Just a Couch
Just threw out a couch. Left it right there on the sidewalk, as if to be sat on. If I were in college and I had a porch, front or back, this is the couch I would have there. But it’s years past college now – and couch, the bell tolls for thee.
Its replacement, a maroon sleeper, came via a generous donation from an old friend and from several hours of grimacing, yelling and grunting, and leg removal, to install it in the old couch’s place.
The deposed couch had been in my family for years and has done me well these last two and a half. Before the aforementioned sleeper, I’d never had a real grown-up couch. The first years out of college, in New Rochelle and Manhattan, were futon years, when college friends and otherwise would seem to be stopping by with some frequency. But when I moved to Queens I didn’t bring the futon – too immaturish. Fewer people visiting. More permanence, I thought. So I instead lugged back the couch from my father’s den, which had sat there for some fifteen years hence. A gift of my aunt’s, I had chicken pox on that couch when I was ten. That glorious week in fifth grade, oatmeal baths aside/included, entailed me sitting L-shaped on the couch, back straight against the arm, legs outstretched, as I watched movie pair after movie pair (my parents got two a day for me, to keep me entertained) and busied my hands by threading beads, of all godforsaken things.
It lost much usefulness as the years flew by, as I watched those years scurry firmly planted on that couch. If a couch’s uses include being comfortable, and retaining the shape of a couch, it was one for two. Barely.
So push came to shove, shoving one couch in and one couch out, after I didn’t turn down a friend’s generous offer. Now, no matter what happens, I’ve got that couch thing taken care of. The old one had been with me through some dark and smoky times, and many good ones, too; witnessing the world in all its dull glory from the trenches. But I’ve been with me too, y’know, most of this time – so while it’s easy to be sentimental regarding the intransience of this object relative to who I was and how I’ve changed, and how things were in the Long Ago, it’s best just to keep going. So after all this nostalgia and movie quoting, here’s this last one, Lester from American Beauty:
It’s just a couch! This isn’t life, it’s just stuff. And it’s become more important to you than living. Well honey, that’s just nuts.
