Today, October 2, 2012, I turn 81. Yesterday I selected
a birthday gift for myself that I have never had before. I bought the first bedroom suite
which is new and personal to me in my entire life: a three-piece Cherry
finish bed frame with trundle for storage, a five-drawer chest and
nightstand.
When I was a boy, I slept in an iron bed with a brother who
was a couple of years younger. There was a dresser for clothes but they didn’t
match. I suspect each piece was handed down from somewhere else in family, most
likely grandparents. When I became a teen-ager I moved to a single iron bed (another
hand-me-down) in the room and my two younger brothers shared the bigger bed. These
were the great depression years followed by WWII, and my single-parent mother
did her best.
I went in the Air Force shortly after high school and slept
on a variety of bunks, cots and beds. After almost three years, I started to
live off-base and shared furnished apartments in Washington with another Air
Force investigator.
When I married Mary in 1954, we also lived initially in
furnished apartments in Washington, D.C., and later in Charleston. In 1955,
rentals in Charleston were hard to come by and mostly consisted of apartments
carved into big homes where these were full of furniture from generations past.
In Charleston, no one throws anything away until it disintegrates.
When the children started to come along we set up in houses and
were given some basic furniture from relatives, mostly Mary’s family. My paternal
grandmother gave us a great wooden table we used in the kitchen for years and
later re-did and continued to use. Some furniture we bought second-hand. I
don’t recall three or four pieces of bedroom furniture that were part of the
same set. It didn’t bother us. We were young, making our way and had a roof
over our heads and a comfortable bed. (Mattresses were the most important thing
and were always ours.)
After a couple of years in a starter house we bought a larger
house in 1964 that would be our home for the next 44 years. We began with a kitchen
table and chairs where we took our meals and concentrated on furnishing the
living room. Then we worked on the dining room, although we reserved its use
for holidays and special occasions, like when family or out of town friends came
for Sunday dinner. There were five children and multiple bedrooms to outfit in
one way or another, piece by piece, but ultimately we started to talk about
“doing over” our bedroom. Before we could bite the bullet Mary’s mother passed
away in 1976. A couple of years earlier
she had purchased a five-piece bedroom suite and we inherited it. It was quality
furniture, looked great, served us well and saved us money.
By 2005, the bed frame from the inherited suite was on its
last legs and we replaced it with a Scandinavian style bed and foam mattress.
Now, we had a new bed and three older pieces, which blended fairly well. A not
uncommon state of affairs among middle class families in South Carolina.
In 2007, Mary was in an assisted living facility and I
closed out our house six months later. I
gave away, sold and threw out all kinds of furniture. I kept the bed and two inherited
pieces. I moved these into a one bedroom apartment on the same campus with
Mary. About a year ago I replaced the inherited nightstand.
And then Friday night, September 28, 2012, I turned on the
lights in my bedroom, looked and laughed: a chest of drawers going back almost
40 years, a bed and a nightstand that were close but not really a matched pair.
Three separate pieces whose only connection was holding my body, some of my
clothes and my accessories. It looked like the bedroom, which also holds a
comfortable wing-back chair and floor lamp, had been furnished from separate
garage sales. This goes beyond even Southern acceptance, I said.
Delivery is Thursday.
