The Chair of My Childhood. And Adolescence. And Adulthood.

Today marks the end of an era. We're officially a papasan chair free household. No member of the McCarthy family, in New York, Pennsylvania, or Massachusetts, has it. The papasan chair has left the building.

If you don't know what a papsan chair is, maybe you referred to it as a round chair. And if you grew up in the late '90's, early aughts, don't even play; you know what I'm talking about.

It's an iconic piece of furniture that graced the luckiest of homes and dorm rooms. I was seriously obsessed w/ this chair. My sister had one in her room her senior year of college and I thought it was the coolest thing since jelly slippers (bear w/ me here, this is 1998). Her dorm room was full of other cool things, like a poster of the scene from Romeo and Juliet where Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes are looking at each other through the fish tank. If your mind can't immediately conjure up that image, you must have spent the '90's under a rock, or maybe you weren't born yet; I don't know which one is worse. To not have seen that poster flanking every dorm room and video store of it's time! What a loss! 

Being the youngest has it's advantages, one of the best ones being introduced to all the "cool" stuff by my much cooler older sisters. Even if my sisters weren't that cool, they had some friends that were. Like my sisters roommate, the rightful owner of the Leo and Claire Danes fish tank poster. The height of sophistication when you're visiting over parent's weekend w/ your greasy bangs and coke-bottle glasses. 

This chair has been in the family for decades. If she got it in '98, and it may have been earlier, that's over 20 years of pure enjoyment. Pier 1 may have thought they were pulling one over on all of us, selling these huge, cumbersome chairs that are impossible to transport and take up half of your living room and can only seat one person and that one person is constantly rearranging to get comfortable, but the joke's on them b/c we sure got our money's worth out of that thing.

My parents lugged that chair to and from their house in Syracuse during college move outs, drove it out to Pennsylvania for my sisters life after college, drove it back to Syracuse when I moved home and begged my sister if I could have it, and hauled it to Massachusetts when Brent and I bought our house and had room for it. The papasan chair may be a large reason why my dad drinks. 

Brent tried telling me not to worry, he had a papasan chair we could use and I was all, hold up. Don't even try to tell me that plastic, glorified camp chair from Wal-Mart is a papasan chair. It may be a round chair by default, but that is no papasan chair. Show some respect.

We're clearing away some unused furniture and the papasan chair didn't' make the cut. I finally posted it on craigslist today in the free section, figuring we'd be lucky to get it out of the house since it probably won't fit in our car. I've never seen so many interested parties. I kid you not, within the first half hour of posting, I had five inquiries. They're still coming in, and I'm hoping someone will pick it up by the end of the day. We're not in a major metropolitan area, these are people willing to drive to our tiny town and pick up this glorious piece of nostalgia. To think I had any doubts; shit, we could have made like $50 bucks off this thing.

So long, papasan. It's been one hell of a run.

wistfully remembering all the good times I had in that chair