By Jane Gordon Julien
April 3, 2026
My niece texted me the other day; she is a history teacher at a high school in Rockville Centre, Long Island. She is giving a TED talk in a few weeks on how much chairs mean to my family.
I know this sounds questionable. A TED talk on chairs? But I think you’re missing the metaphor.
Chairs relieve us of the weight we are carrying. They allow a moment of rest, and in these wearying, confusing times, they are more than a miracle.
My mother knew that. Of all the wisdom my mother carried, coupled with the burden of trauma and disappointment, she knew the meaning of a good chair.
My mother loved to entertain, loved to cook, loved to welcome friends and family through the front door. When you have all those people flooding into your house, you need to give them a place to sit.
Sure, many of them stood. There were often too many behinds for one house to handle. And even though we didn’t have much money to spare, with six refrigerator-raiding kids and a stay-at-home mother on a New York City police officer’s salary, my mother managed. She managed by fervently attending estate sales, where what did she frequently buy?
Chairs.
Wooden chairs. Upholstered chairs. Folding chairs, handy in a pinch for holiday dinners where the table stretched from the dining room into the living room. Small sofas. A recliner for my father when he grew older and wanted more comfort for snoozing. (My father, when younger,could sleep anywhere. A wood bench at family picnics. The driver’s seat of his car, fortunately not when he was driving. In one instance, a toilet seat, where he fell asleep leaning on the radiator next to the toilet and burned a hole into his arm. I can’t say he was sober.)
One winter, when I was about 8 or so, my parents bought a big, red upholstered chair that spun around. My mother settled it into a corner of our house on 128th Street in Richmond Hill, Queens, away from the central part of the living room. The corner was near the front door entry hall, but in a solitary enough place that my father could read the numerous newspapers he brought home. Some Sundays, he welcomed Jehovah’s Witnesses in that chair even though he was a devout if discerning Catholic. Random weekdays, he welcomed repenting car thieves in that chair, to whom he offered safe haven and a chair to sleep in, while they found their footing.
The chair was an island unto itself. On afternoons in every season, I picked up my book, most often then a Nancy Drew mystery or a Louisa May Alcott affair, plunked into the chair, and spun it around to face the corner. No one could see me – I was small and skinny and curled into it like a cat in a laundry basket.
The house was high-traffic. Kids slammed in and out doors. Mom yelled at somebody or other or dished on the phone. A baseball game narrated in the background. Kids played football on the narrow street, parked cars flanking both sides. City buses navigated between the cars as the football-playing kids shrieked ‘bus!’
If there was peace to be found anywhere in that house, it was in the chair.
When my family moved to Long Island, my mother collected wicker chairs for our screened-in porch, always white, certainly sturdy, never more than a few dollars at a tag sale. Every warm summer evening when the rain held, we carried our heaping plates from the kitchen into the dining room and through the door into the porch. We nestled into those cushioned wicker seats and inhaled our food and the summer air. In a sea of memories hard and soft, those moments landed softly.
We grew up, we moved out, we bought chairs. We bought tables too, to go with the chairs, because laps are precipitous places to balance your food. We went to estate sales, because now it was a part of our legacy, and we struggled, positively struggled, to buy new. There were too many fantastic, quirky, interesting chairs out there that needed a home. And we were all perched on the edge of that cliff, waiting to find them.
When I moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in the early 1980s, I walked onto someone’s lawn on a tag sale day and spotted a Queen Anne club chair, she of the daintily curved mahogany legs and the upholstered arms that curled away from the long body. “How much?” I asked. I had moved up from Alabama with very little to sit on. This club chair was so big I could sleep on it too.
“Twenty-five dollars,” a young woman said.
“Oh,” I hesitated. Twenty-five dollars in 1984 was more than I, perennially broke, could afford.
“Is this yours?” I asked.
“No, no,” she said. “My grandmother died. This is her house. This was her chair.”
Grandmother’s chair, I thought. Clasping my family’s legacy in my heart, I said “Sold” and pieced out the preciouls bills into the young woman’s palm.
I was younger then, and picked it up by myself. A huge chair. A heavy chair. I stuffed it into my car and yelped with glee. Then I immediately signed up for an upholstery class, bought a pink cotton polka-dot fabric, and gave that girl a new life. She is still with me, in a different, hardier cabbage-rose fabric, a ‘grandma’ fabric, one of my sons says. But it’s held up for 30 years now. And the chair itself – which found yet another new life in my Manhattan apartment – is the one everyone fights to sit in.
We are now in the process of reupholstering my in-law’s dining chairs. When my in-laws died, no one wanted the dining table or the fat-cushioned high-backed chairs. Except, of course, me. The table and chairs had been discovered in the apartment when my in-laws bought it in 1959, on a storied strip of Central Park West on the Upper West Side. The chairs were carved and dark but luxuriously comfortable. So I painted them, put a white fabric on them, and sat in them day after day until the fabric became spotted with smashed avocado and ribeye steak blood and chicken drippings and we said ‘enough.’ Time to save these girls too.
That’s what we do in my family. We save chairs. Because chairs are, truly, more than a miracle. They are a salve, a saving grace, a cushion for all that we carry in this world. And if you want your house to be a haven, you’re going to need plenty of them.
A POEM ABOUT A CHAIR!
by Pablo Neruda
Ode to the chair
One chair, alone in the jungle. In the vines’ tight grip a sacred tree groans. Other vines spiral skyward, blood-spattered creatures howl deep within the shadows, giant leaves drop from the green sky. A snake shakes the dry rattles on its tail, a bird flashes through the foliage like an arrow aimed at a flag while the branches shoulder their violins. Squatting on their flowers, insects pray without stirring. Our feet sink in the black weeds of the jungle sea, in clouds fallen from the forest canopy, and all I ask for the foreigner, for the despairing scout, is a seat in the sitting-tree, a throne of unkempt velvet, the plush of an overstuffed chair torn up by the snaking vines – for the man who goes on foot, a chair that embraces everything, the sound ground and supreme 23 dignity of repose! Get behind me, thirsty tigers and swarms of bloodsucking flies – behind me, black morass of ghostly fronds, greasy waters, leaves the color of rust, deathless snakes. Bring me a chair in the midst of thunder, a chair for me and for everyone not only to relieve an exhausted body but for every purpose and for every person, for squandered strength and for meditation. War is as vast as the shadowy jungle. A single chair is the first sign of peace.
— Pablo Neruda