As I write this, I’m sitting here on two pillows because my La-Z-Boy sofa with its two built-in recliners finally has become uncomfortable – like sitting in a deep gully. Without the two pillows stuffed into it, I’d never be able to climb out of the recliner without something hanging down from the ceiling to hoist me up.
I hate to admit it, but finally, after over 30 years, I honestly can empathize with my late husband when his beloved recliner – his best friend and dear companion from 1983 to 1994 – bit the dust. He loved that chair. He ate in it, napped in it, watched TV in it and curled up with a blanket in it when he was sick. Whenever we went away on vacation, the first thing he would do when we returned home was flop into his chair, pat it and say, “I sure did miss you, old boy!”
That chair, however, hated me. The one time I sat in it and pulled the lever to recline, I ended up tipping over backwards and landing flat on my back with my feet straight up in the air. And as I struggled to get up, I swear I could hear sadistic chuckling coming from somewhere deep within the chair’s stuffing.
When my husband came home from work that day and I told him what had happened, his expression immediately displayed his concern.
“It’s okay,” I assured him. “Don’t worry, I’m fine.”
“No! You sat in my chair? You didn’t hurt it, did you?”
Alas, when our 95-pound dog decided to take a flying leap onto the precious recliner one day and left it in a broken, lopsided heap, I was only mildly (very mildly) upset. My husband, however, nearly called 911.
A furniture repairman charged us $198 to put the chair back together. But to my husband’s dismay, it never was the same after that. And with each passing week, I noticed he was tilting more and more to the left whenever he sat in it.
Finally, when he practically had to use a seatbelt to prevent himself from falling onto the carpet, he admitted defeat. The time had come to buy a new recliner.
We thought it would be simple. We’d just drive straight to the nearest La-Z-Boy showroom and pick up another one exactly like the one he had. But when we arrived, we were informed the chair had been discontinued back in 1991.
Discouraged, my husband then proceeded to sit in just about every recliner in the store. As he grumbled, “Too hard,” “Too soft,” “Too narrow,” I began to feel as if I were watching a bad performance of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The only difference was Goldilocks ended up finding a chair that was “just right.” My husband didn’t.
For the next three weeks we haunted just about every furniture store within a 60-mile radius. We came close to finding a recliner that my husband deemed was almost perfect, but it had to be factory-ordered, which would have taken over three months.
Then, just as I was on the verge of vowing never to set foot in another furniture store again, even if every stick of furniture in our house was ravaged by gangs of giant, starving termites, my husband pointed to a recliner in Montgomery Ward and said the four words I had been praying to hear…”I’ll take this one.”
The only problem was it was bright blue and our living room was beige and brown. The clerk assured us a brown chair would be delivered to our door in exactly one week.
My husband spent the entire week mourning the demise of his old recliner and telling it how much he was going to miss it. Then, on the night before the scheduled delivery of the new chair, he disassembled the old one and put it outside for our neighbor, who had a pickup truck, to haul to the dump the next day.
I could be wrong, but I still believe I heard the faint sound of Taps being played somewhere in our yard later that night.
The new recliner arrived right on schedule, but to my disbelief, it was gray, not brown. I immediately called Ward’s to complain.
“It’s not a mistake,” the manager of the furniture department assured me. “It’s a hot new color called silver-brown.”
“Silver-brown?” I repeated. “Are you sure? I’ve heard of silver-gray, but not silver-brown.”
Still, I’d have settled for chartreuse with pink polka-dots at that point if it meant I wouldn’t have to spend one more minute shopping for recliners. So I decided to keep the silver-brown (aka gray) one.
The moment my husband, smiling, took a seat in the new recliner (after spending 20 minutes moving it an inch here and an inch there, until it was in just the right spot), his smile faded.
He then squirmed. He repeatedly raised and lowered the footrest. He squirmed some more. He emitted enough sighs of frustration to inflate the Hindenburg.
I finally felt obligated to ask him, even though every fiber of my being was screaming at me not to, if something was wrong.
“Yeah,” he said, frowning. “There’s a big seam across the seat that’s digging into my butt, and it doesn’t have nearly enough padding on the headrest to comfortably support my neck. I’m going to call Ward’s and tell them to take it back.”
“But then you’ll have nothing to sit on!” I protested, tempted to have Ward’s take him back along with the chair.
“Then we’ll just have to go out and find another chair before they pick up this one,” he said with a shrug, as if it were as simple as buying a loaf of bread.
So I called Ward’s and was informed they would pick up the recliner in a week, but we would be charged a return fee. That meant we had only seven days to find a replacement chair.
To my disbelief, my prayers were answered nearly immediately. In the very next store we visited, one that had been on our list if we hadn’t purchased the one at Ward’s, my husband found a recliner he really liked. Not only did the chair pass his comfort test, it was on sale and was a rich chocolate color. Even better, it was in stock and able to be delivered the next morning.
So for the remainder of the week, we had two new recliners stuffed into our already non-spacious living room. My husband enjoyed having both of them there, however. In fact, he spent equal time in each chair, even though I repeatedly told him not to use the one Ward’s was going to pick up. I mean, with our luck, I was afraid he’d either spill something on it, put a hole in it or break it.
But he ignored my fears and continued to play musical chairs all week. He said he liked the headrest on one and the footrest on the other. He also preferred the feel of the fabric on one and the seat cushion on the other. I honestly was ready to search for a Doctor Frankenstein clone who could transform the two chairs into one perfect one.
On the day before Ward’s was to arrive to collect the silver-brown chair, my husband announced, with a weak smile and a nervous laugh, “Heh, heh. You know what? Now that I’ve had more time to sit in the Ward’s chair, I really like it. Can you do me a favor and call the furniture store and tell them to take back the brown one? Then call Ward's and tell them we've decided to keep their chair after all?”
The only call I wanted to make at that moment was to a good divorce lawyer.
So the silver-brown chair from Ward’s remained with us after all, and it and my husband soon became inseparable. The too-flat headrest and the seam that once had hurt his butt somehow had magically disappeared. And that chair lasted until 2009.
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| MY DOBERMAN, ENJOYING A SNOOZE IN THE SILVER-BROWN RECLINER CIRCA 2007 |
Now, my current sofa with the dual recliners in it that are slanting backwards and forcing me to sit in what resembles a mini-version of the Grand Canyon, is 16 years old. But amazingly, it’s still being manufactured…for close to $2,000.
That means, with the way prices on everything so rapidly are escalating lately, by the time I save up the $2,000 to buy a new one, it probably will cost about $5,000. So I guess I have no choice other than to suffer with my old sofa indefinitely.
And if I'm lucky, I just might be able to continue to afford pillows to stuff into the “canyon.”
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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.
