Orange Couch

by Tom Spendlove
03 December 2003

A little story about a confusing phone call I had recently. But first, a little back-story for the story of the phone call. For about the past month we’ve had an orange couch in our front room. “Hideous orange couch” can be the only proper description for the color. The kind of couch that it would have made total sense to buy in 1958. Because you bought orange things then. It’s got a little fading motif in the back, more of a two-toned orange that goes from “hideous creamsicle” to “macaroni and cheese on a bad day”. A guy from work got married and he was verboten (hey, he married a German lady, give me some leeway here) to bring the very very old couch into his very very new house. So on a fateful Monday afternoon I drove the father-in-law’s truck to beautiful downtown Bay City and loaded an orange couch into the back of it and drove it back to beautiful between-Birch Run-and-Frankenmuth. However (what good story doesn’t have a however in it somewhere, after all?) the pregnant wife couldn’t help carry it down the steps into the basement, where couches and chairs from decades past go. I had to concede that I wasn’t man enough to load a giant couch from the back of the truck into the front room, and so she helped me bring it inside. But not down the stairs. Not a pregnant lady forced to do heavy labor. Oh no no no.

So I was rambling without making a point and then what happened? Oh yeah, big couch in the front room. Technically it’s a davenport, which I don’t really understand the difference, but that’s what old people say and it breaks into two separate halves. And then when you have it sitting somewhere, say your front room, and it’s totally taking up too much space and in the way, you can flip it around so one side is resting on the other side and then not only is it in your way, it’s no longer functional because it’s sitting on itself instead of allowing you to sit on it. Did I say orange? Because it’s orange.

I was sitting in front of the television watching college football and the phone rang. It was my brother-in-law.
“Hey, Tom, I heard you really like having a couch in your front room” – to me this makes perfect sense because I have a couch in my front room. He’s a funny guy, he says funny things like that. “I hear you like it” is that weird guy code we use for “haha, dumbass, you’ve got a big couch blocking your living room.” He must want to help me carry it downstairs because my wife told him I need help.

“Uh, yeah, I love it but I’d rather have it in the basement” – again, this makes sense. Right? Right.

“We thought you’d rather have one for your front room there, with the computer and the bookshelves in front of the windows” – huh? Why the hell do you think I’d need help with moving a couch into the basement if I was happy with it in my front room?

“What? I don’t think I understand anymore” – it’s sad how many conversations I have end up with me stopping, saying “what?” and having to admit that I have no idea what the point of the conversation is – usually it’s at work after a particularly boring half hour of stupid talk from someone I have no interest in talking to unless we’re stuck in the same room. But we all do what we can, I suppose. And for some of us that means halting mid-conversation for a little catch-up.

“Well, I don’t think we can fit it through Mom and Dad’s front door; we had such a problem with that last time” – at this point I’m 100% sure he’s not talking about helping me push a couch down my steps and into my retro-basement. “And I think we’ll be storing it there until Katie goes to college in two years.” And then I realize it isn’t about my couch at all. Or I realized that I was actually realizing it and not just having something stupid to write about later. One of those two things.

“Wait, wait, wait – you mean you have a couch from Mandy’s apartment that you want to put in my basement?” – yeah, he wanted to put it in my front room but couches go in the basement for when we have the two birthday parties a year down there so all 20 of us can have a seat. Also it will be convenient for playing the Gamecube that we’re getting for Xmas so that I don’t have to sit on the Queen Amidala blow-up chairs that have long had the backs and sides popped and are now just silly blow-up cushions with weird cloth Queen Amidala faces that hang off the back of them. For those of you keeping score at home, the Jar-Jar Binks blow-up chair popped and was thrown away a long time ago. All of him. “Mee-sa have no air in me, so not good chair, throw mee-sa away-a.”

Continuing on, I came to learn that there was a couch in my niece’s dorm room that has to be stored and it won’t fit in the in-law’s house because it’s a big house and they have a smallish front door and she’s going to Italy at the beginning of January and so the couch (which looks far too close to the current decade to really fit into my basement but I’m making a concession because I love my niece) is now going to sit in my basement until my other, younger niece starts college. The moving doesn’t have to happen for a good month, so he was really just making sure the new couch, new being relative, has a place to stay when it’s evicted from its current home. I don’t know if I’d call that a coherent point to my story, but I’d definitely say that the story had a beginning, a middle and an end. Maybe it needs a better end, though.

The end of the story is that there’s still a large orange couch, unusable because it’s folded on top of itself, taking up space in my front room.

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