TABLING THE ISSUE
Perhaps I’m just a little dense, but can someone please explain to me how an old table can cost more than some used cars?
You see, my wife and I are shopping for a dining room table (despite the fact that we don’t, technically, have a dining room, but that’s a column for another day), and I have to say – the dining room table racket is running strong.
Traditionally, when I have needed furniture, I go to a –Mart store and purchase the item. All of these items come in boxes that are three feet wide and six feet long and weigh 45,000 pounds. It doesn’t matter if it’s a futon or a plant stand. It’s coming in the standard-issue –Mart furniture box. And it’s going to take a small army of surly teen-agers to get it out to your car.
Which begs the quick aside – one time, while buying a piece of furniture (perhaps a futon, perhaps a plant stand), several of the grumpy youngsters were hauling the massive piece out of the store for me. At the exit, the store greeter stopped the furniture caravan and asked to see a receipt. Apparently, she thought I had enlisted the help of several store employees to help me shoplift one of the largest items in the store. As I fumbled for the receipt, the help continued out of the store without so much as a pause. When I finally caught up with them wandering around the parking lot, they seemed both shocked and a little confused that they couldn’t figure out where to take the item. When I explained to them that it would probably be a good idea to show them what car it was going to, they all nodded in sad agreement.
Waddya know? It was funnier in person. Just didn’t translate well here. OK, back to the original point of the column. My wife made it very clear that the days of fraternity house furniture were over (despite the fact that giant cable spools make perfectly fine coffee tables). We were going to get an honest-to-goodness new table, and by new she meant one that was older than my grandparents.
Being the good husband that I am, I agreed to go along with my wife to an antique store. (Wife’s note: Good husband? Agreed to go along? Excuse me? You’d have an easier time getting Calista Flockhart into a pie eating contest.) I decided that I would have to look on the bright side of this ordeal, the bright side being that, eventually, the earth would crash into the sun, at which point I would not have to be shopping at an antique store.
As we strolled through the store, I found that a lot of people have a very liberal definition of what constitutes an antique. Among the things that were for sale: a copy of O magazine, Oprah’s monthly mag that has been published for all of about two days, a magic eight-ball, and a Smurfs glass. To each his own, I suppose.
The store did house many honest to goodness antiques however. And, of course, we gravitated to the tables. Now, I don’t know about you, but for $700, I think a table should be a magic table that automatically puts food on it each evening. My wife thinks I’m being cheap and absurd, and says that’s what tables cost. I counter that it’s not what they cost when they consist of cinder blocks and plywood. She counters that I have potato salad for a brain, and the argument ends.
Overall, we looked at roughly nine million table sets, all of them way more than I would ever spend on a table, much less one that other people have been dining on for decades. Who knows what those people could have had? What if there are plague remnants hanging around on a leaf? What if one of the chairs was used in World War II by a Nazi? I can’t have these kinds of things in my house! I have a family to think about!
And you are correct in your assumption that none of my arguments held up. While we didn’t buy a table, it became quite evident that we would be buying a table, and it would be old, and it would be expensive. And it may have the plague, but apparently that’s OK.
Maybe I am being silly. Perhaps this is just what nice tables cost. Maybe I should just suck it up and buy a table. After all, if that’s what would make my wife happy, then it’s certainly worth it. Besides, one day we will need a dining room table. And to be honest with you, the more we wait, the older these tables get, and there appears to be a correlation to age and cost. Although I still don’t see the problem with blocks and plywood. Potato salad, anyone?