A friend bought a house in an auction and decided to sell all the furniture. “Do you have any overstuffed chairs?” I asked.
“I have overstuffed everything,” she said. And there it was, an enormous old horsehair chair that was just the sort of thing my daughter could curl up in with a book.
“A steal at seventy-five dollars,” my friend said. “And the matching ottoman is only fifty.”
I sat in the chair, stroking its great round arms and admiring its carved wooden legs. The footstool was equally handsome but I didn’t have an extra fifty dollars.
“I’ll take the chair,” I said.
My daughter spent many hours in the horsehair chair—and then went off to college and marriage, leaving it for me. Now I’m the one who curls up with a book and my only regret is that I didn’t buy the ottoman.
It was a false economy, saving fifty dollars and losing something I could never replace. I can see the missing ottoman so clearly—the way I can see other things I’ve lost that often seem more vivid and valuable than the things I have. That metallic blue Mustang, for example, that I gave up in favor of a sensible sedan. The brooding novelist I met at a conference and never forgot.
Someone else is resting their feet on that ottoman now. Do they wish they had the matching chair?
