paisleypiper's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- furniture memoir I asked Quinn how much I love furniture. And this is what she told me: �You love furniture so much you could probably tell the whole story of your life based on the furniture you had.� � Quinn When I get to tell people the entire story of my life, I always start with when I was a baby in New Jersey and slept in a drawer. My parents had a huge old dresser and crammed a pillow in one of the drawers and turned that into my crib. I believe that they set the drawer on a luggage stand � even though they were young and at odds with finding themselves parents, I do not think that they pushed the drawer in while I was in there. But, my mother admits that it was great not to have a bunch of unsightly baby gear junking up the apartment. I like to continue my whole sort of humble-beginnings with my furniture when we lived in a hole known as the Old Stanely in dusty Arizona. The same story in my mother�s hands would be all about the dust, the dust storms and sharing a bathroom with a toddler and an entire apartment building full of drug-using hippies. By the time we left the Old Stanley, I was quite sophisticated. I prefer to focus on our two room apartment and the fact that I only had crates in the kitchen for furnitre. On the whole, it is a very Little Princess sort of tale. I slept in the kitchen next to the stove and put lots of alphabet magnets on the stove. Until my mother took some notion to cook and they melted. My parents got two of the taller metal milk crates and put a board and piece of foam on them. This was my bed. Across the tiny room, they made a little desk for me out of three crates and a board. I sat there for hours making collages and working with paste. Leaving the Old Stanley, we headed back to our home state where my parents rented an undeveloped trailer that sat in the middle of a horse pasture. I know that I have mentioned before that I distinctly remember being awakened by horse drool and flies and a number of mornings. I was too old for it, but here I had a crib because my grandmother gave them my mother�s old crib so I could be up high enough to catch a breeze. The whole set-up was incredibly remedial, but so was the lack of electricity and plumbing. Quinn assures me that this would have been incredibly cool in the late �60�s and early �70�s, as cool as the old hearse that they drove with daisy contact paper on the dash, but regardless of how cool it was, it just did not work out in the winter. So we headed to State City where my father enrolled in the conservatory of music. And this is where it all turned around for me. After about a year there, my parents bought a house from an estate sale and I had my own room. They saved up $10.00 and took me to the junk shop around the corner where I had the honor of picking out my own furniture. The only constraints was that I stay in my budget and keep everything in my room. I got an old wide metal bed, a huge mahogany dresser, a plant stand, a bunch of fruit boxes, some hat boxes. The old guy who owned the store was so excited by my incredible enthusiasm for furniture that I think he must have fudged a bit adding it all up. I befriended him and visited him often at his old curiosity shop on Division Avenue. My first fun furniture purchase came at eight when I bought a bunch of barrister�s bookcases from the library where my mother was a clerk for $5.00. They are, of course, worth much, much more than that now. But it is not about the investment with me. I just loved having that antique glass in front of my stuff. I loved looking through the doors and noticing the slight distortion. My first serious furniture purchase came at eleven. I saved up all of my money from odd jobs and gifts and purchased an oak secretary desk. To me, it seemed like the very best place to sit and write. And my antique books went into the glass-front bookcase portion. I loved to pull up a chair to the pull-down desk and write letters with ink pens. Sometimes, just sitting at that desk, writing letters to my aunt and my best friend, was enough to keep me going through the very hardest part of my life. I imagined the girl who had this piece first and thought I could connect with her by sitting at the desk and writing. I knew that she was just like Clara, only happier and healthier, and probably French, living in Manhattan with her great aunt. Since then I have bought and sold so many pieces of furniture. I have spent hours and hours repairing and fixing old furniture. My grandfather was a hobby carpenter of incredible skill. Every year he made something for me out of wood from the red wagon that is on the front porch to sleds and jewelry boxes. And I used to help my father who made money by making furniture. I got to try my hand at designing custom furniture for people with really boring taste. My father and I would try to find some under-handed way to slip in some style and art to the endless buffets and entertainment centers. My favorite wood is Honduras mahogany. I will never be able to afford anything made out of this wood, but I did secure a hunk of it and built an entire chair just to feature this wood. I sit in this chair and put my arms on the mahogany and reflect on life. This is my power chair � it sits in the dining room now but originally I designed it as a meditation chair. It is perfectly proportioned for a person who is almost 5 foot 5 inches to sit up straight in just the posture for reflection and supported breathing. I also have many furniture war stories. Mostly while I was married to a jobless jerk who kept selling my furniture for money instead of keeping a job. I had a job editing a book in Chadron, Nebraska and was able to purchase at a farm auction two Morris chairs and a Stickley rocker. One of the major issues I had with my marriage was that on too many occasions, after coming home from my full-time job as a secretary and my part-time job as a photo-restorer, I would discover my incredible furniture collection to be slowly disappearing. This inventory control problem is now completely solved and our house is so packed that I cannot buy any more furniture. I try to stay away from the stores, the antique stores and the junk stores, because we cannot accommodate a find. I live vicariously through the furniture adventures of others. And so far, that is enough, because my love of furniture is not just about acquisition, although that certainly is both symptom and side-affect. I have an incredible appreciation of the drive to furnish. To support our bodies in certain culturally-defined ways. We sleep laying down. We sit. We have done this for thousands of years. Furniture is an expression of how we feel about the activities in our day. When we permit ourselves to be whimsical. When we are serious or rigid. When we are close and when we separate ourselves. 10:13 p.m. - 2002-08-26 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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