and such--I can’t use, because one of the wheels broke off in the moving process five years ago, and in the old arrangement, it was propped against a book case, but now there is no room for it there, so it sits at a tilt, on three caster, and all the stuff I put on it slides off. Including the house phone, which I can’t reach from my chair now, since its battery is weak and has to be on its charger stand.
So, because old men are far more adaptable than people give us credit for, I have decided that I don’t need a desk drawer, or a phone, or a printer, or a table for extra work. Not as long as I can get at those metal file cabinets, for banging my head.
Be careful in this pandemic era. Just because you have time for a new project doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
John Robert McFarland
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