Chairs

Growing up, my parents’ chairs interested me little. They still don’t. I consider them in my mind: the bulbous thing they reupholstered from a shocking golden mélange of 50’s colors, vaguely like a tweed, to a deep blue-green as hideous as you likely just pictured. Another horrible chair, this one chalky gray underlaid with a chocolate brown, thankfully disappeared from our lives as my parents focused ever more on Danish modern. Two deep mustard gold chairs sculpted from a cube joined the blue-green thing. I took Danish modern for granted then, hate it in retrospect. For reasons never given, our sofa matched nothing else in the room, either in style or color. Its creamy colored soft contours with the ever-present throw pillows would scream Rooms-To-Go today. Back then it just said, “I came from the middle aisle of our local furniture store.”

Chairs only rarely occupy our minds beyond whether we can find one to sit in. We take them for granted, I suppose because those of our upbringing formed part of the Always-There background. We sat on hard wooden chairs in school, replaced later by hard plastic seats, replaced in turn by a hard substance which defies any characterization other than “smooth”. College offered the same but with more variety unless you attended something exclusive in which case the chairs weren’t any more comfortable but they looked a lot older, more distinguished. When newly graduate, one’s interior decorating attitude toward chairs usually is something like, “is there one” and “is there room for one or two?” Perhaps I should add, “Can I get them from Mom and Dad?” because that’s their provenance for the most part.

“For the most part.” I moved from my dorm to my first apartment towing the usual hand-me-down furnishings including a deep brown and deeply ugly sofa. Along the way, however, I stopped at my grandparents’ house to pick up a chair from their basement which meant a lot to me. Now in their 80s, they were moving to a senior-living apartment. At the time this chair represented a place where I had sat a lot, a place I found both comfortable and comforting. Over time my bones became more brittle, my muscle turned to fat, and I found the chair less comfortable. At the same time, the comfort of seeing a chair with deep green shiny silk-like ribbons running vertically on a cream background, with dark-stained wooden arms and legs, sustained me emotionally. In 1992 I looked at the chair in my new Pennsylvania apartment where I had fled my divorce and my teaching career, seeing the chair as an anchor to my past and to my family. As a child I sat on the floor of my grandparents’ basement when Grandpa read Mr. Murphy the Irish Potato. (It’s horribly inappropriate, but times were different then.) A little older, I sat in that chair when my brother and I would hide out from the adults upstairs. In college, I ducked over for dinner every few weeks with my grandparents and spent a couple weeks there my final college summer as I waited for summer quarter to become fall quarter. I’m sure I sat in that chair then, also. Fifteen years after graduation I could reflect on that in Pennsylvania. My one regret with regard to it? We reupholstered it 20 years after I took it from my grandparents’ house. We chose fabric practically instead with our hearts, and the upholsterer somehow made a hard seat even harder. Today it’s usually covered in blankets and our cat sleeps there.

Other chairs came later, mostly as my grandparents died. The shield chair from those same grandparents, still sporting the upholstery I know from childhood, sixty years ago:

My parents claimed one chair from my mother’s parents and kept it until they both had died by 2020. True to form, they immediately reupholstered it to a completely inappropriate modernist pattern, cream with trailing colors of brown, muted oranges, and dusky rose. Later, perhaps recognizing the error of their ways, they chose a formal but slightly modern pattern in rose, and that is what sits in my library today (and yes, I posted this chair once before):

Some chairs entered my life at times indeterminate. I can tell you where they’re from, but not when and how they came to me, or at best guess at it. The cherrywood rocker which my mother’s mother sat in the corner of her bedroom to match the shockingly gorgeous cherry bedroom set. Every morning I too sit on this to dress, just as my grandmother did about 100 years ago.

Then again there’s the wooden rocker with a caned seat which I used to sit on to dress myself until the caning gave way one day, and I thought I would go through it to the floor. My father’s father sat in this chair in his study while taking a break from his duties as a Baptist minister. I remember the beautiful rolltop oak desk he would work at. Sometimes he needed a break. He would move to this rocker, sitting in an opposite corner near the window of his study which looked out to the next-door church. I can see him rub then rest his eyes from all the reading he had done.

When my father’s father died, and his mother entered a nursing home, I inherited another rocker and its matching straight-legged chair, a captain’s chair style. I wish I could remember their position in their household. These two must have had either sentimental or practical value for my grandparents to have moved them from a large Victorian three-bedroom house to a small two-bedroom home in a retirement community. The rocker is missing one of the dowels between the seat and the arms. My father’s brother got his leg stuck between two dowels and my panicking grandmother insisted to her husband that they break out one dowel to free him.

Despite my love for this older furniture, it has only graced our main rooms by necessity. Early in our marriage (the second, lasting one) we purchased a Broyhill recliner which echoed the wing-backed design of these older chairs complete with a brocade upholstery. It also complemented our older, inherited chairs. Unfortunately, only a few years after we did, we invited a streetwise cat into our house whose scratching habits proceeded to turn it into a tasseled mockery of itself. It sits in the rec room now, with the other rejects who form the viewing area for our ‘home theater’. (It’s not really a home theater; it’s two chairs and a love seat, all of which recline and are positioned as optimally as possible to a large TV with a surround speaker system. We invited the other chair in the ensemble into our living room in 2009, and sent it to the basement in 2017.) I’m thinking we should reupholster it and return it to its rightful place in our living room.

Early relegation to our basement (or worse) seems to be the norm for modern furniture. I would tell you of the two loveseats which have been purchased and abandoned in that time, falling out of favor and usefulness just as the one now in our basement, and I could detail the two sofas we purchased in 2006 and 2013, the former being replaced by the latter, the latter going “to a deserving home” in 2020. But we’re talking of chairs. We started 2020 with a fixation on chairs. We purchased four chairs which looked decent, solid, and worthy of the prices we paid. Two of them replaced two of the inherited chairs detailed above. Two motorized recliners replaced the sofa. Now, barely more than four years old, the two recliners have entered middle age, declaring themselves for the James Dean life with the exception they’ve never lived fast nor will they leave a beautiful corpse. They’ve become more uncomfortable to me as I deal with lower back issues. Luckily the two side chairs have been making their case for sticking around more than a few years. They simplistically mimic the older inherited chairs, causing me to wonder: why I don’t seek out chairs like that?

Before ending this, office chairs should be mentioned. Though often unremarkable, they offer a unique feature: they almost always have wheels. On top of industrial-grade, quarter-inch-thick carpet, these babies provide transportation to those unwilling to stand simply to walk 10-20 feet to a neighbor’s cubicle. (And that one time my four-person team found ourselves housed in a former microbiological incubation room with hard, sealed floors? One of eight such rooms on a hallway with the same flooring? Do you know how far you can push a well-lubricated chair on such floors? Not if you haven’t tried it!) Once, though, I purchased an old office chair my employer had slated for disposal. Although the calendar said 1997, this chair hailed from the 1950’s. Completely upholstered with wood accent on the arms, this chair would swivel and tilt just like modern chairs–but with no ability to make adjustments. Yes, it had wheels. And from that year until 2006 (I think) it served me well as my computer desk chair.

Ultimately we think of office furniture similarly to most of our then co-workers: there have been many but we remember only a few. Not so our heirloom chairs. Not so the chairs of our childhood, from the plastic-sheathed kitchen chairs to the kitchen stools to the weird plastic furniture used on our parents’ patios. Not so the chairs which graced our first apartments, entering the doorway by whatever means necessary, whether begging, stealing, inheriting, or in our last-ditch efforts, purchasing. Not so where we sat when visiting our grandparents, our uncles/aunts/cousins, or even our friends in college when a Naugahyde sack full of styrofoam could be called “a bean-bag chair”.

When I look at this cycle, I see that my parents’ chairs came and went, my chairs in school could at best be called functional, my chairs in early adulthood had value only because they were there, my chairs throughout my life have primarily existed only until I could replace them–but the chairs I inherited from my grandparents, the ones constructed in the 1920’s, the 1930’s, the 1940’s, have outlasted all of the others and, like the British monarchy, say, “yet, I’m still here!”