SATURDAY AND SUNDAY

Saturday, my sister comes over and helps me clear out my apartment.
I send her away with lamps and lampshades, a tennis racket, cds, an electric piano, a tent and sleeping bag, a used bike. We gather a mound of paperwork (I've saved receipts and tax returns for the last 20 years). We build a pile by the couch.  I am to slowly go through it and throw most of it away.

Sunday,  JD takes me to IKEA.

We drive through the Holland Tunnel to a desolate land of off ramps, factories the size of small communities, a cold treeless world and then we're at IKEA.

IKEA chills me to the core.

He pushes me around in a wheelchair.  As I'm rolled around I disappear. I am invisible.

The human need to create a quick homey world. No one has time to gather things to create a home but you can buy the look of a home for very little money if you will spend the day staggering in this windowless convoy with more merchandise than is (right or good) and it's everywhere.

Everything I saw I thought, "I could use that" but I don't dare stop and look at it or even consider buying it because IKEA never ends.

When we got to the check out line with my little sheet (I thought I lost it), I asked JD if he wanted to bag it.

"Wanna just get out of here, pretend we never came here today?"

And I kind of thought JD would quietly say and with some small shame,

"yeah, lets get out of here. I can't stay here another minute."

But he didn't.  JD is a competitor, he enjoys fighting for parking places, he got good grades in engineering school. We are not two peas in a pod. So JD perseveres. He gets us through check out.

I buy a tiny dining table, three sets of shelves, matching storage boxes, and a gimmicky red IKEA wall clock. I almost abandoned the clock at checkout but JD insisted I get it. (It was cheap and you feel like you have to buy things, you've spent the day there).

And we drive through endless broken parking lots with acres of plastic parking barriers to the pick up the loot. JD loads the back of the car and I concentrate on not letting the desolation, the existential angst of spending the day shopping for cheap plastic furniture, get to me. I think I was actually a little shaky.

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My friend CAR left a message on my cell phone objecting to my thoughts on IKEA.
My friend Olivia left this email.

Just wanted to let you know that I USED to feel that way about Ikea. I still hate going there but now that I've started to master the catalogue I have started to appreciate it. It's not a defeat. It's not the same way of decorating as collecting antiques through the years but it still counts towards making your living situation better and cozier.

Me