A Chair's End

(or)

Eighteen + Years with a Second Owner

The last of my grandmother's chairs have finally left us.

After living in the dorms, I moved into an apartment with Tony and furnished the place with my late grandmother's furniture: a couch, two chairs, two marble-top end tables, a wooden hexagonal doored table, and two brass lamps. 

The effect of all that legitimate furniture, all of it already close to 30 years old, was to make our little apartment the most home-y out of all of those in the Jungle, the nickname our section of those shitty apartments had.

When I moved into the Oceanaire house with Tony and Ryan, I brought all that same furniture. The couch was the first to be destroyed/replaced. We had three couches in our living room, and two throne-like chairs set up for our drinking game, Caps. One of the throne chairs was one of my grandmother's chairs. After four years of being basically a drinking hammock, it was worse for the wear and obviously shabbier when compared side-by-side with the other chair, safely tucked away in my bedroom. The couch lasted only a few years. Both chairs made it to our own place before we left town.

In Brooklyn, Tuxedo chose the Caps chair as his scratcher of choice. By the time we left, all that cat-scratching and Caps-playing had taken its toll and that chair didn't make the move to Texas.

After Texas and a half-decade in California, getting another cat, having a baby, and the general falling-apart of gear, the other, formerly pristine Oceanaire's-bedroom-chair, has met it's final demise:

I'm not sure how long my grandmother had the chairs, but I'm guessing close to thirty years, and then I had them for another eleven and eighteen, respectively. 

We considered having it re-upholstered, but very few people seem to know how to do that anymore. Eventually it had fallen too far apart to be taking up as much valuable space as it had.

The lamps, marble-top tables, and hexagonal table are all still around.

The end of a sitting era in our midst...