A CHAIRY TALE AND THE TWO BEARS

Once upon a time there was a beautiful young woman. Well, she wasn't exactly beautiful, and she wasn’t particularly young. As a matter of fact, she was more like plump, average looking, and of a grandmotherly age. Her name was Mama Bear.

She and Papa Bear decided it was time to get her a new chair. She wore out her old chair from too many years in it writing nursery rhymes. OK, they weren’t nursery rhymes, but they were storybooks all the same, and log updates, and Facebear posts, and presentations for other mama bears who also lived in the woods, and articles for The Woodsier Times.

She was excited to go into a local furniture store. But of all the chairs she tried there, they were too big, or too small, or too expensive, or too fluffy, or too non-fluffy.

The same was true at the next store, and the next, and the next, and even at the next, and at the one after that. There was not a single chair in all the land that was just right. Mama Bear felt discouraged.

There must be something wrong with her, she told Papa Bear, because it shouldn’t be that hard to find a chair that is just right. She knew this was a first-world problem, and she felt guilty complaining about finding a perfect chair when so many other bears in the great woods beyond them had no chairs at all.

Papa Bear was the pragmatic sort. He was tired of looking at chairs so he growled at Mama Bear. “How difficult can it be to find a chair that suits you?” asked Papa Bear. “I can walk into any store in the land and find a chair I like.”

And so Papa Bear did just that. Only when he got it home, he sat in his chair and frowned. “This chair is too short when I lean back,” he said in a sad voice. “I don’t like it.”

But as the weeks passed, Papa Bear came to love the chair he picked out for himself. “It grew on me or I grew into it,” he said happily. But he was sad that Mama Bear still had no chair.

Her old chair went to meet its maker, and Papa Bear’s old chair was taken away to the Goodbear store. Mama Bear had no place to plop her furry behind.

Then one day Papa Bear said, "Let's go back to one of the stores we visited and look again."

So they did. Mama Bear was amazed. She spotted a chair that was not too big, nor too small, nor too fluffy, nor too non-fluffy. It was just right! The only thing wrong with it was that she didn’t like the fabric. “Too mod,” she told Papa Bear. She was an old-fashioned kind of bear.

But the store people said she could have that chair in an old-fashioned fabric, and the people gave her many choices of material. So she picked out a fabric she liked and ordered her new chair.

Then she waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.

One day her chair arrived and Papa Bear picked it up to surprise her when she returned from her work at The Woodsier Times.

But there was a new problem. The chair came in two parts. The two bears had to attach the back to the seat and after an hour of trying as hard as they might, and saying words that should not appear in a chairy tale, they were angry.

The bars on which they needed to fit the back were too tightly pressed into the sides of the chair. What could they do? The chair might have to go back to the store. Mama Bear might not get her chair after all.

She might never find a chair and she would have to do her writing … where?

But wait! Papa Bear had an idea! He found two crowbars in his bear cave! He had never used a crowbar before in his life but, his own Papa, Grandpapa Bear, had once told him when he was just a cub that they would come in handy one day. The cub who became Papa Bear didn’t believe him, but once again, he was still finding out things in life about which his own Papa was right. This was one of them. The day had come for those crowbars to come in handy, after all.

Papa Bear used the tools to hold the steel bars in place so the back would slide on. It did! It slid right on. The two bears rejoiced!

“Why do we make simple tasks so hard, sometimes?” Mama Bear asked while finally sitting in her new chair next to Papa Bear in his.

“I don’t know, Mama, but sometimes that is just how we roll,” said Papa Bear with a chuckle as he settled into his new chair for a  long winter's nap.

Finally, they could laugh about their experience finding the right chairs.  At long last, Mama Bear had her new chair. And there she wrote happily ever after.

The end.