JOYRIDE III

The spring is the season when I feature the best student work from my essay class at Atlantic Cape Community College as we try to develop the next generation of “Joyriders.” This week’s column is by Ryan Sheehy, a graduate of Mainland Regional High School.
Deadlines near, stress builds, and keys chatter as I’m working the graveyard shift in the comfort of my own bedroom. I shuffle a pile of old essays and notes revealing a portion of my scarred desktop. Underneath all the mayhem, memories swarm together.
Some people keep photo albums or journals to look back on their lives. I keep my desk, and almost every single drawing, phrase, and design on it is significant.
My desk is actually a sewing table my mom bought me from a used furniture store. I had a growth spurt around nine-years-old and could no longer push my seat into my primary-colored playschool desk without banging my knees.
The furniture store was like a garage sale and the salesman looked like someone you would find trash-picking in a pick-up truck. “Sixty dollars for the desk and I’ll throw in this chair for $15,” he told us.
My mom whispered, “Seventy five dollars, you can’t beat that Ry.” I disagreed, “But the chair has a broken rung and the desktop is…” She cut me off before I could finish. “We’ll take it,” she said. I was now the reluctant owner of a sewing table that was likely plucked from an alleyway during the night.
The amber-colored finish was cracking like dry skin and coming off in blotches like a mangy dog. You can’t run your hand across the tree-bark-like surface without a few fragments of the finish sticking to your palm.
My dad fixed the broken wooden chair, which probably belongs at a dining table. I use an old Christmas pillow, with the image of two bears sledding facing down, as a cushion. It’s more deflated than an old movie theater seat.
It didn’t matter if my marker accidentally ran off the page, if I spilled ink, or if I carved my name into it. Over the years, it has evolved from a junky piece of furniture into a work of art.
My mom doesn’t appreciate my customized desk as much as I do, and has offered to buy me a new one, but I can’t bring myself to actually do it.
It’s the only thing in my room I can say I’ve had for 10 years. I have put it through so much and the collage of scrapes, scratches, and scribbles on the desktop chronicle my life.
Long parallel scratches from an Exacto knife remind me of staying up until 2 a.m. to finish an art project. A sketch of Batman reminds me of when I went through my comic book phase.
A tic-tac-toe game I played by myself during a late-night talk on the phone with my first crush still remains in the top right corner.
Various band names and logos like “311” describe how my musical taste has changed during my teen years. I can read the desktop like an archeologist translating ancient text scrawled across the wall of a cave. Friends tell me, “Wow that’s an awesome drawing” or “I really like how you wrote that.” But they don’t see it all as a story like I do.
The desktop doesn’t only bring me back to single moments, but to whole time frames. It reminds me of who I am, who I used to be, and who I want to become.
Keith Forrest an assistant professor of communication at Atlantic Cape Community College. His late mother Libby Demp Forrest Moore wrote the Joyride column for this newspaper for 20 years.