Yesterday afternoon I entered the last edit on the
last sentence of the last chapter of my rewrite, then made a celebratory
raspberry latte and carried it to the Hundred Dollar Chair. I leaned back and
closed my eyes, savoring the moment. Creaky groans punctured the quiet, as I
churned back and forth. The rhythm is familiar, always makes me sleepy, like the
lullaby cadence of backseat naps on lazy childhood trips to visit relatives.
Trips that sometimes included the original owner of that
chair.
It came from my grandfather, who bought it when he and my grandmother
lived in the Spring Port Trailer Court. The details of my
grandfather’s purchase are a little fuzzy, but what I do remember is that one
day he went out and bought a brown velveteen swivel rocker and he paid a whopping
hundred dollars for it. It must have been the early 70’s, and as with most
depression-era grandparents, a hundred smackers was a hefty wad of cash. Knowing
my grandfather, he probably got the chair “marked-down,” a phrase
certain to set a row of perm-rodded heads nodding in reverent appreciation as my
grandmother shouted the story from under her plastic hood in the Busy Bee
Salon.
My genes are rooted in thriftiness, inherited from a family who never
pays full price for anything. The problem with this mode of thinking is
sometimes my mother would return from a day shopping with a pair of
shiny patent leather shoes and exclaim, “Look! Only a dollar-ninety-five!”
To which my sister would reply, “But Mom, they’re not your size.”
It didn’t matter. A bargain was a bargain and she’d make like Prince
Charming until she found a pair of grateful feet for those shoes--usually one of
us. For the next year, one lucky daughter would end up with toilet paper tucked
into the toe of her new shoes to keep them from falling off.
When my grandma died and Grampa moved in with my parents, the Hundred Dollar Chair moved in with him. A dozen years later, I sat in it as my
mother took her last painful breath. I rocked a bit, watched her cancer-wracked
body become a hollow shell, thinking about how life passes through rather than
by us.
Somehow the chair ended up in my living room after we cleaned out my
mother’s house and sold off most of the contents. A dozen years later, it followed me here, to
California. The velvet has long since rubbed off the arms and there’s a tear in
the seat cushion, but it still brings me comfort on days like today, wishing my
mother were alive so I could tell her about the book, watch her rock my
grandchildren to sleep as she sings her favorite hymns.
A couple of hours later I stuffed four
year's worth of sweat and tears into a manilla envelope and headed toward the door to mail it. As I knelt beside the Hundred Dollar Chair to
retrieve my dropped keys, I came eye to eye with the armrest. I could almost see my
grandpa's crinkly hands resting on the velvet, absent-mindedly stroking the
fabric with his thumb as he rocked away his afternoons.
Someday the chair may
outlive its use, but you couldn’t give me a hundred bucks for it now. Hell,
you’re lucky if I even let you sit in it.
Me: While you were lying around playing X-Box and downloading Adult Swim episodes, I was on the roof in the pouring rain, cleaning out the gutters!
