Daddy’s Study
A small room with a window to the world.
Daddy’s office was up the stairs in the small room to the left.
His office, created in the late 1950s to early 1960s, was usually called “the study.”
He made his own desk. High-grade plywood with a gray, wood-grain Formica desktop. The venerated desk rested on four mid-century modern screw-on legs. Google that leg style. You will see what I mean.
The desk faced two double-hung dormer windows that looked north over the backyard, the “orchard,” and into the forest.
A few hundred yards north, a small chapel sat above the river. Daddy began his married life as a rural missionary pastor at that chapel.
The study’s wooden shelves were full of books. Bibles and Bible commentaries. Books on theology, psychology, history, preaching, prayer, music, ecclesiology, and education. Devotionals. Classic literature. Novels. Adventure books. There was a file cabinet full of Bible study documents, church documents, and Christian education documents.
When I was a young boy, I studied the titles and the heft of all those books. I opened them and saw pages and pages of words. I was intimidated. Surely, these books are beyond me, I thought. Surely, they are for someone else.
One day, I found the little spiral-bound booklet that contained the words Daddy used at weddings and funerals. I remember reading the typed words “Dearly Beloved, We are gathered here . . .”
I did eventually begin to read the books in the study.
One book that particularly fascinated me was a thick old textbook from my mother’s college days. Abnormal Psychology & Life was the title. It was amusing to imagine my twenty-something mother back in college in downtown Chicago, dutifully reading her weird psychology text. For a time, this book inspired me to consider psychology as a profession. I even picked out my grad school: Rosemead School of Psychology in California. I did not become a psychologist, but I did discover that the human mind is a fascinating mystery, and I eventually discovered what my personality type was, at least according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). That answered a lot of questions, ha-ha.
Daddy’s study was a place to spend many hours with books: imagination and the world of reality.
I have more than once thought that I should have spent more of my youth reading those books in the study and less time sitting in a school desk, chatting with classmates about nonsense.
The study included more than books and papers. In the study closet was a small metal box. I took it out once in a while and examined its contents. Inside were some of Daddy’s U.S. Army artifacts and other mementoes from his life before marriage and family. His military medals and patches. Some old photos. Wooden ink stamps. Small wood carvings of horses. A small chain, with links all carved from wood.
There was marvel and wonder in the study. And who was this man who studied here? Scholar, preacher, pastor, singer, carpenter, entrepreneur, farmer, father.
The study is gone, but the empty room remains. Daddy is gone, but his legacy remains.