To Life -- Long and Full

He looked around the dark room he’d been unceremoniously dumped in just minutes ago. Now what? Where was he this time? Only shapes stood out, dark against the lesser darkness. There was a familiar odor to the place, though. Somewhere, back in the past---the memory tried to connect to a picture. No, not quite. Just a familiarity that felt comforting.

The last place, the high-ceilinged room at the base of a huge flight of stairs---that place that was now, too, only a memory---had not been a bad place to be. At least there’d been people, children--he really loved to be around children. He’d been shoved against one wall where he’d offered his meager comfort to hundreds of people over the last years---maybe thousands. The constant daily turmoil and noise in the free clinic had made him feel useful again, brought him out of his near-sleep, in the home he’d claimed before that hall-way.

That older home had been safe; he’d been cared for. But it had been lonely and musty. An old lady had chosen him from a storefront where he’d sat for months. She’d cleaned him up and polished him lovingly, and then she’d pretty much just walked by him from that time on. His usual position, come to think of it, had been alone, near a door, seldom seeing anything but people and things passing by. He’d been used for years, before the free clinic, as merely a place to drop a purse or a package, or remove boots in the winter. A string of entrance ways filed through his memories…leading him back through the years.

Wait! Now the smell of this new place brought forth the memory from long, long ago. The memory grew, from an isolated shot of a room smelling of freshly turned wood, strong scents riding over that---chemical odors of the sticky stuff that had just been applied to him. His birth place! It came rushing back. It must have been over a century ago. He recalled a man who hummed and whistled, who stood back occasionally, hands on hips, to admire each new creation sitting around his shop. He remembered the thrill of feeling new and smoothly made. He was proud of his carved arms and back rail. A pew, that was what the man called him---a church pew. Right, he’d nearly forgotten his name.

And appropriately, he’d gone from the shop, with many others like him---mostly larger than he, he remembered---straight to a building that seemed enormous to him then. A church on a street in some city whose name he’d now forgotten. He was set right up front, under a pretty, colored window. There’d been long spells of no people around; and then there would be days breaking those lonely ones. Days when people were lined up on all the other church pews, and he too got his visitors---though not as many as the pews nearer the back of the room.

How could he have let that memory slip into obscurity? Oh, now the reason came back to him…. That great memory, that proud, lovely placement, his first experience out of the shop-of-creation, had ended many years later in a disaster. A fire, a painful, frightening memory. When it was all over the building was a wreck, very little left. He’d been one of the lucky ones. Scorched, and bubbled, he’d been taken to the house of the man who’d stood in front of him on the busy days. He’d been stored for a time in a dusty attic, and then, eventually, had all his damaged finish removed. A fresh new look had earned him a place in his first lonely hallway, waiting for packages and overcoats to land on him.

But why did this place smell so familiar? Was he back in his first home? Back with his kindly maker who thought him beautiful? No, he knew by now that the humans, the people that drifted in and out of his world, had very short lives. He’d seen a few carried by him, as unmoving as he was---not a normal thing for humans. And in his years in that church he’d seen his first examples of what humans became, while still much younger than he. He’d seen them in front of him in large, decorated boxes. He’d heard the sobbing of the still-moving people around and on him. Before people stopped moving their finish had changed, in a way his never did. Their outside surfaces had become wrinkly, paler; and the tassels that decorated their tops also became pale and worn. Death, they’d called the non-movement. And his creator, too, must have left his shop, looking like that--long ago.

So what now? And as if in answer to his question, the lights came on as a small, dark man entered by a doorway the old pew had not been able to see. Joy rippled over him as he looked around at what were only looming shapes in darkness just minutes ago. Though different, it looked very much like his birth-shop. There were no pews like him, all lined up as they'd been at his birth. In fact, this place was much smaller and couldn’t have contained all those pews. But there were other furnishings, like him old and scarred. And here and there, there were smoothed and resurfaced pieces drying in the cool breeze from the big fan in the wall behind him. He was to be made handsome again. He would wait patiently while the dark man worked on a table sitting near the wall to his right. He could dream of a new home, busy with people, where he’d be a valued addition---where he’d start another new life in a long string of useful lives.