Daddy’s Chair
My writing group, which focuses (mostly) on short-form memoir, chose “Chairs” as its topic for this month. I don’t think any of us knew exactly how it would work out as inspiration, but when we read our essays aloud at Monday’s meeting, we were all struck by how conducive such a seemingly mundane topic was to deep reflection, and by how each of our essays turned out. Here’s mine.
Milford, Connecticut, 1966
I tuck one leg up under me as I sit at the breakfast table, the toes of the other bare foot curling around the twisted metal that forms the legs of my chair. The curved wrought iron back is cold against my shoulders, even through my flannel pajamas; the window beside the table faces north, and the draft around it is persistent.
“Where are your slippers?” my mother asks, but I almost never wear my slippers. On the coldest of winter days, I might wear socks around the house, despite the ever-present danger of slipping when I race up and down our uncarpeted stairs, but I prefer bare feet, year-round, indoors and out.
The seat of my chair is a flat wooden circle not much more than a foot in diameter. It offers no concessions to the shape of the human body, unlike the scooped wooden seats of the Hitchcock chairs my mother admires, the padded vinyl-covered chairs in my grandfather’s Bangor kitchen, or even the woven rush seats of our otherwise severe ladder-back dining room chairs.
This chair has no cushion or pad, and the ring of metal that holds the seat in place protrudes just enough to be felt against the back of my thigh. If I sit here long enough, it will leave an indentation in my soft flesh, curved like a smile.
I love this chair. At seven, I am already drawn to anything quirky or unique—Pippi Longstocking is my constant literary companion, and I have turned our sunporch into my personal museum, curating a collection of oddities that range from exotically foreign coins, stamps, and seashells to a mouse skeleton and a real stuffed alligator. Our kitchen chairs bring an undeniable note of whimsy to an otherwise disappointingly ordinary home. The intricate twists and circles of the wrought iron stand in marked contrast to the staid and sensible furnishings throughout the rest of the house.
I love my chair even more because my mother says it is an “ice cream parlor chair,” and although I’ve never actually been to an ice cream parlor, I do love ice cream. When I sit in my chair, I can conjure the image of a restaurant, one without soups or salads or sandwiches, a place whose sole purpose is the serving of ice cream…and it’s magical.
But one of the best things about my chair is that its original home was a store and lunch counter in Bethel, Maine, called Farwell and Wight’s, owned by my grandmother and great-grandmother, who ran the place for more than two decades, serving home-cooked meals, sandwiches, pies, and, yes, ice cream. These two women are legendary in my mind, although I’ve never met either of them—my great-grandmother because she died in 1949, ten years before I was born, and my grandmother because she lives a world away, with my aunt and uncle in Phoenix, Arizona.
They both, at different times, lived with my parents. My siblings all speak about our grandmother, Grammy, as if she is someone they know well, and the older two of my brothers even remember her mother, whom they call Gram. I know that Grammy taught my sister how to cook, and that only reinforces my conviction, and frequent lament, that “all the fun stuff happened before I was born.”
When Gram and Grammy sold their business in 1945, my father, who grew up in an apartment above the store, hauling wood for the stoves and helping out in the kitchen, drove to Bethel and brought six of the chairs back to my family’s home in Newington, Connecticut.
And this is really what imbues my chair with the greatest significance: my father actually touched it. He carried it. He sat in it. He probably gave it its most recent coat of shiny black paint.
My father brought the chairs home for his family of six. For thirteen years, in homes in Connecticut and then in New Jersey, they sat in these chairs at the round wooden table in the kitchen for daily breakfasts, and for weekend lunches, and for any other meals not formal enough to require serving them in the dining room. My brothers sat in them to do their homework; my sister climbed on them when she needed to reach the highest shelf in the cupboard.
Evenings, my parents sat in these chairs as they planned their future together: the family camp they would build on North Pond, their eventual retirement to “a house on a hill in Bethel.”
I wasn’t part of that family of six. The family into which I was born was a different one altogether: five shaky survivors, grieving an unimaginable loss, and telling each other stories to keep their memories alive, stories of all the things I missed by being born too late—campfires and kerosene lanterns, rockhounding and rowboats. They remember so much that I’ll never know—the scent of our father’s aftershave, the rough feel of his plaid wool shirt against their cheeks as he carried them up to bed.
But I’m lucky, I remind myself, feeling the cool iron against my bare toes. Now I get to sit in the sixth chair. Daddy’s chair.
