ON A PLAYFUL NOTE: furniture, forlorn

This post isn't really meant for you if you're recently bereaved. One's delight in the ridiculous usually takes a while to come back. But it may make you smile if you're somewhere past the absolute worst.

I came across Bill Keaggy's little book Fifty Sad Chairs about a year after my father died. Each of its 4-inch square pages offers a photo of a real chair abandoned in a real place somewhere in St. Louis and photographed exactly as found. A single look at the photos was enough to make me laugh out loud. Keaggy's sad chairs were so sad, so deeply forlorn, so put-upon, so down and out they made the entire concept of sadness feel amusing. Keaggy's brief introduction notes, "You'll see them beside dumpsters, in backyards, in vacant lots and on the sidewalk. These are the forsaken chairs...They saved us from having to sit on the floor. And how do we repay them? With a grunt, a curse, and a heave-ho to the street." If these chairs were characters in Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, they'd all be Eeyore: depressed, desultory, and deeply under-appreciated.


The image I reprint here is titled "She Never Calls Anymore." It was taken sometime before 2007, when the book was published. Today, not only the chair is gone, but probably the phone booth too. I wonder if Keaggy would consider a book called Fifty Forlorn Phones.