THE TALE OF THE WANDERING FURNITURE

Back in 1963 our set of wooden furniture left our home in the countryside and travelled to my Grandparents’ residential home in the town of Bellingham, Washington. The set consisted of two small dining-room type tables, two long benches with full backs, and six chairs, all of dark, rough-hewn wood. The set had come into my mother’s possession as the result of the closure of the local restaurant “Jerry’s Italian Village”. This “Jerry” was no relation to my mother’s son by the same name. The set served our family well for a number of years.

The set had been handmade in Italy and sent to Jerry Polargio specifically for his restaurant in Bellingham. Now that his restaurant had closed, Jerry sold some of its furniture to my mother. And she brought it to our home where it served well for several years. When we moved to live with my Grand-folks the furniture went with us. After my grandparents had died, it remained there in partial use for some twenty years.

However, when a group of us in Seattle decided to open a church-related coffeehouse where we could sponsor and engage in open conversations about important contemporary issues, my mother donated the furniture to the project. She even became the coordinator of the business side of the new enterprise and   took charge of the menu, which soon became the best coffee-house menu in town. The whole project was a roaring success and lasted ten years, receiving rave reviews amongst the coffee-house participants and even the local press.

In the meantime, I had moved on to pursue my career as a college professor. One of my good friends stored the furniture in the church basement thinking that I might some day want it. When I showed up teaching at a college in Florida my friend asked if I might need the furniture, which I did, so I had it shipped from Seattle to Florida and used it there for a number of years and in several different places. Later, when I moved north from one college to another, I always took this special furniture. It fit beautifully in every home where I lived.

            It has now been over sixty years since I first acquired those chairs, tables, and benches, and I am, as you might guess, extremely attached to them, both for their survivability and for their rustic beauty. They still grace our dining-room and prove ever so useful when we have larger groups of guests. Not only do they show their special signs of wear and tear, but they are each adorned with various scars, cigarette burns, and are held together with wooden pegs. It is amazing and wonderful to speculate about what diverse and different locales and adventures these pieces of rustic wooden furniture have encountered. I love them dearly. They have become my longest-lasting memories and landmarks