Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [29]
In big cities you see a lot of overstuffed chairs being thrown away outside apartment houses. I always think of the old Eskimo women they put out on an ice floe to die.
The kitchen chair and the overstuffed living-room chair are the most sat on, and there are always a few chairs in every home that no one ever sits on. Everyone in the household understands about it. There are no rules. It is just not a chair you sit on. It may be in the hall by the front door, used mostly for piling books on after school. Or it may be silk brocade with a gold fringe, in the back bedroom. It may be antique and uncomfortable or imperfectly glued together and therefore too fragile for the wear-and-tear that goes with being sat on regularly.
Sometimes there is no reason that anyone can give why a chair isn’t sat on. It’s like the suit or dress in the closet that is perfectly good but never worn. The unsat-upon chair in a home really isn’t much good for anything except handing down from one generation to the next.
In hotels they often put two chairs not to be sat in on either side of the mirror across from the elevator on every floor.
There aren’t as many dining-room chairs as there used to be because there aren’t as many dining rooms. Now people eat in the kitchen or they have picnics in front of the television set in the living room. It’s too bad, because there’s something civilized and charming about having a special place for eating. It’s a disappearing luxury, though. These days everything in a house has to be multi-purpose, folding, retractable or convertible.
Dining-room chairs on thick rugs were always a problem. They made it difficult or impossible for a polite man to slide a chair under a woman. As soon as any of her weight fell on the chair, the legs sank into the pile and stopped sliding. If she was still eight inches from where she wanted to be, she had to put her hands under the seat and hump it toward the table while the man made some futile gestures toward helping from behind her. It took a lot of the grace out of the gesture.
The other trouble with a good set of dining-room chairs was that at Christmas or any other special occasion when you wanted them most, there weren’t enough of them. This meant bringing a chair or two in from the kitchen or the living room and ruining the effect of a matched set.
If dining-room chairs are the most gracious, folding chairs are the least. I suppose someone will collect those basic folding, wood chairs they kept in church basements and sell them as antiques someday soon, but they’re ugly and uncomfortable. Maybe they were designed to keep people awake at town meetings.
The Morris chair was invented by an English poet named William Morris. He’s better known for his chair than his poetry. A man takes immortality from anywhere he can get it, but it seems a sad fate for a poet to be remembered for a chair. I make furniture myself and I hate to think of any table I’ve made outlasting my writing, but I suppose it could happen.
Very few chairs survive the age in which they were designed. The Windsor chair is one of a handful of classics that have. The Hitchcock is another. If the time comes when we want to place a time capsule to show people on another planet in another eon what we sat on, we should put a Windsor chair in to represent us. You have to choose something better than average as typical.
The rocking chair probably comes closer than any other article of furniture to delineating past generations from present ones. People sat in them and contemplated their lives and the lives of people they could see passing by from where they sat. People don’t contemplate each other much from chairs anymore. When anyone passes by now, he’s in a car going too fast for anyone to