Josh Pachter

Sometime during the mid-1970s, my mother bought a bizarre 3-D sofa pillow at an art fair in southern Florida. It was so ugly it was interesting, and everyone who saw it in my parents’ living room either loved it or hated it.

A decade later, I was living in what was then West Germany, and one day Mom called me, told me she was adding a list of bequests to her will, and asked me which of her possessions I’d want to have when she died.

“That’s so morbid,” I said. “I don’t even want to think about you dying.”

But she insisted, and, in order to end that part of the conversation, I said the first thing that came into my mind: “I want that pillow, the one with the ladies’ heads on it.”

She promised to put that in her will — but, a few weeks later, a package came for me in the mail. Inside the box was — no, not that pillow, but another one made by the same artist, with a note from Mom saying, “I don’t think you should have to wait.”

Sweet, right?

Except a few years later, I returned to the US and wound up losing an awful lot of my belongings in the move. When my mother asked me what I was the sorriest to have lost, I didn’t even need to think about it: “That pillow,” I said.

And, yes, a week or so later, a package came in the mail….