The most versatile thing in my home—aside from the sexual tastes of its inhabitants—is the kitchen stool I sometimes use as an end table, a TV dinner tray, a clothes drying rack, a stepladder, and even, on rare occasions, as a kitchen stool.
The item dates to the year my husband, Frank, and I lived in Brooklyn. We had moved there from Chicago, which mostly involved getting rid of stuff ‘cause our new apartment was a tiny concrete corner in a squat concrete building. Now that I think of it, we might have been living in a parking garage.
I guess we got a little overzealous with the downsizing, though, and found ourselves in need of a pair of kitchen stools. I ordered them from the internet. They took me a shameful amount of time to assemble. I recall having trouble with the swivel mechanism. Incidentally, that’s the same feature that makes the stool suboptimal as a stepladder.
For the first couple months after the move to New York, Frank was still based primarily in Chicago so that he could finish wrapping up our lives there. Meanwhile, several states away, I’d sit in my concrete hidey-hole, stare at my newly assembled kitchen stools, and wonder whether I’d made a mistake.
Not about the stools. About leaving Chicago. And overdownsizing. And moving into a parking garage. And also the stools.
All these years later, I don’t know whether any of those were good choices. Except maybe with regard to the downsizing. I dislike clutter.
But here’s the truth about decisions: In many cases, there’s no such thing as the right one to make. You simply pick something and brace yourself for the consequences. Just like eating at Chipotle.
After all, when Robert Frost claims that taking the road “less traveled by” of two diverging paths has “made all the difference,” he doesn’t mention whether the difference was positive, negative, or a mix of the two.
Or, as another great poet put it, “You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have the facts of life.”
Consider children, for example. On the one hand, having them curtails your freedom and strains your finances but, on the other hand, increases your odds of having somebody around to close your eyelids for you after you croak.
Frank and I are currently childless and that seems unlikely to change, though we did take significant steps toward pursuing adoption back in Chicago. As a matter of fact, it was the relocation to New York City that interrupted our adoption project. We never restarted it.
So that’s another alternative timeline for us all to ponder. Me as somebody’s father—can you imagine? I feel like it doesn’t say much for my fitness for the job that it took me so long to put those stools together.
The two of them are still around, by the way, both stationed next to the kitchen counter. I always use the one on the left. I suppose my tendency to pick favorites wouldn’t be very good parental behavior, either.
Perhaps I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two stools in my kitchen stood, and I—
I took the left—can’t tell you why,
But that has made all the difference.
Indirect Objects 