Slow gifts

Have you ever spent MONTHS trying to give a gift? I don't mean the package that never gets to the post office or the "I'll know it when I see it" item that is never quite found. I mean the sheer logistics of presenting a person - say, Phrodaux - with a particular gift.

Well. Here is my completely not recent or timely or urgent in any way story.

A couple of years back, in the month of September, Phrodaux and I checked out this groovy place: Beam & Anchor. You should too. Go there now. This post will still be here when you get back.

Anyway, just inside the door was the chair. A lovingly and painstakingly restored antique dentist's chair. Round base, wooden arms, the little headrest thingy, and buttery new leather on the seat and back and twitchy foot parts. Now dentist chairs are something the Fairy Queen can take or leave. Not super fond of being at the dentist, don't really want to sit in their chairs, etc. But Phrodaux was instantly smitten. I think I need it was what he kept saying.

(phrodaux here: I don't love the dentist, I'm not Jack Nicholson or Steve Martin, look it up.)

I thought I might save all pics until the end, but that just seemed mean. Also, this post is so long and random, you might give up. So here! Here it is! What this whole endless story is about!

See those blankets? They come up in Step 3.

The FQ can be cagey, sometimes. She knows when to play her role (den mother and team killjoy): No, really, what would you do with it? Where would it go? There's no space for it. Which in this case was just a way to buy some time. Her REAL internal monologue was going something like this:

• Perfect gift for impossible to find perfect gifts for Phrodaux. 
• How can I get it? 
• And how can I keep it a secret? 
• It's not like I can put it under the daybed in the library where all the other secret prezzies hide out with the dust bunnies and abandoned dog toys. 
• When? Where? How????

(phrodaux back here: note to self, don't look under the daybed in the library, phrodaux don't play that way, likes gifts to be a suprize, thinks dust bunnies deserve their privacy being bunnies and all)

Well. Things transpired, slowly.

Step 1: Buy the chair. I called the lovely Beam & Anchor people, who agreed to sell it to me over the phone. I suspect they put a cunning little SOLD tag on it and only wish I'd seen it. When we buy art, I 99% love the art and 1% love knowing that the SOLD tag means the piece is eventually coming home with me. Does that make me a small, acquisitive person? Whatever. We have some cool art.

(phrodaux blah, blah, we have a lot of cool art, not cable or other things that people think are essential)

Step 2: Get the chair. This happened a full month later, due to a shiny confluence of events. There is a day in October when kids get the day off due to something called "Statewide Inservice Day." My first, brutal, cry every day year of teaching, I asked my principal what I was supposed to do. She said, "Take a class if you want to, otherwise stay home and soak your feet." Essentially, the ambitious among us take a class and everybody else tries to get caught up. I did take a class once, through the brilliant Wordstock machine, with Jeff Anderson, and if you read one teacherly thing this year it should be Mechanically Inclined but lord almighty how I have digressed. Ahem. This was not a take a class year. This was a corner your lovely father, the Wood Master, along with his ancient truck, and make a plan to PICK UP THE CHAIR.

Step 2.5: Actually pick up the chair. Let's boil this one down to: a) the chair is badass heavy; b) you can't really lift it because of the hydraulic thingamajigs that once made it go up and down; c) it took 3 nice guys who are somehow affiliated with Beam & Anchor, plus their lift truck, to get it into the Wood Master's truck.

Step 3: Store the #$*)#*$(#* chair until Christmas, the occasion for which this gift is intended. Luckily for me, the Wood Master wasn't driving the ancient truck much in those days, so the chair stayed safely in the back, under the canopy plus blankets and tarps and such to ward off rain, mildew, and evil spirits.

Step 4: Give the gift. Yay, much rejoicing. Was Phrodaux surprised? I don't know. Ask him. I can never tell.

(phrodaux: yep)

Step 5: Get the $#*#$(&$(#*&$(*#&$(*#&$(*&# chair into our actual house. In the week between Xmas and New Year's that year, we actually had a little dinner party. At some point I thought: OK, the Wood Master can drive over and somehow the guests can all get together and unload the chair. And then I woke from my dream of youth and realized we're all old and have bad backs. New plan required.

(phro: one had recently had back surgery and been confined to bed for more than an insignificant time, actually the youngest of the group, crap. I remember when we bought our first color tv.)

Step 5.5: Hire movers to transfer the chair from the Wood Master's truck (parked in our driveway) into our living room. They are young and have insurance. Done.

Step 6: Enjoy gorgeous, lovely, perfect chair.

(phr: yep, that is my I'm talking on the phone spot)

Notice that cute little round rug?? It pulls it all together, right?

Step 7: Realize (Phrodaux) that what's missing is a small table next to the chair. A table that is so small it cannot become a beacon for clutter, like every other surface in our house. No, a table that can hold exactly one bottle of beer, to be sipped while talking on the phone, which is what the chair has proved perfect for. Can such a table be purchased? No! It must be created by Phrodaux himself. And of course it will have a chicken leg/foot.

Notice the fluffy things stuffed under the chair? Mo thinks it's a good place to wedge tennis balls, then cry and bark about his sad, sad life in which the balls just keep getting stuck.

Ignore the stuffing! Look at the table!

Chicken Foot!

(Ph: yep, feet be chicken feet, and yes it is possible to have a table that doesn't get covered with projects/paper/crap/entrails of your enimies, oops, did I say that, I meant "donuts", yah, donuts)

The morals of this story are: a) Find a way to give your true love what he/she wants. It's worth it; b) Some gifts take a long time, but that's OK; and c) You never know, your house might just need a dentist's chair. Confession: Phrodaux is not the only one who sits on it when talking on the phone.

(P: my lovely wife loves and knows me, neiner neiner, or you can thank the dark gods that you all don't have to because the fairy queen does)