There has been a chair beside our building door for as long as I can remember. It is wooden, painted green, and nobody knows who put it there. Old men sit on it in the afternoon. Delivery drivers put boxes on it. In summer, children stand on it to reach the doorbell. Two years ago the chair broke. One leg came off, and for a week it lay on its side by the wall. Then somebody repaired it. The new leg was a different colour, and it was slightly too short, so the chair moved when you sat on it. Nobody ever said who did it. Last spring the building manager decided the entrance should look modern. He removed the chair and put a small metal table there instead, with a plant on it. The table lasted eleven days. Somebody took the plant. Somebody else took the table. The chair came back the following week, still with its short leg, still moving when you sat on it. It was cleaner than before, so somebody had kept it somewhere dry. The manager said nothing. I think he understood. Last month I saw a woman waiting for a taxi. She was elderly and she had been standing for a while. She looked at the chair, hesitated, and then sat down. The taxi took twenty minutes. If the table had been there, she would have stood for twenty minutes, and the entrance would have looked modern.