When I was a kid, my father used to tell me to “buy good, so you don’t buy twice.”
My father was a thrifty, prudent sort who kept annotated back issues of Consumer Reports in his basem*nt, filed as if they were the Encyclopedia Britannica. He never bought an item without punctilious deliberation, scrutinizing every circular, clipping every coupon, researching every ball bearing before removing a single moth-eaten dollar from his wallet to acquire it.
My mother was, naturally, the reverse, impulsively acquiring frivolous, expensive fancies for the sheer delight of being able to do so. Consequently, we were the only family in our suburban neighborhood to watch “Maude” together on a 19th century fainting couch.
It had character.
When it came to furnishing my own home, I inclined to my father’s more judicious approach. No slipshod laminate for me. I’d go big or go home. I wanted something solid, dependable, classic – something to pass on to the next generation (once I acquired one.) I squirreled away my nickels in an El Producto cigar case until I had saved enough of them for a down payment on a wing chair. And what a chair! Solid cherry frame! Hand-sewn upholstery! A chic, chintz pattern that would never go out of style! Why, it was so exquisite, you didn’t dare sit in it.
And, for the most part, I did not.
I left the chair in the corner until some Important Person came to visit.
They never did.
The only Important Person who actually took rest in my heirloom chair was the Sun, which made such an impression on all of us that we could no longer see the upholstery. It had jaundiced.
My father never mentioned that possibility.
“Get a new one,” my mother advised, which, outside of “eat something!” is her customary recommendation.
“But it’s a perfectly good chair.”
“Oh junk it,” she said blithely. “Donate it. It’s about time somebody sat in it.”
I didn’t want to get a new chair. I wanted to keep the chair for which I had paid a small fortune and which my father had assured me would last generations.
“I’m probably not going to want it,” said my son, 21.
“That’s because your generation does not know what ‘good’ is anymore, Sonny,” I reacted in horror. “A disposable, undiscerning generation, content with shoddy goods and fast fashion.”
“Whatever,” he said.
The obvious solution was not to buy the $495 swivel chair or the $559 recliner, but to reupholster the chair that I intended to survive Armageddon.
Off I went to the upholstery shop, about as compelling as trolling through the vinyl siding aisle minus the entertainment value of a mattress store.
Yet the upholstery shop was so much more visually demanding. Plaids. Patterns. Chintz. Stripes. Flax. Woven. Chenille. Velvet. Jacquards. Linen. And the colors! Sunbrella. Pebble. Macarena. Southpaw. Sugar Shack. Balsam. Tonic. Tropicana! What desperate English literature major comes up with these names?
I felt like my third-grade art teacher, Miss Bole, had glued me to the color wheel and flicked it as hard as she could. I was spinning wildly in a Matisse tilt-a-whirl engineered by Raoul Dufy. It was like an LSD trip with 375,00 swatches. It was the visual equivalent of spritzing myself with too many perfumes and watching my olfactories flatline.
At a certain point, I just put my finger in a book blindly and landed on one.
“OK,” the upholsterer said. “You will need 8 yards of fabric.”
He unearthed a dusty calculator from coils of fabric, tapped away at it with his pencil eraser and said, “OK, that will be $1,469.45.”
Wow.
That is a lot of cheap chairs I could buy. I might be able to finance an entire floor of Ikea and have enough left over for the Swedish meatballs.
“Good quality chair!” the man said. “Will last a lifetime.”
What I wanted to say, of course was, “Phooey, it will! I could buy four pieces of junk that people will actually sit in for that price.”
Instead, I recall the recent figures I read about just how much furniture Americans throw out – 12 million tons a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Since 1960, that number has increased 450%. Most of it, the Wall Street Journal reports, gets junked in the landfill. They don’t biodegrade.
So I caved. I caved because I was thinking about my father and thinking about my son. He probably won’t want the chair. But he’ll appreciate the earth. Consider it a Boomer’s down payment on creating a better one.
Reach Tracey O’Shaughnessy at Tosh@rep-am.com or visit rep-am.com/Reflections.
