I miss my grandfather's chair, and not just because it's trendy now.

A long time ago, I had a chair I didn't appreciate and a cat I adored. Grendel. He never stopped saying "Cow."

I'm feeling nostalgic about this colorful chair. It was one of two that my grandfather bought the year I was born, and it represented the best that San Diego Discount Furniture offered.

Orange, turquoise, harvest gold, sunny yellow, tan. Sleek modern lines. To my eyes at the time this photo was taken, it was not good. But I needed chairs, and I owned them both for a while, in Berkeley, Binghamton (NY), and Berkeley again, until lugging them around the country became too much and I distributed them to various people who no doubt gave them away as "not right for me" either.

Do I have nicer chairs now? Yes and no. I miss the ones my grandfather and his succession of three wives used to sit in. Perhaps one wife sat in this chair as she plotted to poison him and then drive off to Mexico in his car with her son ...

The poison plot failed. Farfar and the chair endured.

I hope it is alive somewhere (as he is not). I also hope that it still has that magnificent upholstery. Even at a discount shoppe, furniture was built to last back then. Waaaaaaay back then.

It was a good chair and I should have appreciated it while we were together.

Good cat, too. He lived for fifteen years, five of them with feline AIDS. He spoke constantly, but he knew only one word: "Cow."

"Cow. Cow cow. Cow. Cooooooow!"

I long at least to meet a chair like that again.

I hope Farfar is doing well, up in the great electrical storm of the afterlife.