Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Joining the Bureau
this is the last in a series of essays about furniture and furnishings. my problem is that I never know when enough is enough. but this is certainly enough, so thanks for your patience and have a delightful day.
When my dad came to visit, the first thing he wanted to see was his grandson. After that, I think it was the dresser. I guess I can understand where he’s coming from. It’s a powerful piece of furnishings, that.
I have a vague recollection of being very young and having a wide, low chest of drawers, cheerfully painted in the clown-pants colors that were so typical of juvenile décor in the mid-60s. But at some point early in my youth I got bumped up, furniture-wise: I got the old dresser set. I don’t know where they’d been hiding till then, but in my defense I didn’t know much anyway. I did know, though, as soon as the old dresser set showed up in my room, that it was old. Not as old as it said it was on the matching mirror, on which the date 1762 had been carved in bold relief around a succulent bunch of grapes, but old enough that my very own dad had stored his very own goods and serviceables in it as a youth. That’s right, I was using my dad’s drawers, and I used them thoroughly.
The mirror, as I mentioned, was festooned with carven grapes and was generously proportioned (not unlike myself, in some ways). The dresser that matched it was a tall, heavy piece of work, with complex joinery and a chain pattern carved into the sides of the front. The first two drawers were rather shallow and a little narrower than the bottom three drawers, which jutted out on the front and sides like the lower floors of a stepped skyscraper from bygone eras. Drawer #3, at the top of this wide lower tier, was designed so as to give the impression that it was three drawers – two real narrow ones on the sides and one reasonable one in the middle, with four cast pulls across its face to complete the illusion. Beneath this drawer was where the chain pattern started, on either side of the two broad, deep bottom drawers, both of which were designed to look like two drawers each, split up the middle. Beneath the very bottom drawer was a wide panel incised with a grape vine relief and a sort of curvy swag pattern, bottoming out with a thick stubby leg on either side and one in the middle for luck. All the drawer pulls, except for the middle drawer, were black iron rings fastened to black iron quatrefoils. In all, it was a very solid, sturdy, heavy, large piece of furniture. Frankly, it daunted me.
I could barely see the top of it for years, being too vertically impaired for its lofty heights. It smelled old, looked old, felt old. Putting my underwear and socks in it lent them an air of sober dignity that the clown-color drawers never imparted. Dad’s dresser anchored my room like oxen anchor a barn. Its presence made all my other furniture shape up and behave itself, and I tried to follow suit. The mirror, similarly, reflected an image of sober rectitude, and I don’t mean it that way you troglodytes. I mean, I looked serious in it, possessed of a certain grave sagacity. My clothes, crumpled and mussed and cursed by my lack of sartorial sensitivity, still seemed worthy of respect when they occupied those wide oak drawers.
The style, officially, ostensibly, was “Swedish provincial,” but I knew it better as the furniture equivalent of what I wanted to be when I grew up – solid, sturdy, discretely ornamented, capacious, and, somehow, overtly understated. I liked my chest of drawers. I like them so much that when I accidentally burned a hole in the top with an incense cone when I was in the fifth grade, I felt as badly as if I’d injured a friend – and I didn’t have enough friends to get away with that kind of crap. As I took care of it, it seemed, I took care of myself.
Naturally I left the dresser and mirror behind when I went to college all the way on the other side of the country. The first two years there I lived in dorms and used their standard-issue veneer pressboard dressers, which were as serviceable as they were uninspiring. The last two years I got a great vintage cherrywood deco bedroom set that enabled me to build a residence for myself that became a party destination for friends and freaks all across Philadelphia. But when I graduated and came back to LA, I moved back into the same old bedroom in my dad’s house in the valley and the same old dresser set again.
They came with me when I Kel and I moved out to midcity while I was in law school, and then I took them back to Dad’s house two years later when we moved on to SF. I wanted to leave those drawers behind me when we stared afresh up north. I might be wearing the same old underwear, but I thought maybe I’d be moving forward if I stored it in new drawers.
So I went to a cheap unfinished furniture shop and and got an undistinguished dresser, tall and narrow and well-furnished with drawers, but abjectly lacking in personality. That was okay, though. I had moved, in large part, to escape the past. The absence of a received personality in the form of my furniture just improved my opportunity to build my own habitation and my own personality from scratch. All I had to do was paint, varnish, and finish this dresser, and it’d be all that I could ever want it to be. And so would I.
I never did finish it, though. Over years, the raw pine wood mellowed to a soft yellow color, richly stained with various grimes and resins, lightly shredded on its middle levels by Sydney the cat, who used it to keep her claws sharp. It did me well and I appreciated it. So what, if it never inspired me. It was furniture. If I wanted inspiration, I knew better than to look for it in a piece of wood. I was ready to set my own agenda, and, if anything was going to inspire me, it would be my own actualization.
Not too long ago my past and future collided and I found myself again possessed of the dresser. Dad had kept it all these years, wrapped up in his garage, awaiting my pleasure. For some reason unknown to me, it suddenly grew incumbent upon him to get rid of it, and he offered me its custody. I drove down and got it a year or so ago, and as I hurtled back up the 5 with a cargo bay full of hardwood and silvered glass, it felt as if I were helping a sibling or cousin move back to his rightful place in my family home.
The dresser set furnished our yoga studio for several months, imbuing my practice with gravity and focus. Then came the day that the studio turned into a nursery. That dresser was too much for a tiny infant so out it came, along with startling quantities of other stuff we’d forgotten we’d stowed away in it. The dresser went into the study, which was rapidly filling up as an all-purpose storage area; the mirror hung around for a while where it was, peering curiously into the little room as it filled up with a crib, changing table, swing, and buckets of toys and clothes.
Soon enough we solved the puzzle of what went where in our reconfigured living space. The key was when we realized that the boy needed a dresser, and not one that was huge and heavy. He needed my old unfinished pine jobbie. We could paint it two tone sky blue with clouds and it would work perfectly for him. And I – I’d take back the big chest. Which, very recently, I did.
The pine drawers just got their long-deferred surface treatment and they look fabulous. The big old dresser sits across from our bed now. I stuffed its drawers with my various sox and t-shirts and less mentionable items. I look down now with startling ease on the nugget of char that I burned into its top, and the whole thing feels cozier, friendlier, supportive and familiar. I admit, it still feels strange to grab those iron rings again, to rifle through those same unchanging drawers now full of clothes that reflect my own current condition, rather than the self I tried to be back when I last lived out of it. I’m getting used to it again, though, and that feels good.
As for the mirror, it’ll stay in the nursery. Somehow we acquired another one that’s bigger and matches the finish of the dresser more closely. The original mirror looks more aged, with a dark patina and that weird 18th century date up top. It looks good next to the door in the nursery, near the light-up moon and star and the mobile that plays real music by real composers. Zach likes mirrors, and when I hold him up to it, it’s fun to see him giggle at himself, a sweet fresh face in that old frame, clear curious eyes reflected out of that old jaded glass. I’ve seen my own face in that mirror so many, many times, scrutinizing myself with mystified skepticism. I don’t know if I’m any less mystified or skeptical now but at least I’m okay with not knowing. And now Zach can reflect on his own mysteries in that same silvered face, and in his own sweet time.
