When I was 2 years old, my father noticed that our neighbors had thrown out a bed. To be exact, it was an early 1970’s Sears French provincial girl’s double bed. Upon enquiry, the neighbor explained that some piece of the bed had come unglued, so they were throwing it out and buying their daughter a new one. My father found this to be a perfectly unacceptable reason to throw away an otherwise perfectly good bed. The guy gave my dad the bed for free and charged him something like a hundred bucks for the matching dresser. I slept in that bed until I was 34 years old. That’s right, 34. I jumped on that bed, crammed crap under it, read hundreds of books by nightlight in it and built many a pillow fort in that bed.
From the time I was a teenager, I really wanted a nicer, more grown-up looking bed. Then I would remember how proud my dad had been to have salvaged that mediocre piece of furniture. When I was 15, my parents compromised by going to Sears and buying me a matching desk. I was shocked they even still made that style. Finally, when I was 34, my mother decided she wanted a new Queen-sized bedroom set. My father’s requirement for acquiring new furniture is finding an appropriate home for the old furniture. This means keeping it in the family. It was at this point that I inherited my folk’s 35-year-old bedroom set.
This event led me to realize that I had acquired most of the furniture in my house this way. I had inherited 2 living room sets (including some egregiously ugly lion’s head lamps), 1 dining room set (and been pressured to take 3 other dining room sets), as well as the 2 bedroom sets. My house is just under 900 sq. ft., where is all of this stuff supposed to go and why don’t we just get rid of old stuff like everyone else? I knew if something was going to end up at Goodwill, my father couldn’t find out. It came to my attention just how emotionally attached my father is to furniture. It doesn’t even have to be nice furniture, just furniture that holds even the slightest memory for him. One of the dining room sets didn’t even have chairs with it, but he had bought it for my grandmother when he was in the military and she, my dad and his 7 siblings and well as nearly 2 dozen grandchildren had all gathered around that table countless times over the years. I suppose a lot of this has to do with the fact that he grew up without much, one of 8 kids raised by a single mother. My mother cringes every time he tells the story of the wool pants that he wore that all 6 of his brother’s had worn before him.
Recently, my brother and I sat down and talked with both of my parents about all of the stuff that they had saved to pass down to us. Neither my brother nor I have kids; my brother broke it to them as gently as possible, that unless he had his own personal memories attached to it, that it didn’t have the same meaning for him to own all of the things, regardless of my dad’s attachment. And while I would love to have some of it for memory’s sake, my house and storage unit are both full.
Over the years, my dad accumulated many memorable items “free to a good home,” including a piano, a church pew, antique school desks that my parents made my brother and I retrieve from the neighbor’s trash, and a table my parents have to this day that was left at the curb by the neighborhood hippies that moved out in the middle of the night. While I love the stories that all of the hand-me-down furniture holds, I feel eventually I need to get my own stuff, in my own style to properly transition into the person I am. For now, I’m still holding out for a Queen-sized bed, with no history, straight out of the box, that I can call my own.
