A chair’s life

So the experiment of using this blog to replace Facebook didn’t work out so well. But here is a recent Facebook post, about a chair, that has some relevance to this site.

The chair in question.

Dallas friends – if you would like a chair, let me know. The mechanical and emotional details follow.

The facts are, this is an Ethan Allen recliner, purchased circa 1995. Aside from a few love marks from 25 years of cats, the leather is in good shape. The varnish has worn off the arms in some spots. The cushioning is comfy.

The recliner mechanism is problematic. If you attempt to recline, you will travel backward with the speed and velocity that will recall any number of amusement park rides of your youth – the ones maintained by half-awake carney types who make you fear for your life, especially when it flings you with enough force to raise the front legs an inch or so off the ground and you wonder if you will be flipped through the window behind you. When the seat has arrived at its full not-upright position, it makes a loud THUNK and drops a couple of inches on the right side, as if the floor is collapsing beneath you as your house slides down a hill.

The exuberance with which the chair flings you back is matched by its reluctance to let you go forward. With your back sinking into the soft, leathery cushion, you will need to find a way to lift your gluteus region high enough to extend your legs to provide leverage to tilt your body and the chair upright. If you have, say, a pulled muscle anywhere or weigh more than approximately 25 pounds, you might find yourself on the verge of crying for help or cursing the fact that your iPhone is just out of reach on the nearby shelf, like a can of Mace someone is reaching for at the climax of that horror movie that I think starred Bea Arthur but can’t recall the title of now. Although rest assured, that when the moment to traverse forward comes, it will come suddenly and with great enthusiasm, probably flinging the drink you set on the armrest, and possibly all of you, to the floor.

The THUNK problem began last spring, and I spent many hours trying to fix it. I finally realized it would require more disassembly than I was willing to undertake even in a pandemic. I called a chair repair place. The kind people told me it was almost impossible to fix a recliner mechanism in a way that made anybody happy, so they would not even attempt it.

I purchased another chair last month, so I must part with this one.

I am reluctant to do so. We bought this chair soon after we bought our first house but before we had children, which meant we had free time and spare money and devoted a ridiculous amount of effort to its selection. Melinda and I visited multiple stores before I declared this one to be superlative. We waited possibly weeks or months for it to be built and delivered, then had Ethan Allen employees come out to adjust the mechanism when it behaved questionably. I envisioned this as my very own Archie Bunker chair – not for its casual, comedic racism but for the way I intended to expound on all the world’s problems from it for decades to come.

I would say I watched a lot of sports from it, but to be honest, if the game mattered, I was probably jumping up and down or pounding the floor. But I would sometimes hold my little girls on my shoulder while I sat in this chair, and my then-small children later enjoyed playing on this chair, which may or may not have contributed to the warping of the mechanism. I also wrote about 40 percent of my novel from this chair (another 40 percent having been written in bed, 10 percent being done at the library and the rest done in coffee shops or wherever I could steal a half-hour). I did almost all my reading as books editor from this chair. Melinda took a lot of naps in this chair. It was really comfy.

But it’s gotta go. Yours free for pickup because it deserves a better fate than a landfill. Or you can wait until next week when I will list it on Craigslist for $50 and settle for $20.