My very own chair

I don't consider myself a selfish person. I believe I am considerate of others and,  for the most part, am willing to give more than what I wish or expect in return.

In my life, I'd never had a recliner. A recliner symbolizes "your spot" in "your home". It is rarely to be shared. Everyone knows who sits in the recliner.

When we moved to Long Island, we needed some new furniture. We bought a new bedroom set replacing the one we bought 20 years earlier. We needed a new kitchen table, some living room furniture and, for the first time, this new house of ours had a family room.

So we drove to the nearly Seamen's Furniture store looking for some pieces and saw a tan leather recliner as a floor sample. It was post Ginger and we didn't really think we were going to get another dog, so we had no reason to think it would be abused.

For years, sitting in that chair was like going to a totally different place in my mind. Add a remote--heaven.

Then came Ollie.

When he took over, that became his chair. Yes, he let me share it but when he was home alone, it was his spot. But Ollie loved to lick the leather and scratch at the cushion and over time, the area he scratched started to wear away. Eventually, holes replaces the worn areas and this little spot of solitude became an embarrassment.

We knew we needed to replace the chair but while we had Ollie, there was no reason to do that.

We kept that chair for a full year after Ollie passed challenging ourselves to find a new recliner but hoping it would somehow magically appear. We weren't looking for one, we just wished we had one. This past Christmas, I received some universal gift cards and we decided it would go towards a replacement chair.

We started looking on New Years day but weren't convinced we saw anything we liked enough at the right price.  In early March, we looked at that old recliner and made the decision we had to get rid of the old chair. It was beginning to lean to the right (not my political position) and just looked horrible.

So that weekend, we were committed to find the chair. At the price we wanted to pay (somewhere between free and cheap),  we found a few chairs that we liked but weren't the right color or were too "man cave" type (built-in cup holders and coolers). My wife also notice one thing in common with inexpensive recliners-- their feet. They all had these cheap feet. Not like the feet on regular furniture.

So using that as our "quality" standard, we restarted our search for inexpensive recliners without cheap feet.

As we were about to give up our search for the day, we decided to look at one more store - Macy's Furniture Center. Most of their recliners were priced higher than we wanted to spend. But just as we were about to give up, we saw it....an inexpensive recliner without cheap feet.  We scheduled delivery for March 16.