Scraps that Speak
By Jim Dodson
Not long ago, I sent out an old club chair from my office to be recovered.
Some of my colleagues at the magazine were greatly amused by this act, pointing out that the town dump was a more fitting destination than a fine reupholstery shop.
For years they’d made high sport of my uncommon devotion to this old chair, you see, though probably not for no good reason.
Half its springs were shot and its cushion sagged almost to the floor in places, prompting me to lovingly nickname it “the Chair of No Return,” warning any unwary sitters of injuries that could occur from attempting to rise from it. My wiseacre Art Director, Andie Rose, insensitively took to calling it “Chairy” after Pee Wee Herman’s peculiar talking arm chair. The CNR and I were both wounded by this.
Still, how I loved that old armchair, secretly hoping the magician upholsterer might return with a new lease on life.
Crusty Mildred Horseman, after all, gave me this chair the summer before my junior year in college, my first piece of actual grown-up furniture. She lived across the street from my parents in Greensboro. Even then the old thing was something of an antique, the chair I mean to say, having belonged to her late husband Clyde from his college days in Michigan, his favorite reading chair she explained, evidenced by its original faded green leather worn by decades of service.
I carted it off to my first big job in Atlanta, where it received its first reupholstering job, a nice updated green hunter plaid like the one I’d recently seen in a sitting room of the swanky Piedmont Driving club. I thought it looked terribly sophisticated, even if I wasn’t.
Seven years later the CNR accompanied me to a new life and job in a rented U-Haul truck to a solar house by the Green River in Vermont, followed a year later to a cottage in a New Hampshire apple orchard thence to a weathered bungalow in the salt marsh of Essex, Massachusetts — and finally, to the rugged post-and-beam house my young bride and I built on a forested hilltop near the coast of Maine.
By then the CNR had seen its better days, with a seat cushion woefully sagging, soon to be relegated to my upstairs home office in the barn, safely out of view. Still, the old thing was my seat of choice, the place where I preferred to sit when I wrote essays or read books to my small children.
I thought that might be the final resting place for us both, that hilltop in Maine.
But life had other plans for both of us. A decade later, following divorce and remarriage, the old armchair came home with me to the South and wound up in my magazine office, the source of great mirth to my staff.
Still, what is it about a few old things that have a way of wrapping their vines around the human heart, invested with a deep personal meaning?
Maybe it’s the fact that their bittersweet impermanence mirrors our own, and they may outlive us in our race to the boneyard.
Artists and poets seem to understand this intuitively. Not long ago I saw a magnificent iron elk made from rusted auto parts standing beside the highway. What a thing of salvaged beauty it was, a mythic tribute to nature and General Motors. I stopped and snapped a photo, wishing I could somehow cart it home to my front lawn.
Such acts are in our national DNA. In the days before every rural family possessed a camera, handmade quilts were made from worn-out clothing and dish rags for warmth, utility and economy – effectively a way to record a family’s passage through time, scraps that speak, as my late Grandmother Taylor liked to say of her own cherished quilts. They reminded her of people she’d known in her life, how far she’d journeyed, a story behind each square of cloth. If you love it enough, said George Washington Carver, anything will speak to you.
Tony Avent, the nationally known horticultural guru and owner of Plants Delight Nursery, uses old bathroom fixtures and other household items that have outlived their usefulness as stage props along the paths of his magnificent botanical garden built in an old tobacco farm outside of Raleigh, perhaps reminding us how nature will have the last word in a throwaway consumer culture. Somehow, though, those fixtures make the garden look like an enchanted Lost World of treasures both natural and man-made.
Though I’m not much of a collector of anything save pocket lint, golf caps and old books, my home office has become a kind of accidental collection center for old things that speak to me and probably nobody else. On my desk stands a handsome Colonial blue-coat soldier, a ceramic lamp from the 1950s, exactly the one I had as a little kid but disappeared many years ago.
My late grandfather’s squirrel rifle stands over in the corner — unfired for decades — next to a shelf of old books that belonged to my late father, including a first editions of Kipling’s Phantom Rickshaw, James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and Markings by Dag Hammarsköld, three two of his favorite books. And now mine. I also have my dad’s old Wilson golf clubs and the green cap he purchased on his last trip to St. Andrews, relics only a golfing son could find priceless.
The oldest bed in our house is a handsome pineapple four-poster made from solid cherry hardwood that reportedly belonged to my great-grandmother, quite possibly the bed was born in. For a time my daughter had it in her Brooklyn apartment until a side rail split and I drove all the way to Brooklyn just to haul it home. I fully intended to find a craftsman who can repair it.
My wife cherishes several antique china cups and saucers, the only items her immigrant grandmother brought with her on the boat from Ireland a century ago. In her bathroom sits a large glass ginger jar filled with beautiful sea shells she’s collected from every beach she’s visited since girlhood, a spiritual record of her footprints in the sand.
The actual oldest object in our possession is a long farm table I gave my second wife on the occasion of our marriage. It came from England with papers certifying it to be more than 200 years old. Oh, the life that simple dented and scarred table has seen, outliving kings and empires, made smooth by unknown hands and time – including two decades of rowdy Dodson family dinners, comprising just a tenth of its life. We’re mere caretakers before its onward journey continues.
Not long ago that table accompanied us back to a rambling old house where we previously lived for six years. It’s a relic from the Gilded Age, at least a century old, with foot-thick plaster walls and ancient plumbing, windows that leak cold like a sieve and peculiar half-sized doors and back passageways meant for servants that disappeared half a century ago.
For what it’s worth, I wrote three books in an upper bedroom of this old place. The room has superb light and a powerful serenity I can feel in my bones. Moving back to it after a year away was like coming home to an old friend, a deep comfort in the wake of an unsettling year.
During the move, in an effort to begin downsizing our possessions, we made stacks of clothes for Goodwill and set aside household items we have no further need of and even went through several dusty boxes containing old kids’ toys and books, scores of dolls and once-beloved stuffed animals, broken train sets, Matchbox cars, photos and other sweet artifacts of a family all grown up, deciding to fill one large foot locker for each of our grown children to go through when they come for the holidays.
As for my old friend the Chair of No Return, it eventually returned from a talented Mexican upholsterer with new springs and a firm seat cushion and a voluptuous houndstooth fabric that had made it look fresh from the furniture showroom. My formerly amused colleagues were all a bit stunned by the transformation, eager to take a turn resting their bottoms in it.
Truthfully, they seemed a trifle put out with me for taking Chairy home to the upper bedroom where I do my best work. But I’m no fool. Time is passing quickly and a good reading chair belongs in a peaceful old room where it can do the most good.
That old chair and the table downstairs will likely outlive us all. Ditto my bride’s Irish china and her collection from the sea.
But therein lies a powerful message for those of us who choose to love a few old things in a perishable universe. Eternity resides in every moment with the people and objects we hold most dear.
Best to take notice and love them before we all have to go.
Editor’s Note: This Simple Life essay appeared in the October 2015 issue of O.Henry Magazine. Dodson’s beloved chair now reposes in his home library, where he’s trying hard to stay in place.
