Save me a Seat

Every culture has a rite of passage to mark a teenager’s coming of age. Bar- and bat mitzvahs are held to celebrate the maturity of young Jewish teens. Socialites hold debutante balls to signal a daughter’s passage into womanhood. Native Americans turn young males loose in the wilderness for a week. My rite of passage was what in family lore came to be known as the Life-Is-Hard Talk our father had with us when we turned 14. I was the third of four sons, and he was growing weary, so his talk with me was mercifully brief. Mostly he warned me about unrequited love, the rigors of college, finding employment, paying bills, and child-rearing.

I was fortunate enough to dodge those axle-busters. The woman I love loves me back. I breezed through college, thanks to CliffNotes. I have done well on the job front, and my wife pays the bills—and pretty much raises the kids, too. So what has been the pothole on my otherwise smooth road? What has caused me to rend my clothes and curse the day of my birth? That would be shopping for living-room furniture.

When we moved into our home, my wife sent me to the furniture store to buy a new couch and chairs. I entered the store, stopped just inside the front door, pointed my finger at the nearest living-room suite, and said, “I’ll take those.” I was back home in a half-hour. Unfortunately, the furniture store wasn’t similarly swift. Two months would pass before our furniture was delivered—long enough for us to forget we had ordered it, making its arrival a pleasant surprise. We shoved it around our living room, found the optimal arrangement, and there it sat for 10 years, gathering dog hair, popcorn, and loose change.

The furniture was just getting comfortable, broken down in all the right places, when my wife said it was time to replace it. As much as I enjoy comfortable furniture, I like spending money more. My life’s goal is to spend my last coin just as I draw my last breath, slipping the nurse a tip as she unplugs the respirator.

The next weekend, my wife and I visited a furniture store. I knew this outing would not go well when a clown greeted us at the front door. There are certain places one anticipates seeing a clown—circuses, hospital wards, the halls of Congress. To encounter one at a furniture store was annoying; furniture-buying is bad enough without adding a clown to the mix.

I’m never certain how to behave around a clown. My tendency is to ignore them, hoping they will go away. Unfortunately, this clown was persistent, following us past the mattresses and kitchen tables to the living-room section, pointing out the qualities of each couch and making balloon animals until we made our escape.

The next store was mercifully empty of clowns, but it had something even worse—an overeager employee who proceeded to show us 600 fabric samples. My wife and I have a hard enough time deciding what to eat for supper, let alone picking one fabric out of 600.

“I wish,” my wife said on the drive home, “there were a furniture store with two choices of fabric—one of them so butt-ugly we would have to pick the other one.”

“What we ought to do,” I said, “is buy two wooden rocking chairs that would match any couch. They would last a lot longer than 10 years, and our boys wouldn’t lie in them like slugs.”

To that end, I phoned a man in Texas named Gary Weeks, who makes rocking chairs. I asked how many kinds of rocking chairs he made. “Four,” he said. “Maple, cherry, walnut, and mesquite.” In one fell swoop, we had reduced our choices from 600 to 4.

“What color is the other furniturein your living room?” he asked. “Darkor light?”

“Dark,” I said.

“Then you want light rocking chairs for a nice contrast. That means maple.”

“I’ll take two,” I said.

These rocking chairs are made by hand of solid wood—not a nail or screw in them, hand-doweled, hand-joined, hand-sanded, and not inexpensive. But they will last five or six lifetimes, so are a far better deal than a 10-year recliner, if our children don’t sell them in a garage sale after we’re dead.

A few weeks after I placed our order, a delivery truck pulled down our driveway, and a man carried in the rockers and situated them in our living room. The next day we drove to a furniture store, stopped just inside the front door, pointedto the first couch we saw, and said, “We’ll take that one. That very one.”

“That’s a floor model,” the saleswoman said. “We’ll have to order one for you.”

“That’s okay,” my wife said. “We’ll take the floor model.”

“We can’t sell it until our floor-model sale this fall,” she said. “But you can pick a fabric, and we’ll have a couch made for you. It’ll take about eight weeks.”

It is, I have learned, impossible to buy a couch in one day. It can’t be done. A house can be purchased in days. A car can be purchased in an hour’s time. If I wanted to, and had the money, I could buy $1 million worth of stock in two seconds. But a couch takes eight weeks.

The hitch in the get-along is the 600 fabrics. Everyone would have been better off if they had selected five or six attractive colors, made up a sufficient supply of couches, and shipped them to stores so I could walk in, point to a couch, and say, “I’ll take it in green.” While I was writing them a check, they could be tying the couch to the top of my car. I would bring it home and fall asleep on it that very evening while watching Letterman.

Instead, the saleswoman asks, “Would you like that couch in moss green, algae green, holly green, lime green, grass green, olive green, avocado green, forest green, spinach green, or traffic-light green? We also have green floral, green stripes, green plaid, green circles, and green squares. But perhaps you would like to see the samples?”

It is a couch, not a snowflake. It doesn’t have to be unique. Comfortable, yes. Long-lasting, even better. But if my neighbor happened to have one just like it, my life would not be ruined.

Two months have passed, and we are still awaiting our new couch. The furniture store phoned two weeks ago to tell us the model of couch we had ordered had been discontinued. Sofas, it seems, come in model years, just like cars.

“We have it in a camelback design with a skirt and rolled arm,” the sales-woman said.

“That will be fine,” I said. “How soon can we have it?”

“We can expedite it for you. You should have it in eight or nine weeks.”

My younger son turned 14 last month. I sat him down on our old couch. He fell through to the floor.

“Son,” I began. “Life is difficult. Take this couch, for instance ...”

But don’t take it yet. I’ll need it another eight weeks.