Speaking Confidentially: 14 February 1998

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I wonder what we should do about RDC's desk and things. Right now RDC is building a bookcase of poplar we bought from Home Despot. We looked for a bookcase in Scandinavian Designs but nothing remotely in our price range appeared either in wood or the right dimensions. Otherwise Scandia is a great store. I sat in dining chairs with both lumbar support and freedom for shoulders. The wooden struts? pillars? banisters? dowels? of the back curved toward the front of the chair at the base, for lumbar support, and toward the back of the chair at the top, so my shoulders could shrug and go up and down and everything else. Those were nice. And odd little wardrobe bits with cabinet doors opening onto small drawers. Most cool, if mostly impractical. So along we ventured to the Park Meadows Capitalism Extravaganza. We looked at a store with contemporary furniture--

What exactly does that mean? Any furniture that's made this year is contemporary, no matter what style it's in.

--without fribbles, furbelows, or other Chippendale-esque excesses. Excesses it did have, but more to my liking. I liked, for the few moments I looked at it in the store, a room divider (I assume), a tri-fold of iron, deliberately partly rusted, mostly just a frame with some interior swirls, with a sun motif in the center frame and in one of the side frames, a progression of poor quality crystal balls. Really an intriguing piece on first glance, but too poor quality to purchase and nothing I could stand to look at every day. Too tippy; too trendy; not dog-friendly.

We wound up in Home Despot and bought 9" furniture-grade poplar and built (well, RDC did) a five-shelf bookcase. And I put geegaws on top of it: photographs and sea-shells. Not geegaws, actually. In some people's houses, sea shells are knickknacks; in mine, they're reminders of home, and I would never adopt a shell I didn't pluck from its native beach. Disclaiming, o' course.

So I put tucked some more poetry into the poetry case, which forcibly displaced the bookends to the new bookcase. They're Pooh bookends: the short side is Pooh's tush, wrongly represented as being on a hillside instead of inside Rabbit's kitchen; the long side is Christopher Robin, Rabbit, and some friends-n-relations pulling on Pooh's front.

The bookends might not gather as much dust on the second shelf of the new case, but I wonder if they enjoy holding up the books they now hold upright. The new case begins with fiction at He-; thus the ends prop up Catch-22 and the Scribner edition Hemingways. Yikes. Well. I don't know if Pooh enjoyed Aeschylus, Blake, Donne, and H.D., but at least he wasn't overwhelmed with a preponderance of one author.

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Last modified 18 February 1998

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