Apparently my mind is fixated on chairs this week as this is the second post in a few days about a chair. The first entry was serious, this one…not so much.
I took a seat in the place of defeat last night…and not for the first time. Things had been going along swimmingly all day. Amy and I were sharing several hours of interrupted oneness with the kids in school and no peripheral duties pulling us in another directions. We had a sit-down breakfast AND lunch, seamless conversation, hand-holding and smooching and laughing with one another. I had some sort of flu on Valentine’s Day so we postponed our date until last night and went to a steakhouse in Atlanta where we were tucked away in seclusion…just me and my girl. Breakfast, lunch and dinner with my girl… I was diggin’ it big time.
Then we decided to go to a mall across the street from the restaurant. I’d never been to this mall and I was glad to try something new. It was crowded and I immediately began to miss the quietness of our little booth back at the steakhouse. The crowds were kind of loud and there was no indication of a lagging American economy as shoppers were running hither and yon. Then it happened. Amy saw a store called Brighton and asked if we could enter in for her to browse. Like a lamb led to the slaughter I complied and entered the world of purses, bracelets and accessories. My precious day was being threatened with disaster. It was then that I took a seat in the place of defeat.
I sat in the man-chair. All alone, in a corner, far from the place of activity of the store was a solitary rattan chair. It was the man chair and I knew that I had to be seated there.
What is the man-chair, you may ask?
In shops that are nearly 100% feminized, where no heterosexual male would ever enter on his own, there is the provision of chair for the man to sit in solitude while the woman he entered with does her thing in the shop. It is both a place of relief and defeat. The man is relieved that he has somewhere to go while his lady engages in the fine art of “shopping”, which is different from the male activity of “buying” (see marriage manual in chapter 3). He sits in the man-chair which is usually afforded a copy of USA Today for him to read up on sports as he begins the painful process of slow death. He is relieved to have a place to be when he sits there, yet he also knows that he has been defeated. There is no place or purpose for him in the store. He has nothing to offer and the only thing he has which might be needed is the funding of whatever his dear one will buy. He is to sit quietly in the chair until she approaches him with something that he cannot identify – is it a hat? perhaps a purse? or is it a hat that turns into a purse? He never knows. what he does know is that the man-chair is his own island for the next 20-25 minutes. He cannot move because there is no GPS in existence to help him understand the environment of this girlie shop. He does well to stay put and hope for his evacuation.
You will be glad to know that I survived and left just as happily as I entered.
Amy got to “shop” which is, again, different from the verb “buy” – all men must learn that these two words mean something different to women! We left the mall and drove forty minutes back home to the quietness we had earlier enjoyed. The man-chair is simply a part of life that all men need to prepare to deal with…kind of like a colonoscopy. Don’t be insulted by the man chair, make use of it when you must. On your wife’s behalf, scout out some bigger shops which have an entire man-chair section and affirm the other men in your circle of defeat. They understand the MCDS (man-chair-defeat-syndrome) so don’t feel awkward. In the end there is great relief. How do I know? Because there is no shopping in Heaven (no buying there, either). There will be a day wherein there is neither mall nor man-chair. In your patience, brothers, posses your souls.
Happy Saturday,
Jeff