Who could talk about them as lovingly as Mr. Griffith. (From now on we will refer to Mr. Griffith as hcg.)
Is is a wonderous thing to read his feelings for chairs.
He was not around in the easy chair days, but we can only imagine how he would have waxed eloquent on that particular type of chair.
But enough of that for the moment. On to his true love.
The African, or Plank chair. One piece of wood cut into 2 pieces, and strategically fit together with some other cuts. The simplicity is fooling. But then again, simple things many times are so pure in their beauty.
The first time he saw one was in and old issue of Popular Mechanics. He had to make one. But the problem with that was that he had no wood. Christ, he did not even have a saw.
So his dream was put off but not forgotten for over 20 years. During that time he had a hard time thinking about much else. The chair was on his mind.
That is were his writing came from. The longing he felt for that chair. To have one in his life. To sit on it, feel it carressing his buttocks.
After a minorly popular book about the history of the chair, many short stories and articles submitted to any magazine that would take them, hcg decided to honor the plank chair and make one for himself.
God how he wanted one.
But sadly it was not meant to be. As many love stories go, it ended when so close the the end. I guess a 20 year love story has an inevitable ending.
The wood was purchase, an engineer dispatched to deal with the plans for said chair, and arrangements were made for a space in which to build it.
A few years after all the wheels were put into motion, with various models failing in their trial runs, the engineer was killed when he sat on his latest itereation.
It not only broke under his weight (he was over 460 lbs, not that it matters), but spintered, which everybody knows can be bad. A splinter stuck into him on his left buttock near his hip.
He did not worry about it, what with a splinter weighing a gram or so and him weighing close to a quater ton, what was there to worry about? Sadly, plenty.
It's the old story. It got infected because he never removed it (him being so obese and all he could not reach it, and him being obese and all he had yet to find someone who would want to take it out for him, if you know what I mean). The infection then traveled throughout his body, ending up in his brain, and ending up in him dying a horrible death (I obviously never experienced death but I am pretty sure all death is horrible at least to a point.)
So hcg never got he working model of a plank chair. The dumb bastard.
