A Woman Brought Me a Broken Chair and Asked for a New One

 

Cedar Valley News
July 1, 2026
A Woman Brought Me a Broken Chair and Asked for a New One
By Lars Olson

A woman came into my store last week with a kitchen chair and set it on the counter like she was turning in a body. The back rail had cracked where it met the leg. Her husband had glued it once, badly. She wanted to know where the new chairs were.

I turned it over in my hands. It was a good chair, oak, forty years old, the kind nobody builds anymore. I told her I could fix it. She looked at me like I had offered to raise the dead.

Most of my work now is like this. Not selling. Talking people out of throwing away a thing with more life in it than they think. The country has gotten very good at starting over and very bad at starting again, and those are not the same thing.

On Friday night I watched a man teach the difference, and I have not stopped thinking about it.

Our ward held a watch party in the hall. Folding chairs, a table of food, neighbors I see on Sundays, and neighbors I only see at the store. On the screen, the Hollywood Bowl, where a choir a hundred years old had come back to sing. Partway through, a man sat down at the piano.

Everybody my age knows the face. He is sixty-eight now. He has been famous since boyhood, and has spent a good part of his life being counted out and climbing back. He had buried a brother two months before, the second in a year and a half. And he sang a song he wrote himself, called Start Again, and told the room something plain. We are all dealing with hard things, he said. And every one of us has the ability to start over.

He was not selling anything. He meant it about himself. You could see it.

Here is what a hardware man hears in words like those.

Starting over sounds like a clean slate. New chair, new start, out with the broken one. But a clean slate is usually a lie, told to avoid the harder work. The chair is not the problem. The break is not the end of the chair. What the chair needs is not replacement. It needs repair, and repair is slower, and repair leaves a mark.

I glued the woman’s chair, clamped it, and let it set overnight. When the clamp came off, you could still see the old crack, a darker line in the oak. It will always be there. And the joint is now stronger than the wood around it, because glue done right holds harder than the grain. The chair did not start over. It started again, and it carries the break in it, and it holds.

I have another counter, on Sundays. People bring me different broken things there. A marriage with a crack in the back rail. A habit somebody glued badly once and hoped would hold. A man who walked away from his faith, standing in the doorway wondering if he is allowed back in. They ask me the same question the woman asked. Is it too far gone. Do I start over.

And I tell them what I tell her. You do not get the unbroken thing back. Nobody does. It is not on offer. What is on offer is the repair, the slow kind, the kind with a seam. And the seam is not the shame of the thing. The seam is the strength of it. It is the proof you did not throw the chair away.

The man at the piano knew this. You do not write a song called Start Again at sixty-eight, after all of it, if you think starting means erasing. He was not asking the room to forget what it had lost. He was asking it to sit back down at the bench and begin.

So here is my counter advice, weekday and Sunday both.

The next thing you are ready to throw out, the chair or the marriage or the year, turn it over first. Look for the joint. Ask a man who fixes things whether it can be saved.

Most of the time, it can.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. If you have something broken you have been ready to throw out, a chair, a habit, a hard year, tell us whether you decided to repair it instead. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the Tabernacle Choir’s June 2026 return to the Hollywood Bowl and Donny Osmond’s performance of his song Start Again described here are real.