It’s just, when you buy furniture, 

you tell yourself, that’s it. 

That’s the last sofa I’m gonna need. 

Whatever else happens, 

I’ve got that sofa problem handled.

–Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

If there was one thing I learned from my parents, it was not to go in for cheap furniture–even if it meant the much slower assembly of a fully furnished household. To be clear, we’re not talking about deeply expensive, limited-edition Italian furnishings, but neither are we referring to the unpronounceable particle board that’s found on IKEA shelves. Let’s just call it furniture that’s not irreplaceable and also not disposable: Stuff that, with proper care, might sturdily (and with a righteous exercise of taste) last a few decades . . .

I mention this because four days of last week were spent in pursuit of a new chair–my first in slightly more than 20 years (so yes, the parental lesson really did sink in). And by my, I mean the place where only I sit–the place that is never offered to visitors, the place that even the tyrannical cats understand will never be theirs. This, however, is not a quest story because I knew exactly what I wanted. In the end, it was merely about concentrated persistence–the visiting of stores and the terrorizing of sales staff unprepared for a shopper who came armed with a detailed sketch of what he wanted. And–spoiler alert–on the fourth day of my retail walkabout, I finally found exactly what I was looking for. It was just a matter of time.

But what’s been on my mind since this morning is not just this new, on-its-way chair–I’m also pondering the old, outgoing one. And almost certainly I’m doing so because of its soon-to-be gone intimacy; because it’s been my home within my home for more than two decades now.

Over the past 20 years, a great deal has happened in that chair: happiness, insights, sorrow, the climaxes of novels, mourning, planning, notes, innumerable films, uncertainty, resolution, conversation, world-shaking news and of course jazz–so much of it that the chair’s atomic structure must certainly vibrate Miles, Coltrane and Bill Evans. As Lou Reed once sang, “Someone died and someone married”–and through the years, I received word of it all sitting there. My old chair was reupholstered three times and its cushions were restuffed four. But no matter how serially different it looked, much like the Time Lord in Doctor Who, it was always still recognizable; it always clearly remained mine. And in this there was a continuity that came to be reassuring.

However, now that my old chair is finally going, it hits to me that everything which has occurred in it will more authentically become memories–no longer simply in the past, but also made forever placeless by an irrevocably changed household topography.

Add to this Proustian consideration something else, something bleakly fast-forward: My old chair’s length of service suggests that, given the care with which I’ve selected it, the new one will be similarly long-lived. But this time around I’m no longer middle-aged–even by the most charitable of measures–and the prospect of a new 20-year chair unavoidably forces me to consider that it could very well be my last. And so this morning over coffee, it occurred to me that, like Palahniuk’s protagonist, whatever else happens, I’ve got that chair problem in hand, only this time–gulp–probably forever . . .

This too, it seems, is also a matter of time.

I write this with a lunch-time sandwich by my side, waiting for the furniture store’s delivery. I sit here marveling at how unaware I’d been while choosing the front row seat for my own final act, and suddenly the addition of a beer sounds like a good idea. It had been that forest-for-the-trees thing, but on the most personal level. In a space of probably less than 15 minutes, a new phase of my life will arrive and an old one will suddenly disappear. I’ll be asked to sign and then initial–here, here and here. Then the truck will be gone, taking my old chair with it, leaving me to take stock of where–and more importantly, how–I’ll be spending the next 20 years or so.

And in all likelihood, I’ll wish that I had another detailed sketch of what it is I want–but this sort of planning sadly resists the meticulous addition of details. The future, after all, frequently lacks any sense of proportion and it’s impossible to measure. So, for a while at least, it’ll be my turn to be unprepared because, as Reed further sang, “It’s the beginning of a new age . . .”