I’m aware that there are homes -- places of culture and refinement -- in which dining room chairs are pieces of furniture where human beings sit while they eat good food and have enlightened conversation.
Here at our house, however, chairs tend to serve two very nontraditional functions:
--Chairs are ground cover for the hunter/gatherer feline Basil as he stalks about in his daily rounds of cat daring-do, ever vigilant for cat-imaginary villains. Basil hides behind chair legs and darts in and out of shadows, ready to attack a passing and threatening human foot or an unvacuumed dust bunny.
--Chairs are visual elements for me, shapes I notice that might be a part of a photograph. A chair is a circle here, a straight line there. A chair in my way of thinking is something the light strikes, after which the light bends, twists, bounces one way or another. A chair is a piece in the puzzle that is a photo opportunity.
Yes, there are times here when a chair does serve the more conventional function of being a place a human can park his/her backside, but those times tend to be rare...and even when Leah and I do want to sit, we have to make sure the chair space hasn’t already been claimed by a cat or a dog -- four-leggeds, after all, being the true rulers of our particular universe.
