Thieves prove my wife is never wrong

George Le Masurier

of the Gateway

UP ’N ITEM — It had to be thieves. There was simply no other logical explanation, according to my wife, who, for the record, couldn’t possibly be wrong.

We had just taken possession of a family heirloom: an 1870s vintage round oak dining table and seven chairs. It belonged to the doctor who was already old when he delivered me back in that other millennium and remained our family physician until he died at the age of 580 when I was a teenager.

He practiced an old style of medicine, where the answer to every ailment, from a sliver to a headache, was “a shot.”

Having made his thoughtful diagnosis, he attacked me with a hypodermic the size of the Space Needle, cackling, “This won’t hurt at all, heh heh.”

But he owned a beautiful table. He willed it to my parents, who willed it to me, and I wouldn’t touch it until I was certain he hadn’t hidden any harpoon-sized needles in it.

The table spent almost 10 years in the shop of a furniture refinisher on Vancouver Island in Canada who said he was really busy but would get to it “real soon.”

We had almost forgotten about the table when the furniture guy phoned us up on a Wednesday evening to say it was ready. Could we pick it up that weekend? No.

Well, he said, we had to get it by the following Thursday, because he was retiring and leaving town on Friday.

Thanks for the notice.

So, we got the table and chairs and, while I was playing golf in Mike Burton’s Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation “On the Greens” tournament, my wife loaded up the chairs in our truck and took them to an upholster in Tacoma. She parked in front of the upholster’s shop and asked the guy to help her unload them.

Turning back to the truck in about two minutes, my wife noticed the most valuable captain’s chair was missing. In that short span of time, someone had stolen it, according to my wife, who is never wrong.

The thieves must have spotted her, followed her to the upholstery shop and only had time to take one chair. The most valuable one.

She filed a police report. Posted ads on Craigslist. Set up a search on eBay, in case the thieves tried to sell it.

Then she also placed an ad in The News Tribune. That got an immediate response, coincidentally from a co-worker at the Tacoma newspaper who also lives in Gig Harbor.

Yes, she’s seen the chair. It’s sitting on the side of state Route 16 by the onramp to the new bridge.

Hmmm. We both drive over the bridge every day.

So, my wife, who is never wrong, walked down to the bridge and found the chair sitting there. It was a little banged up. The back had broken off, and those pieces had been driven over and smashed.

But there it was.

I thought about asking if the thieves had rejected their bounty and discarded it there, but I caught myself just in time.

My wife, who is never wrong, came to realize that, in tying down the chairs, she had only looped the rope around the captain’s chair, but she never actually secured it. She was surprised that I never once became upset at losing a family heirloom, or that her fantastic story about the thieves turned out to be her own folly.

But guys will understand. I was just happy to know that, every once in a while, I’m not the only one in our family who is wrong.