After reading Nicole C. Kear’s sad and funny essay, “What I Learned About the Pandemic When My Kid Got Trapped in a Couch,” I started thinking about what my couch has meant to me during the pandemic.
I moved in the middle of the pandemic, last June. I hadn’t planned to move, but I was living in a faculty apartment in a dorm and that gig was ending in a year. The students were forced to move out, and increasingly, it was just my kid, my cat, and one other adult, in a building that usually housed almost 300 people. To say the halls felt haunted would be an understatement.
Because of a strange feature of the COVID Cares Act, I was able to take out enough money from my retirement account for a down payment on a large one-bedroom apartment in a 1930s coop in Flatbush, Brooklyn. The money was so heavily taxed, I now owe the IRS more money than I can probably ever raise in the next three years, but hey I’m privileged and lucky enough to have a retirement account. I took the money and ran, right to realtor, and then I spent five months doing paper work.
The couch arrived on moving day. At $2500 it was by far the most expensive piece of furniture I’d ever owned. I bought in on an installment plan, on one of the days after my then girlfriend and I broke up. We broke up a lot, but this time it stuck and I wanted a big comfy sectional to wallow in with me, myself, and…