Guest Blogger: My Chair Broke

Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead.  It is going on all the time.  We are in it now. - Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the Zen Calendar (August 24, 2004).

(Note from CycleBuddhaDoc:  My brother Ryan e-mailed this to me a couple of weeks ago.  I asked if he would do me the honor of being my First Guest Blogger.  His reply?  "Sure . . . and before we know it (our) publishing empire will grow to tens of readers!")

My chair broke. Like a loved one in a nursing home I knew it was inevitable but one is never ready. I wasn’t ready.

I was raised Methodist. I loved that Jesus was a carpenter and that Noah built that boat. The house where I grew up had a detached garage and it was heaven. There was (and still is) a solid workbench with a vise on one end and a grinder on the other. There was a pegboard back with ancient chisels, a crank drill with foot-long bits, all manner of hammers and other implements of mass construction. They hung in perfect balance. Perfect design with Perfect lines.

My brother and I sat in those chairs and smoked cigars and listened to the Michael Stanley Band.

There were brackets for a chin-up bar hammered into the doorframe of that garage. I was supposed to remove the bar after chin-ups so my dad wouldn’t mash his head when walking through. The day I forgot to take it down and watched in fascination as my dad walked into it was the emotional equivalent of mixing baking soda and vinegar. Complete and total fear mixed equal parts with a just barely deniable need to laugh. I still feel lucky that I did not explode at that moment.

My wife, brother, and sister-in-law all sat in those chairs laughing as I told them about being knocked out by a low hanging pine branch while jogging back with a twelve pack from the corner store.

I wanted to be a carpenter or build boats like Jesus and Noah. There was a big pile of old wood stacked behind that garage. The ingredients for model airplanes, all manner of kid powered go carts, skateboards, a raft (originally built by my sister intended to navigate Smitty’s creek but later sacrificed, to her dismay, to build a sand box for her little brother), and innumerable other adventures just itchin’ to be cut and nailed. My sister and Ginny Ivey built an entire corral complete with wooden horses. Glorious.

I sat in that chair and listened to stretched tales from my college years as they poured from own mouth, astounded by my own creativity. These were magic chairs that turned boring 20-year-old anecdotes into Legends.

I don’t remember my dad really “teaching” me how to use any of those tools. I just hung out in the garage all the time waiting for him to show up and build something cool. When he did, I just watched and figured it out from there. He never said a word about me grabbing any tool and just taking off with it. Safety is a great thing but it’s not going to let a seven-year-old work a jig saw and I’m glad it hadn’t yet been invented in 1975.

I sat in that chair on Sunday mornings laughing at the silly antics of backyard birds.

My dad liked building stuff. He still does. He built sleds, sheds and wooden guns.  I’ve built a ton of stuff myself: sheds, sleds, shelves, Pagodas, swords, an entertainment center (remember those?), all manner of stuff to launch skateboards from, and those chairs.

I got the plans for the chairs from a co-worker. He has since passed away. There were a bunch of different sized pieces to cut and sand and screw together. My youngest son, maybe three or four at the time, shares my proclivity for banging around in the garage. If I was in the garage he was, too. Tradition isn’t the right word but it’s the first that comes to mind.

Western tradition, with our penchant for bigger, better, faster, stronger, doesn’t smile on sentimentality. Western thought would see the demise of the chair as an opportunity to replace it with one more comfortable, more durable or more attractive to my neighbors.

I watched my son almost break his neck in a trampoline stunt gone horribly wrong from that chair.  A chiropractor friend was nice enough to open shop on a Saturday for x-rays and to mash all his parts back into their original positions.

Eastern tradition, understanding that everything is indeed interconnected, allows me to recognize that that was a pretty damn loyal chair that’d been through a lot with this family. But eastern tradition also recognizes that one should avoid attachments. Circle of life yada yada type of stuff.

I replaced the chair with a soulless $12.00 plastic equivalent like the good little zombie consumer that 43 years of television has trained me to be.  But I wrote this eulogy for the friend that’s watched and weathered the better part of my life.

I sat it behind the shed for now. There’s going to be a Viking funeral and final send-off. There’ll be family and friends there, people who’ve shared my backyard. A fire truck will likely be dispatched. ‘Cause silly as it seems, it is all connected.