Like our old leather chair, my daughter thinks I'm worth keeping

Aug. 19—I ran my palms over one arm of the old recliner, the leather intermittently worn from its original dark brown to a sandy tan from years of countless hands like mine exploring their surface. Cold metal kissed the tips of my fingers as they glided over the buttons lining the edges of the frame. They, too, were worn.

I pulled the heavy chair from its nest against our living room's outside wall and guided it gently across the hardwood — the padding I'd placed on its stubby feet sliding gracefully over the floorboards — to a position in front of the television. The chair groaned as it moved, its aging wood-and-metal bones undoubtedly shifting just below the layers of foam and hide.

The chair in place, I said something along the lines of, "There you go." I was speaking to both it and my daughter.

"Thank you, Daddy," the latter said, her voice buoyant with excitement.

Instead of climbing onto the cushion — wrapped in a thin layer of fabric instead of leather — like anyone over the age of 7 would likely do, Arlie clambered her lanky body over the arm of the chair. The wood complained loudly at the sudden weight.

"Arlie, don't do that," I said, somewhat forcefully, as she sunk into the cushions. "It's an old chair.

You have to be careful with things that are old."

"Like you?" she wanted to know.

I could have crushed ice with my squinting eyes.

"No. Not like me," I said. "Like this chair. As things get older, they're more likely to break."

"Oh," she said.

"So, how old is this chair?"

"I'm not sure," I said. A friend and former coworker of mine with a lot of knowledge about such things — you know, seating — told me she thought the recliner might be at least 20 years old. Likely, it was even older.

"This is nice," she told me after I'd rescued the thing. "They don't build them this well anymore."

"It's missing the seat," I told her, as if she couldn't see the gaping hole where the main cushion was meant to be.

She grinned.

"I can see that," she said, or something like it.

It was basically the same thing the chair's previous owner had told me some 10 minutes before, after I'd stopped him from unloading the bed of his pickup truck to ask about it.

He'd placed the chair on the sidewalk just outside the front door of an antique shop a few hundred feet from where I worked. It was a little off to the side so that it wouldn't be in his way as he carried other aging items — lamps ... knickknacks ... an old desk — into the shop. I assumed his plan was to sell these things.

"How much are you asking for that chair?" I asked as he worked to undo a series of ropes and straps he'd used to secure items to his truck bed.

He stopped what he was doing to look at the chair and shook his head as if it had recently told him it had dropped out of med school or gotten knocked up or something else incredibly disappointing.

"Nothing," he said. "Cushion blew off on the highway. It's useless."

I looked at where the cushion was supposed to be, but noticeably wasn't.

"Where'd it blow off, exactly?" I said. I traveled the highway daily; I thought I might locate it.

He shrugged.

"The highway," he said.

"What are you going to do with it?"

"Haul it to the dump."

"Can I have it?" I asked.

"Cushion's missing," he informed me again.

"That's fine," I said, running my hand across the worn leather of its arms for the first time. "I like it."

"It's yours," he told me.

And so it is. Mandy covered a block of furniture foam with store-bought fabric — its pattern a mausoleum of skulls and bones — and placed it where the wayward cushion should have been. It doesn't really match, but it also doesn't really matter. Sits just as comfortably.

"You could get a new chair," Arlie told me as she nestled deeper into the cushions both old and new.

"Nah," I told her. "Just because something's old and a little worn, doesn't mean it's not worth keeping around."

"Like you?" she asked.

I laughed and slapped my palm lightly against the worn leather of the chair's arm.

"Yeah," I said. "Like me."

ADAM ARMOUR is the news editor for the Daily Journal and former general manager of The Itawamba County Times. You may reach him via his Twitter handle, @admarmr.