We bought a new couch this weekend because our old couch makes a frightening clunking noise every time you sit on it. Buying a new couch, though, means I have to give up one of the types of narratives that makes me quite happy, the "I got this material object in a unique way" narrative. I use this narrative for my favorite cropped, three-quarter sleeve heavy-ribbed-cotton white Jackie-O jacket ("My mother bought this to wear on her honeymoon in Jamaica in 1967; it has a matching white shift with shimmering silver buttons that I wear, too"); for my favorite cowboy boots ("These were my grandfather's; he had tiny feet!"); for my metallic gold clutch and clip-on earrings ("These were Nanny's (my grandmother, not hired help); she was so chic, and a redhead, and she makes me feel like one day I might have a chic, red-headed daughter"); for my white purse, with plastic square handles, encased in nubby little plastic balls ("I found this at this thrift store in a small town in Lousiana where Ed and I lived for a year").
The couch's narrative? This was my parent's couch, the one they bought in the store a week before they were married in 1967, and had delivered when they returned home from their honeymoon. My mother had always lived at home with her mother (twenty-seven years old and not yet married in '67, my mother was a feminist of her own sort) and my father had been eating Dinty Moore beef stew for dinner for eight years. Neither of them had any other furniture.
This couch became our "living room couch," it sat underneath a big oil landscape that I'm still unsure of the provenance of, but which depicts a bend in a river in Tennessee near where Grandaddy and Nanny came from. It was covered in a floral pattern, the pattern done in moss green and gold chenille over top of a silvery-taupe background. When you took the back cushions off this couch, and factored in the quiet nobody-every-goes-in-there feel of the living room, this couch was the pre-eminent nap zone in the entire house.
When I moved from Champaign to Chicago, my parents drove the couch out to me. For some reason Lauren and I were going to need two huge couches in our little ghetto-town apartment on Crystal Street. The couch sat and waited. It watched a lot of Law and Order with us.
Then Ed and I got married and moved to Louisiana together. We'd never bothered to move in together; I liked my roomie situations with Lauren and then with Leo. Our apartment in LA, then, was our first together, and it had a huge vintage cast iron sink that I still pine after. The first few days in that apartment, I stood at that sink and dreamily unboxed and washed the dishes and glassware we got for wedding presents. Everything in its place, I turned my attention to the couch. It needed recovering.
Ed got the tip from a lady he worked with down at the federal court building. "Rickie Long," she said. So we took the couch out to Rickie Long and dropped it off. Rickie Long lived in the woods, was a short man with short arms and little hands. Rickie Long would take longer than his usual week (!!) to reupholster our couch, because he was going on a hunting trip. "No problem," we said, factoring in that in the city we'd be waiting a month or more and paying at least triple was Rickie Long was charging. I'd picked out an inexpensive and pretty grass green twill fabric for the couch. Because I can't sew, I also dropped off some fabric for throw pillows. Fabric that my friend Margaret had brought back from her time spent working for an NGO in Sierra Leone.
Rickie Long, the Louisiana hunter in the woods, recovered the couch that was bought on Staten Island in 1967, trucked down to Houston, TX, then up to Louisville, KY, then settled into New Jersey for two decades, before heading to the Midwest. He made, with his little hands, pillows made from fabric from a war-torn African country that would sit on that couch.
That's a good story, right?
But the couch has, for the past year, become rather uncomfortable (Rickie Long may not have had the most high-end reupholstering materials). Ed and I have bought exactly three pieces of furniture for our house in four years-- a chair from Ikea, a stainless kitchen island, and a coffee table. This is a normal thing to do, right? Buying a couch? We bought one. Which I'm happy about, a new couch, yay!
So I listed the old couch for sale on Craig's List and Apartment Therapy. I knew it would garner some attention, because even though it doesn't sit that great, it shows beautifully. But I got absolutely mobbed with responses, and featured on Apartment Therapy. The narrative continues to be charming, right?
But instead of hand-picking people out of the bunch that emailed me, folks that I got a vibe from just from her judicious use of punctuation or his winking nod to the couch's coolness -- giving them first dibs -- some sort of democratic impulse came over me and I sent out a mass email saying people could come see the couch at a certain time.
The time came, one young man came up our stairs. I've never sold anything on Craig's List and this was a social interaction that made me quite nervous. He sat on it carelessly, I showed him the underside of one cushion that bore red wine stains from my 29th birthday party, he remarked that he had a dog, implying the dog would be making quick work of my beauty. He asked if I'd come down on the (too low, now I realize) price, and I said no. He unrolled a wad of cash and I said okay. Ed piped up, trying to get me to stop and think for a moment, but the damage was done. We didn't know how to get out of this one, the boy said he'd come by on Thursday to pick it up. We took the money.
People kept emailing me, and with each email it seemed that here was a house that would give this couch more love than this twenty-something boy could muster. Here was a man who realized it's good etiquette to indicate that his "girlfriend" also loved the couch; here was a girl offering to buy it sight unseen. Rationally, I had always imagined that the couch would go to a recent college grad, and I recognized that that meant dance party PBR slosh on my couch. Rationally, I understand that it is a collection of wood and foam.
Remember that Spike Jonze Ikea commercial, with the old lamp sitting forlornly on a street corner? Sad music plays as you look at the poor lamp until an old European man (I know he is supposed to be Swedish, but his manner is quite Prussian, if you get my drift) stops in front of the camera and says "Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you are crazy."
It's a clever commercial, sure, but last time I checked, Spike Jonze was a miserable S.O.B.
So I'm sad about my couch and its prospective new frat-town home. I could've ushered the narrative along a bit better. Ed says maybe this kid will fall in love on this couch; I think it more likely he makes it smell like socks. So, I thought I'd do my part and send its story out into the world here, into the least material of worlds. Ah, couch. Look what you've done to me. I'm ridiculous.
(Pssst: So totally psyched I got featured on Apartment Therapy Scavenger. How confirming!)
Why would you do this? Why would you redesign your product so that it could no longer be dispensed with ease? Crap-ass Olay Body gets it, It even says so right on the label: "Store bottle upside down to ease dispensing." Do you enjoy seeing me try to balance this stupid bottle on its precious little nose? And, while I've got you here, Dove Body Wash, wasn't it you who started this whole "upside down for ease of dispensing" thing? Which, I thought we all agreed, moved our culture forward one tiny, beautiful little bit?
said the Library of Congress receives 20,000 items per day that it needs to either shelve or discard. She described the stacks, telling us that they pile books on the floor. There isn't enough room for all the books.
