Osler's Razor

I am writing to you from the weathered seat of one of the two leather couches in my parents' living room. They are brown leather, with nailhead seams and a lot of character. My parents brought these back from England when I was about 10, and they have sustained a lot of life since their arrival. My brother and I played a game we created with them, in which we did the Fosberry Flop over the back, landing on the cushions with the flat of our backs. Because the couches rest on small metal casters, if you did it just right they would shoot across the floor once you landed.

It was on this couch that as a boy (and adult) in red pajamas I opened Christmas gifts every year, where I read the paper as a boy after school, and where I sat with some friends on a summer night in high school, trying to be quiet enough to not wake my parents. There was, I think, some kissing on this couch.

One night, too, I remember waking up in the wee hours and going downstairs. There, surprisingly, was my Mom, sitting on this leather couch with the reading light on, before her the dark-red book of Shakespeare's sonnets. I don't know why, exactly, she was doing that in the middle of the night, but I remember with great clarity the sight of it, shocking, inexplicable, and unspeakably elegant.

Tomorrow and for the next week, they will hold five or six tiny people and then two big people, and then a variety of other combinations as people come by to visit. They will be a set, a stage for life lived well.

The thing is this: I would imagine that these couches seemed like an extravagance at the time my parents got them. It was perhaps the only time they ever made a purchase like that, as it is unlike them. My dad still drives a 1994 Accord, after all. Still, was it an extravagance? Might it be, instead, that they knew the life they would have and give us all?

They were a gift, really, and there is something to be said for receiving a gift with gratitude. It is a week for that, too, for gifts of all kinds; for couches and foresight and the love and presence of family-- the bare, wonderful existence of people who love us really and truly and until and even after the leather has worn holes and the casters fall off and the real beauty comes out of all that God touches.