I was in a hurry (as usual) trying to get the kids to school and me to work on time. As I backed my car out, a man started yelling at me from his balcony. I stopped the car and he said, “There’s a chair behind your car!”
Sure enough, when I got out of the car to look, there was a lovely light blue velvet easy-chair right behind my bumper. “How did that get there?” I asked. The man shrugged his shoulders.
I assumed someone had wanted to throw it away but didn’t want to lift it into the dumpster. So, I left it next to the garbage and drove off.
Imagine my surprise when I got home that afternoon to find the chair in my living room!
My husband had a proud smile on his face. “Look what someone threw away,” he said. He wondered why someone would toss away such a lovely chair. My husband sat in it and we quickly found out why. The back was broken. You couldn’t tell until you sat in it and then you were launched backwards in a very undignified manner (hubby did a backward somersault).
After we all had a good laugh my husband said, “Aw, I can fix that.”
I was less than thrilled, but the chair took up residence in our living room (pressed against a wall so no one was catapulted out).
A few weeks later my best friend came over. She kept gushing about the new blue chair, how much she loved it, etc. I said, “Jerry is going to fix it.” At that point, she burst out laughing and told me the chair’s history.
She and HER husband had gone to their pastor’s house for dinner. She noticed their lovely blue chair and commented on it. The pastor’s wife rolled her eyes and said, “Joe brought it home from a friend’s house.”
Joe had gone to a friend’s house and had seen the pretty chair. The friend said, “It was going to be thrown away, can you imagine?” “The back is broken, but I brought it home to repair, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.”
Joe asked if he could take it off of his friend’s hands. He would fix it and gain a lovely new chair. So, the chair moved to Joe’s house, … where it sat for months waiting to be repaired.
Joe’s wife told my friend’s husband (Bob) to please take it away and Bob said, “Sure, I can fix that.” And, that’s how my friend got the lovely blue chair in HER living room, where it sat for months leaning up against a wall.
My friend hates clutter and was tired of waiting for Bob to repair the chair, so like any good friend (eye roll) she packed it in her car, drove it over to my place at midnight and parked it behind my car (I have weird friends).
She had no idea it would end up in my living room, she just knew our apartments had dumpsters and she thought it would be funny for me to find an easy-chair behind my car.
And, that’s where my husband saw it and thought, “I can fix that.”
The chair moved to our home where it sat, waiting to be repaired. By this time it had gone through at least four husbands with good intentions. And, who knows, there may have been more!
I finally had enough and made my husband move it down to the dumpster (where my part of the whole chair saga began).
We left to do errands and when we returned, the chair was gone. I laughed. The chair was someone else’s problem now.
The next day, the new bride who lived below me called out and said, “Come and see what I have!” She took me into her tidy apartment and showed me the pretty blue velvet chair! “It’s broken,” she said, but Maher said he could fix it.”
I just smiled and complimented her on the chair’s beauty.
They say, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. Proverbs 14:12 says: “There is a pathway that seems right to a man, but in the end it’s a road to death.”
In this case, all of the sweet husbands in this story had the best of intentions. They thought that they were enriching their family’s lives by bringing the chair home. Instead, the chair brought complications and frustrations (it couldn’t be easily repaired) and it would have been better off in the garbage.
Fortunately, in this case, we’re only talking about a chair. That silly chair has provided me with a funny way to remember that sometimes, when we think we’re on the right path, we’re really on a path that leads to destruction.
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Read more of Ann’s contributions to AllMomDoes here.
