Ode To My Family

The other day I was writing in my journal, like I do and I wrote something about a girl seeing her father cry. This brought up a memory of the first time I saw my father cry.  I won't go into details about that, but the thing that resonated with me is that when he had this moment of vulnerability he was lying on the couch.

This is the only memory I have of my father ever lying on a couch.

It got me thinking about the fathers I've known in my life, and across the spectrum, all those fathers had chairs.  A special chair, one that is clearly HIS.  You can walk into any house with a father and within ten seconds spot where Dad sits when Dad is relaxing.  Generally speaking it's the chair that appears out of place in the room.  Or it's the one that looks like it's been sat in an excessive amount.  A modern day throne for a modern day castle.

My Dad's chair has gone through a number of iterations, mainly increasing in size as I've gotten older.  First it was a chair that was one of a pair.  It wasn't a particularly attractive chair, a kind of green-gold velvet with a low back.  It rocked, so he would lean it as far back as it would go while he watched television.  I always found it odd that he rarely used the ottoman that went with it.  Ottomans are not especially popular in my family for some reason.  Sometimes I would sit in it, but it was clear that Dad's chair was to immediately vacated when Dad entered the room, often with a plate of cheese and crackers and a glass of iced tea. Now that he's retired, the chair is enormous -a Brown Monster.  It's a chair you can get lost in, and in fact, he has been known to get lost in it from time to time.  The new chair induces a narcoleptic response that is difficult to describe.  We'll be sitting in our chairs having a pleasant conversation, me, my brother and my father and we'll address him only to find him unconscious in his chair*.  I suppose these are the pleasures that come with retirement.

*My brother tells a story about one time when he visited my parents and my mother made lunch.  Afterwards, my brother retired to the Brown Monster to watch television or read a magazine or something.  The next thing he knew, my mother was shaking him so he could come eat dinner.  He'd just taken an unintentional five hour nap.  "I wasn't even tired when I sat down..." he told me later, "that chair does something to you."

And as I thought of that, I rewound my mind to earlier days.  My Dad's Dad had a chair as well.  When I was really little it was a leather chair with a low back and a seldom-used ottoman, not unlike the one my father sat in years before he got the Brown Monster he has now.  I only carry faded memories of that chair - it was tan and worn.  What I do remember is the chair that replaced it.  A large, blue, velvety La-Z-Boy.  He smoked a pipe, keeping them and the associated accouterments in an adjacent side table.  There are very few smells in the world that I find more comforting than Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco smoke.  I clearly remember the smell of that chair, and the sour stink of his "reserve" pipes held in the drawer of that side table.  The drawer was difficult to open.  It was easier to pull the handle and slide the entire table than to ease the drawer open to examine the old pipes.  We always bothered my grandfather to tell us why he no longer used certain pipes -ones that we found to be significantly more interesting than his standard straight pipe.  He would tell us that this one was too heavy and hurt his teeth, or that one didn't sit right in his shirt pocket causing the tobacco to dump out when he bent over.  There was a lot to think about when selecting the ideal pipe.

When my grandfather died in 1991, the Blue Chair and side table appeared in our living room.  For years afterward whenever I opened the drawer of the side table, which had long been cleared of pipes, there was still the tiniest whiff of stale smoke.   In the few months after he died I would bury my face in the Blue Chair and travel back in time.

My Mother's Dad was an eccentric.  I think if he had been born 80 years later he would have lived under the yoke of "diagnosis."  It's never been confirmed that he was mildly autistic or had Asperger Syndrome, and it's better that way.  He was what I would describe as pleasantly anti-social, a tinkerer -a closet genius.  It was clear from a young age that my grandfather and I would not have a normal relationship.  He didn't appear to have time for children,  which was odd because he'd had three of his own.  People were not his thing; he preferred the company of automobiles.  It was generally good practice to let him do his thing and do your best to stay out of his way.

And he had a chair too.  His chair reflected his singular nature.  It wasn't an overstuffed La-Z-Boy "Dad Chair."  It was a collapsible chaise lounge (emphasis on collapsible) that looked like it had been rescued off the deck of a derelict cruise ship.  It's wood was worn from what appeared to be weather, but was likely worn from use.  It creaked ominously when it was burdened with so much as falling wisp of pine straw.  Most strange was when my grandfather wanted to sit down, he had to assemble the chair.  To my child's eyes, it had about 12,000 moving parts that had to be painstakingly adjusted.  The chair was a chaos of bolts, wing-nuts, pinch points and splinters all draped with a flimsy piece of green fabric with red and white stripes.  It seemed  it took about 30 minutes of grunting, sweating and adjusting to get the chair to a place where it could be enjoyed as a chair.  Then another few minutes of actually positioning your body in the chair in a way that it would not injure you.  Once the proper position was attained, it was best to refrain from moving.  Once he was done "relaxing" he would then have to spend another 20 minutes breaking the chair down and returning it to it's place in the garage.  You see, once the chair was assembled for sitting it could not even be MOVED to a new location.  So if you needed to, say, back the car out to go to the grocery store, you had to wait for the chair to be disassembled and returned to storage before leaving.  It was best to let him know that you intended to leave the house via vehicle before he left to "relax."  Even at the tender age of eight I could tell that this was unusual.

I was warned from the time I was old enough to stand that I was, under no circumstances, to sit in the chair. It was best if I didn't touch, or even approach the chair.  It might as well have been an electric fence.  And what was especially odd to me was that in order to occupy the chair, my grandfather had to retire to their driveway, behind the car port.

As soon as I remembered this chair, I texted my brother in Florida to see if he remembered it.  Here's how the exchange went:

Me:  Here's a random question.  Do you remember that old chaise lounge Gramps used to assemble and lie on in their driveway?
Him:  Yep. It would pinch the fuck out of you.
Me:  I feel like we weren't allowed to touch it.  That it was somehow dangerous.  Why would anyone sit in a chair that pinches the fuck out of you?
Him:  Only if you moved wrong.

I then called him on Skype and we talked for over an hour -brought together by the chairs our grandfathers relaxed in.

The Blue Chair and the Collapsible Chaise Lounge are both enjoying their own retirements in my parent's basement.  It's impossible to look at them and not think of the men who occupied them.  Each is special in that it perfectly reflects the nature of the man who occupied it for the majority of its life.  You can't throw things like that away.