I threw out my favorite desk chair yesterday. It was upholstered with garish red fabric I never liked. The wooden strips on the wheelbase kept flying off. You could feel a popped spring near the middle of the seat, which was lumpy for plenty of other reasons as well. The armrests gave me splinters in my elbows. If you leaned back too far, the chair could toss you like a bronco.
What a fine chair that was! It was like a stray pet that you take in but can never tame.
I met that chair in the fall of 1991 when I began at the New Haven Advocate. I’d only owned it a few months before I’d absentmindedly carved my name on an armrest—an involuntary habit I’d acquired from hanging out in certain wooden-tabled bars and pizza joints in our oaken college town.
Then the office décor changed, with new carpeting and color schemes, and the old chairs had to go. I saw my chair outside the office, waiting for the trashman. I took it home, where it served me another 15 years.
What made me finally send the chair to its eternal (arm)resting place is a broken wheel. I felt like I was shooting a horse for breaking its leg. But you can’t turn a swivel chair into anything else, can you—not an ottoman or artwork or Lazy Susan. It was a thing on which I sat, and that is that.
Recline in peace, chair.