Dad Built a Desk for the Toilet

toilet

This reminds me of the desk my dad built in the bathroom.  It was a pull-down affair that looked like a high-chair tray.  When you dropped your drawers, sat and pulled down the desk top, the rest of the built-in features were visible: magazine racks holding National Geographic, Popular Mechanics, Reader’s Digest and articles cut out from the Elkhart Truth; an ashtray, cigarettes and a lighter; a notebook and grease pencil for sketching out whatever my dad was in the process of inventing or building.  He was always building something.  We had a fully-wired playhouse with its own garage and a gocart.

While his three daughters engaged in hand-to-hand combat to do our hair in the only other bathroom, my dad smoked, sketched and dreamed in his temporary kingdom, his bathroom Brigadoon.  I used to flip through his notebook to see what he was thinking of building next.

My dad’s bathroom smelled like stale smoke, Ben Gay ointment and Sen-Sens liquorice breath mintsI wondered if my dad was using the Sen-Sens to mask the bottle of booze I found in the back of the bathroom sink, hidden, no doubt, from my mother, who preferred to drink her spirits from  a bottle of Lydia Pinkham´s herbal-alcoholic “women’s tonic.” 

Today, there are always books in my bathroom.  Instead of paper and a grease pen, I  have a white board on the wall.

Hell, I do some of my best thinking in there.