Couches

Our couch is dead. Long live our couch. The old one had received the rear end of all our friends over these past 26 years without a peep of protest. And with each year it seemed harder and harder to get up from. Sometimes I’d be stuck there for weeks at a time. I’ll never know what I missed. 

 Our new couch is handsome, no cushions, rust color, to hide the grime… Does that mean I can spill Ragu sauce on it? No, it does not. Now behave yourself. and best-of-all, firm. We can actually rise effortlessly. I can hardly wait to get up now if we only had someplace to go. 

New furniture is seen by me for just a few weeks, maybe months. After that it becomes invisible from familiarity. It also gets too chummy with the picture over it and coffee table in front of it.

Freud became so emotionally involved with his couch that he is said to have had it transported to England when he fled Austria. Imagine all the scandals and hysterics embedded in its fabric. If couches could talk… There is something about a couch that induces conversation, even disclosure. I saw a documentary a few years ago in which the filmmaker moved a purple couch to various locations on busy pedestrian sidewalks. He asked people at random to sit on the couch and tell what event changed their lives. The great majority presented themselves as victims of some death in the family or unfortunate happening. It was almost as if Freud was there taking notes. 

Matisse delighted in couches. He painted them in patterns which caused aesthetic sparks to fly when seen in dialog with the wallpaper. Those decorators who insist that paintings, throw-pillows and drapes must somehow rhyme or harmonize, shudder at Matisse…and he at them. The French painter liked his women on couches …when they weren’t frolicking in Nature. Where else for an odalisque than on a sofa-divan-couch? And there is Peggy stretched full-length on our spanking new earth-tone couch. Where’s my easel? 

I expect to morph into a potato periodically on this couch. I’ll be gnashing my teeth on election night and living a thousand deaths with my favorite teams. The couch will also be the site of many dramas as I spot tell-tale signs in the first five minutes of murder mysteries and when the judge asks the defendant to rise I will probably jump up.