The desk set

Cover story

For many, the work space is an extension of their personalities

June 02, 2011|By Bella English, Globe Staff

On his desk, Smith College English professor Eric Reeves keeps a photo of… (Matthew Cavanaugh for The…)

Joan Parker sits at her late husband’s desk in their Cambridge home. Robert B. Parker, the best-selling author of the hard-boiled Spenser detective series, died last year, and his widow has left the desk where he wrote 10 pages five days a week pretty much the way it was. It’s a manly space, large and dark, with a nameplate “Spenser for Hire’’ and a mousepad of Red Sox slugger Ted Williams. There are a couple of family photos, including a picture of his beloved dog, Pearl.

Then there’s Teddy, a tiny tattered bear. “I’d come home and Bob would be sitting at his desk with Teddy tucked under his arm, absent-mindedly rubbing Teddy’s ear,’’ says Parker, who now uses the desk. “He loved that bear.’’

For Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, it’s giraffes who take up the prime real estate on her desk — and, like Parker’s Teddy, they go back to her past.

Car magnate Ernie Boch Jr., who has his own band, keeps a lot of music mags scattered around his desk at his Norwood headquarters. But he also keeps a bottle of Mango Peach Tango Hot Sauce made by his friend, Aerosmith rocker Joe Perry. “I love it,’’ he says. He puts it on sandwiches and salads, eaten desk-side.

Those of us who work in an office spend an average of six hours a day at our desks. To some, desks are purely utilitarian: files, phone, computer. But to others, desks are an extension of their personalities, with telling talismans and idiosyncratic objects that serve to remind and rejoice, amuse or inspire.

“A desk says a lot about the person who sits there,’’ says Peg Donahue, whose New Hampshire business, Feng Shui Connections, is based on the ancient Chinese philosophy of providing positive energy to various spaces. “The content of your space is a mirror image of what is going on within you.’’

For Robert Parker, the teddy bear, which turned up decades after disappearing, represented a security blanket he needed as an only child. It first showed up in his Easter basket when he was 5. When Parker went off to prep school, he left the bear behind because he knew he’d be teased. To his dismay, when he came home, Teddy had vanished.

Fifteen years ago, when his mother died, the Parkers were cleaning out her Marblehead home. Joan Parker heard her husband shout, “Oh my God, it’s my Teddy.’’ For the rest of the day, he held on to the bear while he cleaned. Then Teddy got a permanent spot on his desk, despite the fact he was threadbare, wobbly, and had been patched up more times than a bad bullfighter.