Chantal and I were at Coral a while back. Coral is Manta’s first big-box store. It’s what you get when you combine Walmart and Costco, and then triple the number of unstaffed cashier lanes.

We were looking for plastic chairs. Four plastic chairs, to be exact, for our balcony. Ordinarily, we would find them at Plasti Lopez. As this most awesome of business names suggests, Plasti Lopez specializes in plastics. There are three stores: two in Manta and one in Portoviejo, which is fifteen minutes closer to San Clemente. They’re a pain in the ass to reach by car. There is no parking.

Coral, on the other hand, is easily accessible on Manta’s wide northward thoroughfare, Av. 113, and offers a secured parking area that rivals most futbol stadiums. It has an enormous plastic goods department. Coral sells several models of plastic chair and keeps them stacked, almost to the ceiling, at the far end of the store.

As it happens, that week Coral had a sale on plastic chairs. Buy twelve and get the thirteenth free. I think it was for Mother’s Day.

As tempting an offer as thirteen chairs may be, we were in the market for only four. Our balcony is long but not wide. Furniture arrangements tend to be very linear. It’s like trying to decorate a bowling lane.

We already had a matchy-matchy wicker set assembled in a rigid-looking column at one end of our balcony, underneath the dining area window. We had space left at the other end for a small plastic bistro table and four chairs.

Also, who needs thirteen plastic chairs?

We pulled four cheapo butt stumps from one of the more manageable stacks and awkwardly angled them out into the main aisle. Almost immediately, we were set upon by a very concerned-looking sales associate. She offered to help bring our selections to the cash. But before she allowed us to leave, she asked why we had not seized upon Coral’s more-than-generous BTGT (buy twelve get thirteen) chair deal. We told her thank you but we only need the four.

Then she said the most Ecuadorian thing ever: “But where will your family sit when they visit?”

More genteel Canadians and Americans scoff at the idea of the cheap plastic chair. It is what you buy when you cannot afford good lawn furniture. Every redneck country estate features at least one sad-looking cluster of soiled plastic chairs amid the discarded appliances and rusted out engine blocks. In Canada and the States, the cheap plastic chair is a sure indicator of poverty, and a barometer of bad taste.

Not so in Ecuador. Here, cheap plastic chairs are abundant – and essential. You find them in restaurants, doctors’ waiting rooms, government offices, hostal lobbies. They are in people’s living rooms. They provide overflow seating at churches and hospital bedsides. Families carry them to the beach or to the futbol pitch for an afternoon’s leisure.

Whole cottage industries depend on the cheap plastic chair. Especially around the holidays: dozens, if not hundreds, of gleaming white seats, stacked high on the bed of a truck and wrapped in protective sheeting, bound for who-knows-what event. A wedding perhaps, or a funeral.

Cheap plastic chair rentals are a vital community service. For those with no room to store thirteen, or however many of the things it takes to host an entire village of Ecuadorian backsides. When there is death, mourners perform a ritual akin to Shiva. They arrange their rented chairs in rows on the street, in front of the grieving household. Women bring food and the men in town stop by at night, after work, freshly combed and dressed in white, to pay their respects in silence. This can go on for several days. I have seen mariachi perform at such gatherings. The musicians get their own chairs too.

I often think about our exchange that morning with the girl at Coral: about the deep cultural value expressed in her concern for our relatives’ comfort.

I think about what the cheap plastic chair means to families in this fantastically atypical country; how it is there for them in their days of boundless joy and nights of cavernous suffering.

I think about the utter lack of pretension the cheap plastic chair represents, like the proud people it holds high. I think about how it is invisible and vital, flimsy and foundational; the chintzy, injection-molded, anonymous pillar of the community.

If there is poetry in such things, then the cheap plastic chair deserves a verse. And we in the north, who think very differently about these matters, if we think of them at all, might discover something new to read it.

That the cheap plastic chair is family and community and belonging. That we have forgotten these crucial ideas and spend our time instead, on social media, raging at the strangers next door.