Home Alone

25 March 2009

Ken comes later today to pick up the sofa, loveseat, and coffee table from my den.

The impetus, Honey P. and I had decided a bit ago to replace them with furniture that was more conducive to entertaining people … and to give the dogs more room to sprawl out when we’re watching TV together at night. Granted, it’s currently “dog,” but we link to plan ahead.

It’s a bit of a deal for me, you see, because these pieces are the last bit of furniture in our home together that came from my first home alone.

I was in my 20s when I moved out of my parents house to a one-bedroom apartment in Andersonville, just west of Ashland Avenue on Catalpa. The third-floor walkup was in need of repair—there wasn’t a right angle to be found along the doors, windows, or corners of the place. The fridge was antique and large and blocked ready access to the pantry and porch door, the kitchen floor simply worn, and the bathtub enamel stained beyond help. But I loved the place! I moved in with a bed, a couple of bookcases, oak map tables that Grant had saved for me from his offices in the city back when he ran a design firm of his own, a CD player that my singles group had bought me for by birthday, an old rocking chair I had reupholstered myself, and my Martin guitar.

Over time, I filled the space as I could afford to add a table here, a wall hanging there. My greatest acquisition came from a long-gone store in the neighborhood called South & West: this set of overstuffed mocha leather chairs with brass rivets and hand-carved wood pumpkin-shaped feet. Karen, who ran the place, told me it was the last set made by a man in Austin who’d since hung a “gone fishing” sign permanently on his studio door. I’d wanted the set for months and was finally able to afford it by living on pub food and duty-free gin for three weeks while on assignment in Oxford. Have per diem, will scrimp for furniture.

To be sure, they weren’t the best chairs for me. The armchair was too wide and long for my five-foot-six-inch frame. And the loveseat too small to curl up by oneself and too strangely angled to really snuggle up with someone else.

But I’ll miss the idea of that furniture the way I sometimes miss at least the idea of my first place. It was a wonderful time in my young life, and I recall sitting back in one of those chairs more than once and thinking about how good things were and could be.

Funny enough, the coffee table Ken’s claiming is the last piece from Honey P.’s first apartment alone in Evanston. And from what I understand, they’re all going into Ken’s first apartment in Chicago. Some things, I guess, are simply meant to be.