qpmarl blog

Today, I told my mom about an incident that happened several years ago. I've been holding it back from her because I was pretty sure that it would upset her and I don't like to upset her. She said something today that caused me to realize that it wouldn't upset her so bad.

We got some "new" chairs one time - I don't know when. They weren't new, just new to us. They're kind of crappy - my parents still have at least one of them and it makes a lot of noise whenever you sit in it. I think that the parts are bolted together and the bolts aren't that tight and the general design isn't so good, so all the joints twist and creak whenever you shift your weight at all. Some of them had arms, some did not. The chair in question did have arms.

I think that Thomas was still in High School and I was recently graduated. We were rough housing or sort of fighting or something - it probably wasn't anything serious, we were just playing around. I don't remember the events exactly, but one of us pushed the other down or something and we broke the arm off of the chair. Now, this was not a simple break at the joint or anything that could be repaired without replacing some wood - and we both understood this. We looked at each other and came to an unspoken understanding that could be interpreted as "We have to get rid of it - she'll never miss it if it just dissapears." We may have exchanged a few words vocally, but we both understood - that's how we always communicatehttp://esvn.umputun.com/trac.cgi/ticket/38d, we just understood each other - we can carry on a conversation with grunts and half-words and understand each other perfectly.

So we went to town on the chair. We broke it into about 37 little pieces, carried it out to the burn pile along with the garbage (there was never a shortage of garbage waiting to be burned), and we toasted it. Now there's effectively no trace that the chair ever existed. Out of sight, out of mind. She probably doesn't even know how many of these chairs she has anyway, I mean they're spread all over the house. Whenever someone needed a chair somewhere, they'd grab one from the kitchen or wherever there was one not being used - with no concern over whether or not it was ever returned. ( When it came to meals of large gatherings, these chairs would be rounded up from wherever they'd been taken - but I doubt that anyone knew exactly how many we had. )

So the chair was gone and forgotten. No one ever missed it. She would never have known if I hadn't told her just this very day. And as it turns out, she didn't get the chairs in the first place - my dad did, and she never really cared much for them. So nobody was upset. Thomas and I had fun disposing of the chair.

I think that same summer we played catch with a baseball bat and were trying to spin it in such a way that the other guy couldn't catch it. Lots of dodging was involved.