The massacre of the antimacassar
The white cloth at the headrest of my Indigo plane seat tonight was the small, almost forgettable, trigger. It was crisp, tucked in and functional. I leaned back, and for a fleeting second, somewhere between the euphony of takeoff announcements and the hum of the cabin, it pulled me decades backward. Not to airports or airplanes, but to living rooms ("drawing rooms") where time moved slower, and chairs wore their own quiet dignity. There was a time when every respectable chair had a little secret draped over its shoulders. We didn’t call it antimacassar. That word belonged to dictionaries and crossword puzzles, and I became familiar with it while browsing through embroidery-pattern pages on my phone just a few months ago. In our homes, it was simply the "chair back", a square, elliptical or rectangular piece of cloth, carefully placed where heads would rest, where oil would stain, where time would quietly settle. My earliest memories of them are...
