It's just, when you buy furniture, you tell yourself, that's it.That's the last sofa I'm gonna need. Whatever else happens, I've got that sofa problem handled.
--The Narrator, Fight Club
If there was one thing I learned from my parents, it was not to go in for cheap furniture--even if it meant the much slower assembly of a fully furnished household. To be clear, we're not talking about deeply expensive, limited-edition Italian furnishings, but neither are we referring to the unpronounceable particle board that's found on IKEA shelves. Let's just call it furniture that's not irreplaceable and also not disposable: Stuff that, with proper care, might sturdily and (with a righteous exercise of taste) timelessly last a few decades . . .
I mention this because these past four days have been spent in pursuit of a new chair--my first in slightly more than 20 years (so yes, the parental lesson really did sink in). And by my, I mean the place where only I sit--the place that is never offered to visitors, the place that even the tyrannical cats understand will never be theirs. This, however, is not a quest story because I knew exactly what I wanted. In the end, it was merely about concentrated persistence--the visiting of stores and the terrorizing of sales staff unprepared for a shopper who stopped just short of providing a detailed sketch of what he wanted. And--spoiler alert--after four days, I finally found what I was looking for.
What's been on my mind since this morning is not just this new, on-its-way chair--it's also the old and outgoing one. And almost certainly I'm pondering it because of the intimacy; because it's been my home within my home for more than two decades now.
Over the past 20 years, a great deal has happened in that chair: happiness, insights, sorrow, the climaxes of novels, mourning, planning, notes, innumerable films, uncertainty, resolution, conversation, world-shaking news and of course jazz--so much of it that the chair's atomic structure must certainly vibrate Miles,Coltrane and Bill Evans. My old chair was reupholstered three times and its cushions were restuffed four. But no matter how serially different it looked, like the Time Lord in Doctor Who, it was always still recognizable as mine. And in this there was continuity.
But now that it's going, everything that occurred in it has somehow become more authentically memory--now not only in the past, but also made forever placeless by the irrevocably changed topography.
Add to this Proustian consideration something else, something bleakly fast-forward: My old chair's length of service suggests that the new one will be similarly long-lived. But this time around I'm an aging hipster, and the prospect of a new 20-year chair unavoidably forces me to consider that it could very well be my last one. And so this morning over coffee, it occurred to me that, like Palahniuk's protagonist, whatever else happens, I've got that chair problem in hand, only this time--gulp--probably forever . . .
I write this with a sandwich by my side, waiting for the delivery service. In a space of probably less than 15 minutes, a new phase of my life will arrive, while an old one will disappear. I'll be asked to sign and then initial--here, here and here. And then the truck will be gone, leaving me to size up where--and more importantly, how--I'll be spending the next 20 years or so.
In all likelihood, I'll wish I had a detailed sketch of what it is I want--but planning only takes you so far. And so, for a while at least, it'll be my turn to be unprepared . . .
