I’m dreaming tonight, of a place I love. Even more than I usually do…

… only it isn’t home. I’m dreaming of a chair. The perfect chair. A chair so perfect she was called, “The Oasis” and she nearly tore my marriage apart.

She was blue leather and had the softest, most luxurious seat. In fact, even a thousand squats a day wouldn’t get a woman a seat that fine. After a long day in the salt mines, her embrace was heaven. She smelled like gentle rest. When she held you, her armrests opened to reveal a cooler hidden on one side and a remote control storage with a speaker phone on the other. All of this and she had warm, magic fingers better than any massage therapist. Yes, she had heat and vibration.

Like a long lost love, I’m thinking about The Oasis tonight and wondering what landfill she might have ended up in. I miss her. I started thinking about her because my blogging friend, Greg at Almost Iowa, wrote a great post about his chair which took my mind back to the best resting spot I ever had.

How could I let her go?

I had to. There came a time when I had to make a choice. My wife was always jealous of her. Oh, she hid it behind phrases of her being “Out of date” and “Not matching the décor any longer”. But I knew what it was. From the moment I brought her home, it was jealousy.

See, that’s where the trouble started. I was at a discount furniture place when I spotted her across the room. To quote Greg, “It was infatuation at first sight, love came later.” I called my pregnant wife and told her about the chair. Somehow it had been left unpurchased by all the morons in Atlanta and their loss was our gain. Had they not seen it? It will be the perfect chair to rock your baby, I said! It was a $1500 chair, I told her. And I could drive it home today for the obscene price of $499 (no refunds allowed). She could be resting her weary, pregnant bones in ultimate luxury by 6 pm!

She reluctantly agreed and let me buy a piece of furniture without seeing it. That has never happened again.

When I got it home, she quickly informed me that I seemed to have forgotten a “P” because what I told her was leather was really some form of synthetic pleather. The deep blue of my oasis didn’t really match the room and it was a little too big.

It was then that I told her about the no refund policy and took the chair for its inaugural ride. It was perfect – for my butt. I bought it as a rocker for her, but I took over whenever I was at home. Oh, not the rocking duties, just the chair.

I remember one argument that started because she actually wanted me to get up from a peaceful slumber so she could rock the crying baby… the nerve!

Well, one day she made me leave the 90’s and paint our den – a quick $60 exercise that soon involved all new furniture. My Oasis got relegated to the unfinished basement where I still was able to sneak some quality time with her. Then someone needed a blue chair for a play and she was gone. I believe the actual instructions were, “you can borrow it as long as it never comes back.”

She never did.

I miss her badly. I always thought that if they could figure out a way to install a toilet, a man would never have to leave. Until that invention comes, I dream of that oasis – but we do our furniture shopping as a couple. That’s how marriages stay strong.

 

Desert photo credit: Ingo Mehling via Wikimedia Commons