a desk of one's own

Well, my Spanish class is well and truly underway.


Three mornings a week I get up with Rob and head out in the dawn's early light in his car to M university, where he heads off to work in the Printing Department, and I head off to B106 and my class.


I can't believe I registered for a course that has me drinking coffee and trudging to a classroom before eight a.m. I thought, once I retired, in the unlikely event I'd see the sun rise, it would be at the end of a particularly good party, just as God intended. And yet, fully voluntarily, I've rejoined the bedheaded and sleepyeyed shuffling around campus at 7:30 in the ay em.

Of course, these are the people who work on campus. No self respecting student would be doing the morning sudoku and sipping Tim Horton's in the cafeteria before classes begin at 8:30. Most of them drop blearily behind their desks just before the professor enters, or half trip over knapsacks as they slide, not-so-discreetly, to their places several minutes after class begins.

Speaking of those desks, I cannot believe how uncomfortable they are. My class has the kind that are a combination of a fold-out bridge chair and the little swing up eating surfaces you sometimes get stuck with on a plane if you are in the front (economy class) seats. They have just enough surface to hold a complimentary cocktail, but certainly not the notebook, textbook and dictionary I need to get me through the lecture. In addition, they all swing open from the right side, which leaves this southpaw twisted around for 50 minutes, trying to record the palabras of wisdom coming from the prof. When I last needed these desks, thirty five years ago, I used to commandeer two: one to sit in, and one to place to my left, to write on. However, the closet to which our class is relegated has thirty desks squeezed--nay, poured--into it, and on most days except Monday, all of the desks are fully (if not energetically) embodied.

Of course, the body I inhabit now is not as flexible, adaptable, or, let's face it, thin as the one I had when I was an undergraduate. None of the others in the class seem unduly put out sitting through the hour, as I hold in my gut for 50 minutes, and wish I'd made a chiropractic appointment during long sprints of writing. I've grown used to 'airplane seat' anxiety: wondering just how small the seats on our economy flights might end up being on a given trip, and how likely it might be that my seatmate would let me raise the armrest between us. (Yet another endorsement for marriage: I'm quite sure implicit in the vows we made was the acknowledgement that the armrest was allowed to be up on all international flights.) It never occurred to me, however, that I, or my derriere, might outgrow those stupid lecture chairs in the many years since I last used them.

Not to worry, though. We had our first test earlier this week, and judging from the face of the ...um... less scholastically-inclined freshman who sits to my left when our results were returned, I may be able to spread out, literally and figuratively, in the near future. I'm told the deadline to drop courses is next week. I noticed him circling his calendar.