To Rock, Or Not to Rock

I recently had lunch with an old friend who I don’t see often enough. There was a time when we’d catch up at least once a month, brought together by mutual enthusiasm for cold beer and raw fish and other subjects that there seemed to be plenty of time for back before we all had children. But nowadays, a year or more can pass between get-togethers, which leaves us with more topics to discuss than can be resolved over a plate of tuna rolls and argues strongly for better time management.

It also explains why I had not known that my friend was living with his in-laws. With two elementary school-aged kids, the time had come when my friend and his family found themselves needing more room than their Southdowns bungalow had to give—a decision that they were making about the time his in-laws were thinking about downsizing from the large house in which they had lived for more than forty years. Before they knew it, my friends had sold their house, moved back in with Mom and Dad, and collectively bought a third place big enough for everyone. Now they’re in the process of packing the parents’ home for the move to the new one.

This scenario, given the relative life stages of the three generations involved, seems a reasonable compromise that provides practical solutions to various issues, from child care in a household with two working parents, to senior care down the road, to the efficiencies of running one home instead of two—not to mention the well-documented benefits of living in extended family groups. One thing it does not solve is what to do with all the redundant personal effects. The in-laws had accumulated a lot of stuff over the years—a situation that was going to need remedying if another household’s worth of furniture was to be added to the mix and everybody’s taste and comfort taken into consideration. With the move-in date approaching, there’d been some surreal conversations:

“But Mom, do you really need eighteen pairs of black socks and four drawers of scarves?”

“Actually I don’t think the IRS requires you to keep bank statements from 1969.”

“This cuckoo clock hasn’t worked for thirty years… Hey, what’s this key on the back do?!”

“Dad, why do you have eight hammers? Could we give some of them away?” “No. I’ve decided to buy extra tool boxes to make a kit for each grandkid.”

And so on. The situation came to a head over the subject of rocking chairs. My friend’s in-laws were the proud owners of seven, and by the time the younger generation arrived with a couple they ended up with enough to give Cracker Barrel a run for its money. While Mom couldn’t bear the prospect of any rocking chairs being thrown away, she was fine with the idea of them either being sold or put into mini-storage. “Couldn’t you just put them on eBay?” she wondered.

The online auction site offers a great solution for connecting redundant rocking chairs, cuckoo clocks, scarves, and hammers with people who really want them. Who knows; there might even be a market for 1969 bank statements. But as my friend pointed out, unless you’re selling gold ingots or previously undiscovered Picassos, the financial remuneration rarely justifies the time required to make the sales then ship the objects. He and I had an entertaining discussion about the possibility of his saying that he’d sold the chairs on eBay but actually heaving them into a dumpster and just giving his in-laws twenty bucks. He eventually concluded that, given the amount of stuff they needed to off-load, the expense would break him.

So that left mini-storage—that purgatory where furniture that has outlasted its original function or fashion can be put into a holding pattern until the emotional attachment weakens enough for it to be sold or thrown away. At our house we have a barn that serves a similar purpose. When a piece of furniture becomes too old, broken, or unsightly to be tolerated in the house anymore but still has sentimental value on account of having once belonged to an ancestor, my wife directs me to “put it in the barn.” But since “barn” is a lavish description of the three-walled lean-to that the word describes (and the protection from the elements that it offers) it is mutually understood that once a piece of furniture is sent to the barn, it’s never coming back. Like the way children are sometimes told a beloved, but blind and incontinent, pet is “going to live on the farm,” the barn is a euphemism for where furniture goes to rust, delaminate, go mouldy, be gnawed by mice and carpenter bees, then be surreptitiously burned when no one’s looking. You can’t do that in the city; you’ve got paid mini storage for that. Which serves much the same effect but is actually more effective since the bill for maintaining it provides a monthly reminder of the objects’ continued existence.

All of which made for interesting discussion until we ran out of tuna rolls and needed to get back to our respective realities. So I haven’t found out yet how, or if, the rocking chair dilemma was resolved, but I suspect that when I finally get to visit my friend at his new house, there’re bound to be a couple of vacant chairs in which to sit.