Cherry!

Man, do I love my new Costco chair.

I know, on paper, it may look like a reckless extravagance. In my office, it really looks like a reckless extravagance. I tried every lighting combination I could think of, but all the photos came out with the chair bathed in the same bathetic glow (see above). I wonder it wasn’t originally a prop from the last scene of Lost.

It’s the chair me and my aching back have been waiting for.

With one tiny adjustment for lumbar support—the pillow rolled up and wedged into the crack where chair back meets chair seat—it is perfect. It should pay for itself in physical therapy appointments I won’t have to go to in just a couple of months.

Our first night together I spent a straight six hours sleeping on it, and woke up with no back pain whatever. I felt miraculously cured, except like anyone with back pain knows, the shit always be coming around again no matter how good you may feel at any given moment. Back pain is like people with bad luck. Even if they hit a good spell, you know they’re headed back to calamity eventually.

I wanted to wait to get it till after the move had been completed, but thank god The Missus talked me out of it. Having it now is already making a world of difference.

I can’t let the old chair, below, go without mention, though.

It looks scuzzy now, but it wasn’t when I got it. Most of that scuzz is me. That’s about nine years of me, as a matter of fact.

But it’s also me and The Boy, back when he was The Man Cub. That was the chair that we sat in together from four in the morning—after he’d already been awake for a while—and watched The Johnny Cash Show for a year and a half. He learned to speak in that chair. One of his first words was a demand, “Cash!” “Cash,” he’d yell, pointing at the TV screen when anyone other than the then-amiable Man In Black would appear onscreen.

He grew from a peanut to a sapling in that chair, watching quality TV together with me. It’s the chair he was in when he learned about Superman through some old Fleisher cartoon shorts, and how to discern the Good Guys from the Bad Guys by orchestral cues.

But ever since my back started going all twitchy, it’s been on an inevitable trajectory to the junk-heap. Also, The Boy and I have ceased to fit very comfortably together on it for a while now. And as The Missus pointed out, when this new chair is fully reclined, it’s like a twin bed. A super-soft twin bed with amazing Rube Goldberged lumbar support.

May god bless and keep you, Costco. You’re the Frank Capra of box stores. Mmmm-wah!