The movers broke my desk in half. Literally, they broke it in half. The pieces, which they bothered to deliver to me, look like a fairy tale giant had a temper tantrum. I must assume it fell from a great height. Or the truck backed over it. Or somewhere between California and Wisconsin they had to use it to defend themselves against a charging herd of buffalo. No one seemed to know.

It was so ridiculous that it might be a little bit funny if it weren’t your desk. It was the first desk I had as a real-no-kidding-they-pay-me-and-everything author. Up until The Desk, I wrote on three folding TV trays that I lined up in the bedroom of our apartment, so an actual desk was no small move up in the world.

The incident with the buffalo herd, however, meant that, while I had an office for the first time in my author life, I had no desk to put in the office. If I weren’t the sort of person who believes the universe is governed by chaos and chance, which I am, I might think there was some sort of lesson here or maybe just an in joke. But rather than think on that too much, I bought another desk. In fact, I bought two because my husband and I share the office, and I have a pathological need for visual order and symmetry.

Take that buffalo-filled universe of Russian roulette!

Then I unpacked my reference books, went to line them up on my brand new desk and discovered the movers had broken the book ends.