How to Love a Chair

Found objects, my top 10 books of 2021, & an affection for purple vegetables

Change your place, change your luck.

Today is Day 285.

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We bought a new chair.

In the scheme of things, it’s not on the level of a baby or a puppy. But it’s the recliner in which I read on Shabbos and the one my husband Miro sits in on his day off to listen to a downloaded shiur. Meaning, the chair is a small island of comfort in our chaotic world.

The upholstery on our old recliner had torn exactly where your calves rest while in lying position. The exposed wood provided no comfort at all. So this recent purchase really is something, a contributor to our oneg Shabbos if nothing else.

Okay. It’s not exactly new. This past Friday, I went with my friend Debbie to the local farmers market. We were schmoozing near the Jersey corn (which was delicious, by the way) when she mentioned there was an estate sale nearby. Shabbos wasn’t for hours. We figured, Why not?

Friends, we walked into the house and had the same reaction: Perhaps we’d better have gone straight home. We’d been hoping for art and vintage tchotchkes and curious objects that make you wonder what inspired their owners to acquire them in the first place. Maybe a cool end table. But it was mostly utilitarian bits in a dusty state of repair, mildewy LPs, and expired spices. Until we entered the sort of reading room, where there were vintage photos and books. And also, this chair, which seemed too good to be true.

Miro and I have been looking for a new pushback recliner for almost a year. My first rule for a recliner is that it can’t look like one, a complicating factor in our search. Can’t be oversized or have any visible mechanism. Last Tuesday, we went from store to store like Goldilocks. The recliners were either too wide or too expensive. We liked the one in Costco, but it came in grey only, which doesn’t work with the room. The rest looked like recliners. So happening upon this leather gem where I last expected to was serendipitous and a gift.

Still, I was skeptical.

I checked it over with a fine-tooth comb. Nothing was broken or torn. The seat was comfortably worn, not worn out. The chair required just a little TLC with leather cleaner and conditioner. Debbie and I each took it for a test recline. The tag was marked $125.

“All furniture is 30% off today,” said the guy running the sale. I couldn’t believe my luck. “I’ll take it,” I told him. I knew it would ill-behoove me not to.

When Miro came home, we carried the old chair to the shed and the new chair out of my van and into its new position of honor in the den. He sat down and remarked on its comfort. Then, “G-d really is good to us.”

Miro was right. And yet, I thought, Of all the things we are looking for, are hoping for, the chair is the thing He decided to give us?

Maybe G-d hasn’t seen the rest of our wish list.

Besides, it’s a only chair. Does He really involve Himself in the minutiae of recliners?

This past Shabbos, Miro took a moment in the chair before leaving for shul. “It’s a great chair,” he enthused. I spent hours after lunch reading in it, two books in fact — Marra Gad’s The Color of Love and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew. It was so comfortable it lured me into a short, restorative shluf. That’s the best I do when it comes to napping.

So maybe G-d did not choose the upholstery, but our sudden find certainly feels like He had us in mind. It is already very much at home in our home, and we are very much at home with it.

There’s a custom to buy a gift for a person who makes a shidduch. It seemed right to thank Debbie, too, for mentioning the estate sale, which ultimately united two people with the chair they’d long been searching for. B’simcha, I dropped off a hot-from-the-oven banana bread for her right before Shabbos. She was thrilled. We still got the better end of the deal.

Nachas for me, nice listening for you

You’ll forgive me if I briefly promote my son, who produced this stirring song. Listen wherever you get your music. Please like it and share. <3

Book love <3

The New York Times is compiling a list of the top books published in the 21st century and is now asking readers to submit their ten favorites. It’s all the talk among book-lovers. We don’t subscribe, so it’s not letting me participate (if you have a way around that, let me know). Friends have asked, so I’m sharing my list here instead. Frankly, I’m not great at choosing favorites of anything, except ice cream. I like pistachio. So let’s just call these books my favorites of the past 24 years… at the moment. The first one I love best. The rest I adore in no specific order.

• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

• People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

• The Lost Shtetl by Max Gross

• The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl

• War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans

• The Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

• My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner by Meir Shalev

• Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

• The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

• Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

I originally put Possession by A.S. Byatt on my list, but it’s from the 1990s. Read it if you haven’t. It’s a lovely story.

A purple moment in the kitchen

By Eugene Golovesov on Unsplash

It’s so darn hot here that I dread turning on any kind of appliance at all, let alone the stove or the oven. So I’ve been leaning on salads as our meal staple, trying to keep the options interesting.

The extra wonderful thing about the whole salad regime is that it’s a chance to appreciate the joy of the produce aisle or the farmers market, from the palate to the textures. Lots of color, though this is the summer I’ve fallen in love with purple. Purple kolhrabi and purple cauliflower. And more purple — my beet fling is ongoing. Here’s a lovely recipe for Beet Salad with Goat Cheese & Balsamic Vinaigrette, from Love & Lemons. It’s worth turning on the oven to roast the beets.

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So nu, what are your top ten favorite books of the 21st century?

What are you eating in this weather that feels like swimming laps in pea soup?

Any purple vegetable salads to recommend? I recently spotted purple kale. Going to make something with that next.

Love,
Merri