I’ve moved my share of furniture over
the years: most of it belonging to other people. Not professionally: just
helping out. We all receive calls for help of this kind from friends and
family, but simply because I always have owned a pickup truck I probably have
gotten the call more than most. One of the more memorable lifts was for a
friend back in the 90s who moved from NJ to an apartment in lower Manhattan.
Getting the absurdly heavy fold-out sofa-bed up the stairs (it wouldn’t fit in
the small elevator) was the highlight. I was on the lower end and again can
feel the strain in my thigh muscles as I think back on it. “Is this sofa framed
with plutonium?” I asked. “I don’t know. Maybe,” he answered. Somehow we got it
up to the fourth floor.
My Ford and I c.1984
My current Chevy
One of the few advantages to turning 70
(see last post) is that folks hesitate (not completely refrain, but hesitate)
to ask for this assistance. “We’d better not give the old guy a heart attack,”
they think. “There might be a liability issue.” Just last month a friend
borrowed my truck but didn’t ask for my help loading it. I nonetheless lent a
hand unloading it at the final destination, but no more than that. In truth I
could have done more, but I saw no reason to say so. Fortunately, at 70 when
you say “I’m tired,” people take you seriously whether it is true or not. The word “furniture” comes from French
“fourniture,” meaning “equipment.” We regard “equipment” as stuff other than
real estate, which by definition is anything “attached to or under the soil”; equipment
is the stuff on or in the real estate. It is therefore movable, at least in
principle. In French the word for “furniture” is not “fourniture” but “meuble,”
which derives from Latin “mobilis,” which actually means “movable.” (The word
for “furniture” in Latin on the other hand is “supellex,” but there is no need
to chase derivations any further.) In any case, it seems likely that friends
have been helping friends move furniture far enough back into history for
mobility to have become part of the very definition. The very earliest furnishings might not
have been movable – for which reason I balk at calling them furniture. At the Neolithic
site Skara Brae in Scotland, for example, in excavated private houses dating to
some 2500 BCE there are Flintstone-like stone dressers, shelves, and beds. They
are really built-ins (I sure as heck wouldn’t try to move them) and so part of
the real estate. But more portable furnishings turn up very early in ancient
Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China. They include nearly all the basic types of
furniture still in use today: chairs (in a broad sense including sofas and
benches), beds, dressers, chests, shelves, tables, and cabinets. No doubt a
friend with an ass (I refer to the equine) was commonly called upon to help
move them. Lightweight folding chairs, which can be carried easily, date back
thousands of years. There are surviving examples of them from Egyptian tombs
and depictions of them from both Assyria and ancient China. Styles and quality of
furniture varied greatly from place to place and time to time but the fundamental
forms and functions have remained the same.
Built-in furnishings at Skara Brae
Furniture (leaving aside the special
case of antiques) is very expensive to buy new, but often resells for only a
few cents on the dollar (when buyers can be found at all) even if it is barely
used. For this reason some people frequent estate sales and yard sales as the
sole sources of furnishings for their houses and apartments. It is a
cost-effective practice, though of course the buyers need a friend with a truck
to move the stuff from the site. From now on, though, if I happen again to be that friend, I’ll let them do the loading and unloading themselves. I’m tired.
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