On my way to the gym today, I saw an Adirondack chair sitting alone on a jug handle in Morris Plains.
I’m not sure what it was doing there. Maybe it had been promised Lake George and got catfished by Route 10. Maybe it thinks the jug handle is a dock, and any minute now a fishing boat will swing by to collect it. Until then, it sits patiently watching a majestic school of Toyotas swim past.
Or maybe it’s a confused grandpa chair that wandered off years ago. Somewhere in the Catskills, its family is filing missing-patio reports: “Grandpa went out for firewood in the direction of the Thruway in 1997, and we haven’t seen him since.”
Maybe it’s simply the black sheep of its timber kin. The rest of its Adirondack-chair family is beside a calm lake in Maine, enjoying sunsets and s’mores. This one said, “Nah. Screw you. I’m moving to New Jersey.” It didn’t want loons and pine trees. It yearned for jug handles and muffler exhaust.
Perhaps New Jersey is trying a new tourism strategy: Why drive all the way to the Adirondacks when you can sit in one Adirondack chair surrounded by jug handles and diesel fumes? Bring the family, but only one at a time.
Two roads diverged in a wood near 287, and I— I took the jug handle on Route 10. And that has made all the difference in my bronchitis.