Smile all the time
I was wrong about the tables. I started to write a year and change ago about the Cheshire Cat party at the Politics & Prose bookstore, celebrating the children's bookstore the general bookstore had inherited. Having spent most of high school working at the Cheshire Cat, I went, talked to old coworkers and bosses, bought a T-shirt, saw them paint a mural on the wall out back, and visited the shelves.
The shelves were the best part because they were the old shelves, the hand-built ones that had started with Cheshire Cat in the late '70s. They felt good to be around. I started to try and explain the feeling here, but then gave up after a couple paragraphs.
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Millions of cats
It's amazing how certain furniture can stick with you. Some furniture, I guess it makes some sense — couches, chairs, beds, pieces that outsize and cradle your body. Same with desks holding work and experience, extensions of the body through labor.
But other pieces like shelves and tables would seem to fall in a different category. When we give them objects to hold, we do so with a sense of difference, of temporary dispossesion. Our objects will be there when we want them, and at that point we'll just pick them off and walk away. It's not that we don't care; it's that we have no reason to care. The shelves and tables are holders and singularly purposed as such. Even the dining room table, probably the most attachable of the variety, sticks with people for only its desk-like aspect: the fruitful work of eating and creating community.
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And that was it
I'm not sure why the title was what it was. I know I talked to my Cheshire Cat boss that day about the Wanda Gag book. She'd reminded me how the children's book industry had only taken off when Gag and other Eastern European illustrators had taken a children's art tradition and immigrated to the United States after World War I. I don't remember how I'd planned to tie that into the furniture thinking. Maybe since the shelves were simple and modest. That made them like the little plain cat the old man chooses out of the "hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats." Or something. I really have no idea.
Anyway, about those shelves and tables, I read Chocolat at the beach this summer. And while the book turned out to be more chick lit than chocolate lit, and while I was kinda hoping for the chocolate, the book did have one good passage. I don't think I really enjoyed much else. The book was the Scarlet Letter meets Pleasantville meets something else. Maybe the Food Network. Such are the perils of used book sales. But the one passage made it worth reading.
It was a defense of tables.
The novelty of possession is still an exotic thing to us, a precious thing, intoxicating. I envy the table for its scars, the scorch marks caused by the hot bread tins. I envy its sense of time, and I wish I could say: I did this five years ago. I made this mark, this ring caused by a wet coffee cup, this cigarette burn, this ladder of cuts against the wood's coarse grain. This is where Anouk carved her initials, the year she was six years old, this secret place behind the table leg. I did this on a warm day seven summers ago with the carving knife. Do you remember? Do you remember the summer the river ran dry? Do you remember?
I envy the table's calm sense of peace. It has been here a long time. It belongs.
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