On Furniture

If tables turned, and furniture could talk, and people could sense how different elbows feel, when placed just so upon them, it would be an interesting conversation, I think.

Cousin June’s elbows captivated our Megs. Whenever June came to visit, little Megan would make a bee-line for Junie’s soft lap and reach around to touch and gently pinch her soft elbow skin, all slack and gappy around the knob of her bone. I’ll bet the table liked June’s doubly soft elbows too, and how padded her forearms were say, compared to mine - all bone and angles with hardly any flesh at all over them.

To this day, I expect there are dents from my butt bones on that chartreuse Naugahyde chair of my youth - where ever it is. I wonder what it would say, you know, if the tables turned, and furniture could talk. “Ouch?” Or, “Go get something to eat, little girl, and fatten yourself up, child!?”

What do you suppose Winston Churchill’s wooden suit valet would say when it accepted the weight of the world as the Prime Minister let slip from his shoulders, and dropped his suit coat onto its oaken rack just before getting into bed?

Or, Einstein’s desk. Do desks get head aches? All those numbers would make mine spin. I wonder if its surface developed a groove from the movement of his calculating hand.

I don’t know if it’s possible, but how loving a cradle might feel toward the weight of a couple’s first newborn placed so tenderly there with hopes that her first sleep in it would be restful for all.

I’m fairly certain that the wheel chair of my friend from the 1970’s, Frances Rainbow, felt very proud to be her understanding and to stand under her every day and every night of her too short life. Frances used to give tours of her chair to all who would listen: “This lever makes it go backwards and forwards, this one is for steering, and this is the all important eject button which no one but I, Frances Rainbow is allowed to touch.”

Brittle Bone Disease made her lighter than a feather, and her voice sounded as if she’d inhaled helium, or like that of a small child - delicate and high pitched. Imagine how proud of her that chair felt the day she piped up and testified before the Los Angeles City Council on behalf of all people in wheel chairs. Frances’s testimony and her sturdy chair helped so many folks with accessibility issues in the city. Pretty soon the idea caught on all over the country. Her chair’s cushions must be puffed with pride.

When I was no more than six years old, I wished for a chair that could hold and rock me, like a pillowy, bosomy mama, whose enveloping softness would almost swallow my angular boney self, ’til I could hear its inner-workings, and it could hear mine. How would it interpret the gurgles of my always hungry belly? What would it think about my pockets full of pill bugs and foxtail filled socks? And what would it say about my dreams of running so fast that I’d take off - lifting into flight?

I imagine furniture made my humans has a lot to say. Conversely, I believe we humans have a lot to learn about how it feels to be interacted with respectfully.