Office Chair

2/2/25 Greg's office chair

Other than the jukebox, the only object I needed to remove before I could move into my new studio was Greg’s office chair. (I’m keeping his two desks already occupying the room, both of which are larger than the ones in my current studio.) Although he used it for something like 20 years, it’s still in good condition (better than mine, in fact, but mine fits me better).

Even though it kept getting in my way as I emptied file drawers and moved boxes around, I put off getting rid of his chair until the very end. Greg had spent a lot of hours in that chair – doing the usual computer tasks but also viewing, sorting and editing his vast collection of photos. As a digital photographer, he spent much more time futzing with his photos in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop than he did taking the photos. He might come home from a two-week trip with thousands of images, but then he’d take the next year or more messing around with them digitally. For him, that was a lot of the fun of it.

While I was transferring all those image files so that I could dispose of his PC, I sat in his chair (which is how I learned that it’s not as comfortable as my own old office chair). It prompted complicated feelings I can’t quite articulate. A person’s things are not the person; and yet, some things become very personal. He could still sit in that chair now, but he has no use for it.

Somehow it helped me to get rid of it by posting a “give” in my neighborhood’s Buy Nothing Group. It turned out that the woman who wanted the chair for her teenage son lives less than half a block away! Although it was a bit of a struggle getting it down the two short flights of stairs from the porch to the street, she easily wheeled it down the sidewalk the rest of the way. It made me happy that the chair had introduced me to a neighbor I didn’t know, even though her family has lived there for eight years. And the chair has moved only a short distance away.