Moving a Bureau
A piece of antique furniture/a bureau was standing in the front court yard of the house up the street in the reverse direction from the place where I and my wife live. At first, it had all the drawers in their hiding places, nicely pushed back just the right distance to show their dulled brass handles – for anyone who was curious enough to look at it. It was resting on the rough surface made of some irregular slates deepen into a fresh cement, about fifty years ago when Brooklyn was a little less the farm and more a huge developing city in progress.
The cement is more resilient than a human being is, for sure. Can you just imagine a skeleton of bare white bones without the flesh; if instead of those slates a person alive was cemented in the upright position fifty years ago with an apple stuck in the person’s mouth, unable to call for help. Just imagine! Wouldn’t that be a piece of art to wonder about? Imagine, – A house for sale on the White Skeleton Street! — if the ad should have read? – Somebody definitely would have had chuckled along the way.
I didn’t pay any rational attention to the bureau on my daily walks, right in the front of it, to the local coffee shop. Speaking of a lazy brain, my own! Though it did not cross my mind, I still unintentionally noticed the wooden skeleton of it, when the drawers were pulled out, and placed on the porch of a 105-year old brick house.
Then – one Saturday afternoon, my wife walks into our walk-in basement apartment as if won the lottery, coming from the local C-town, right up that way…
– “Did you see that commode; I mean b u r e a u in front of 1351?”
Her eyes widening up, in some youthful “globalistic” excitement of some time ago when she was twenty-two, and when we were about to meet for our third rendezvous on our Kalelarga, (lovers’ lane) in the heart of our first adopted, ancient Croatian city of Zadar.
What the heck, is going on in her head? – I’m thinking and at the same time suppressing some weird words that want me to form some specific answer, even a gentle curse. I know – she hates curses as much as any nun. Also, she dislikes my instantaneous answers as well. She wants me to speak like her favorite imaginary ‘gentleman’ whose name she does not know, but who resides in her head, anyway, as her two dark-brown eyes in her eye(s) cavity; and who always behaves by her strict rules…
– “You don’t use your brakes to slow your brain; you just follow your natural over-sped instinct which has to do something with your forbearers being professional soldiers…
Wait, before you decide to speak!” She said that in the galloping staccato that would definitely beat my natural verbal speed. That was not a provocation, but a familiar reminder. I translated it that way, knowing her, very convincingly.
I’m looking around for a free corner in our limited-space walk-in apartment for a potential compromise. My eyes are already at war with the existing furniture. In my view, the pieces of furniture are like people; they don’t want to be forcefully moved, they love their human-being given deserved spot. Their i n i t i a l spot, that is! And, besides – they don’t like new neighbors! The moment a human hand touches it with intent to move it, transfer it — a storm of resistance boils up in the Formica, pressed wood, knotty pine, oak boards… Don’t touch it. Your hand is provoking a furniture revolution!
The space joins and connects everything that is in it and creates reinforced rebellion against a human hand that – let’s admit it – feeds it. So – the space is a perpetual enemy of man and vice versa!
“Yeah, and?” I manage.
“Yeah, and? You don’t know much about the antique furniture! Do you?”
– She scolds me.
“If I wanted to be a furniture man I would have gone to a Furniture trade school, not wasting our money on college!”
I know that my answer was/is under the college level. Probably there are no Furniture trade schools, but an uncomfortable question requires an uncomfortable, straightforward answer. Anyway – that is my sped-up conclusion in rushed up moment.
She, now, looks at me as a lizard, which just crawled up on the rock to soak up some sun, and got annoyed with the human foot that almost stepped on it.
-“I already see this unique and priceless antique gem, that I’m getting free of charge, in Chloe’s bedroom (Chloe is our 2-yeard old granddaughter and youngest one on the list of our seven grandchildren) twenty years from now. It’s mahogany…mahogany is for ever…we have to bring it in!”
– “Over my sleeping body!” I’m saying these words with a firm confidence.
She gives me back that winning look of hers that I’ve never got used to in all these years of our union, whenever a conflict of interest came between us.
-“I’ve already made a deal with the neighbors to take it in before then rain comes — you know, they are predicting a possible rain tomorrow!”
-“No chance! I’ve already made a deal with my conscience. Also, with the ‘rain-god’ to bring us rain as soon as possible; and also I’m praying to the real God to help out the owner of the hardware store on the avenue to sell all those large bags, and rolls of plastic, so there is none left for the neighbor to cover your bureau!” I said in my hot moment. Anyway – that Saturday night, I went to bed with my wife, Chloe, rain, rolls of plastic, weather men from all of the four TV networks; even the neighbor who promised the bureau to my wife, the hardware store owner, and the ‘rain-god’ – on my mind! I had a specific wish for each one, hoping for the ultimate result, that that bureau does not end up in my cluttered walk-in apartment – any time soon.
Regardless of all of the above — when I get up the following Sunday morning, I could not open my apartment door to go out for my coffee, as my morning routine calls for.
How could I – when the ‘new guest’ to the apartment – the antique mahogany bureau from 1351, was blocking it! It was ready, patiently, to wait when our granddaughter Chloe reaches the twenty-one year of age…
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