Story Time

We cling for dear life to order. Everything in its place and a place for everything. But we are just one step away from chaos. We fear chaos because it so often wears a cloak of darkness and it reaches out to us with grim intent, to smother us and choke us in the filth of our own ignorance. Sometimes though, there is a light that dwells beyond our understanding and that light is so very special. That light is meant for us and we are meant for it. It speaks to us in an ancient and silent language. Sometimes we actually listen. Not often, not because we have forgotten that oldest of languages, but because we have become ignorant of what we are and where it was that we came from. Where we belong. If we do deign to listen, we become more than we once were. We fill a hole we did not know that we had, and we make a little more sense as we pass through this fleeting phase of our existence.

In our obsessive desire for order, objects have to make sense to us. A knife is something we use to cut things with. A hat sits atop our head. Simple naming words that help us attribute glib meaning to the world around us. Labels that denote use allowing us to go about the business of manipulating our reality into something we feel more comfortable with. The world before us is of our creation. It is not often that we do a good job of its construction and so we tinker and fuss, never content with what we think we have.

When my granddad died I was old enough to be an adult, but still unsure as to how to be one. And so I did a half decent job of faking it. It would take me a long while and many more steps along the path of life to understand that I could not let go of the child that I was. Once I did understand this, I relaxed my grip on what I thought was my past state and instead embraced it for what it really was; me. 

The death of my granddad hit me hard. What was unfair about his death was that it hit the little boy that I was, and still am, even harder. The inevitability of death was an impossibility to me, we stood at an impasse did death and I. I would not accept death for what it pretended to be. There was something wrong here and my pain was worsened by my inability to drag this problem out into the light and examine it under the lens of truth.

Like all good boys do, I hid my sorrow and the pain it brought me. I pretended to be less numb than I really was. The days following his death were unreal and his funeral was a badly staged play. The worst of the actors was the one that played my granddad. There was nothing of my granddad there on that day. Silently, I vowed to search for him. I knew he was out there somewhere. I just had to look in the right place and see in the right way. A trick to living that most of us are yet to address, let alone perfect.

A few days after my granddad was planted in the ground, I made my weekly phone call to my folks. The phone rang beside my father and he sat and waited for my mother to answer it; it’s never for me, he would say if any of us questioned this pull in the quilt of their lives. 

Occasionally, he would choose to answer that phone, and I would be reminded that he was not only capable of answering the phone, but also of lengthy and rewarding conversation. More so than when we were in that same room together. This however, was not one of the times that he answered. 

“Hello Jonnie!” said my mother.

Even after all this time with a new phone that identified me, it still gave me the creeps that she knew it was me. I felt predictable, but it extended beyond that. My mother had a knowing that was not natural, and of course she did, because she’d known me all my life and she knew me in ways that I would never know myself.

We talked and asked after each other’s lives. I never wanted to talk about a great deal of mine because it caused me further stress to do so. Work needed to stop seeping into the rest of my life and infecting it. It was bad enough that it had entered my dreams and was affecting my time away from the stresses of the physical world. It would take me a further decade to step to the right and see things a little differently and sweat the smaller things a little less. A life lesson I was regularly in receipt of, but didn’t do anything with for far too long.

“What was that?” I asked my mother. I felt bad because it was rude not to have attended to her words. My eyes were still open, but I’d been caught napping on the job. The sound of her voice has always been soporific for me. A comfort that preceded my time on this earth. She was the first thing I ever heard and I’d not even been born yet. I’d known this woman in another life and maybe that was why I refused to believe that her father had ended so abruptly. Instead he was still here, only differently.

“We’re clearing your granddad’s house,” she told me, “do you want anything?”

I paused. There was a lot to take in. Only now did I hear her calling her father your granddad. I had taken that for granted for so long that I ungratefully expected it. He was mine after all. Mine first and foremost. Well, if that was true, then my mother had demonstrated love in one of its highest forms. She had given her dad to me. Given without a word. Given without the expectation of anything in return, not even acknowledgement of this sacrifice. But then, that is what love is. To give. Only, in that truly selfless giving, a person is filled with even more love and is loving in a way that they were not before.

That was my Mum right there, and I think she learned some of that from her father. I like to think she learned a thin slice of it in the way that granddad was with me, and I with him. We see things better when they play out in front of us. We are blinded to a large part of how we are in the world and we will never see ourselves other than in the reflections around us, via the people who are the very fabric of our existence.

In my pause was a refusal to accept that granddad’s house was being cleared. On the heels of that were thoughts of my siblings and cousins. We were a large family and my granddad’s possessions would be spread thinly.

Did I want anything?

I wanted him, and that was all there was to it. The thought of his home being deconstructed disgusted me. It was heresy. His own family betraying him and burgling his house while he was out. I swallowed down my sensibilities in respect for my mother. She did not want or need the conscious stream of bilious thought that was hissing inside my mind and bidding me to burp it out.

I thought about all the items in my granddad’s house. I was there and I could see it all. So many items with meaning and symbolism that was dear to me. There was something wrong about me coveting his goods. There was a selfishness there, but it went far beyond that. However much I loved and missed that man, I was not about to build a shrine to him. He deserved better than that. 

As I pondered the most important thing in my granddad’s room, I saw it in my mind’s eye. I saw him where I saw him for the majority of our time together, in his chair. He would sit there for hours on end and regale me with stories, some real and some unreal. I was never sure which was which. Most of the time, we just sat and enjoyed a quiet that was not silence. It was a calm, pregnant with meaning, but mostly it was comfortable in a way that I had never been comfortable anywhere else.

“His chair,” I said to my mother.

Now it was her turn to pause and in that moment I panicked. I suffered in my imagination, the punchline to my suffering was that the chair had been disposed of. Thrown out with the rubbish in just the way he’d said he wanted to be discarded when death came a calling; just throw me out with all the other bad rubbish. He’d say this with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, utilising a humour that is the preserve of people of a certain age.

“Are you sure?” my mother eventually asked, “it’s seen better days.”

“I’m sure,” I told her. The truth of it was I wanted that chair exactly because it had seen better days.

I collected that chair the very next day. It didn’t quite fit in my car. I had to tie the tailgate down with a piece of hairy string. This was somehow fitting, and partially allayed my worry that the chair would not fit in my small house or the life I had pieced together within my home.

The chair shouldn’t have fitted anywhere other than in granddad’s home. It was out of place in every conceivable way. The too small dimensions of my living room should have been unwelcome to that chair and once it was sat in the corner, it should have been apparent that it had been a mistake to bring it here. That it had only ever worked in my granddad’s living room and it was never meant to have a life beyond that.

I think, for a while, all of that and more was the case. It must have been, because I saw it sitting there in my domain and it reflected my loss back at me. It looked sorry for itself. Sad and forlorn, and I entertained the notion of buying a throw to cover it over. I had this overwhelming urge to hide it away, so that I did not have to see it. Another ill thought out act of manipulation. An attempt to make something fit when it never would.

A chair though, is not for staring at, and in using it for what it was meant for, it no longer stares at you. In a way, I was compelled to submit to the chair’s purpose and when I submitted to its truth everything changed, and only then did I know why it was that I had chosen the chair.

The truth was the chair had chosen me.

This was not just a chair. This was my granddad’s chair, and it always would be. It would be mine insofar as it was now in my living room and in my care, but it would never be my chair. This chair would always be my granddad’s chair. He had sat in it until it moulded itself around him and became an extension of who he was.

Now, as I sat there in his chair, I could feel him in the world again. I had found what I had been looking for since his death and a great calm spread through me as I reached this understanding. Time slowed and I allowed myself to dwell in a moment that stretched out into other times and places. So many times. So many places. 

I wondered whether I had ever sat in this chair before. I had a legend of who I’d been and I knew I was a cheeky one. Never quite naughty, but pushing the boundaries all the same. Try as I might though, I could not come up with a single occasion where I had snuck from the sofa to his chair while he was out of the room. There was no recollection of his return to the room to discover my chair related treachery. And yet I knew this was the one item I should have of my granddad’s and I’d listened to it calling and gone along with what on the face of it was the appropriation of a piece of junk.

By rights, I should have felt springs threatening to pierce my  back and behind. The chair was lumpy and bumpy and even if it had continued to fit my granddad, I was completely the wrong shape for it. The experience of sitting in his throne should have been like walking in shoes that were two sizes too small. It should have been painful and I should have bled, but I did not.

Instead, I sat there and I felt the presence of my granddad for the first time since his death. 

Then I closed my eyes.

I closed my eyes to focus on the familiar feeling I was experiencing and I heard his voice. He spoke to me. He spoke to me just the same as he always had. You’d think that the sudden sound of his voice would have sent a shocking jolt of electricity through me and my eyes would have slammed wide open, but nothing of the sort occurred. There was no surprise in this, only familiarity and comfort. If I cried, then my unnoticed tears trickled down into a smile I’d not experienced for an age.

I was that little boy again, and I was back where I belonged, only there was no going back. I was right here and this was now. I relaxed into my granddad’s chair and it relaxed into me. My granddad was never a hugger, but somehow being with him was an endless hug. Now I felt that all over again. A feeling that went beyond feeling into being. The connection I had with a wonderful and special human being. I always knew that my granddad was there for me in a way that no one else could be. His presence in this world was the rock upon which I built my life. He just was. Constantly thoughtful, when he spoke I knew those words were both considered and considerate and that they were made and ordered with me in mind. He cared for me in a way that complimented and transcended the love and care my parents bestowed upon me. He helped me to look up beyond the here and now and dare to strike out and live a life well lived.

The first time I sat in my granddad’s chair I was transported to the place where he had moved on to and neither of us were surprised by this. We couldn’t be. This was always meant to happen. Besides, there was no time to waste. Time is the most precious thing that we are gifted in this life. And so he began to tell me a new story and I sat and listened. I sat until it went dark outside and I stayed in that chair until the sun rose again. I should have been tired, but I was as far from tired as could be. I unfurled from that chair and I went out into the world and I lived. I lived more than I had ever lived. I lived the life we’re all supposed to live and maybe I lived it a little more for my granddad. But then, that’s something we’re all supposed to do. 

We owe those who went before us a debt. On the face of it, it is a debt we can never repay. Granted, we cannot repay it to those who gifted us what we are and so how we will live this life, but that’s the point. We are supposed to pay it forward. Not just to our children, but to everyone around us, and we do that by living a good life and living it well. Loving a good life and loving well.

Now I’d found the chair, everything was different. And it was how it was always supposed to be. The chair had sat there in front of me through my formative years and it had waited. My granddad never once told me a thing about his chair and how special it really was. That was not a story for him to tell. But once I found it, I recognised hints and suggestions in his stories. He’d nudged me in the right direction any number of times, but in the end, it was only for me to take those final steps, and I took them towards him.

This chair will always be my granddad’s chair, but increasingly, it is mine. And when a certain grandchild of mine spends time in its presence, it will call to them and if they answer that call, it will claim them, and they will see the chair as mine, just as my granddad still thinks of it as his grandma’s chair. 

Funny really, I see it now and it belongs here. It’s as though it was always here in this living room of mine. And now I can’t quite remember how it looked in my granddad’s house. I can still close my eyes and wander his home and I see everything as it once was. But the chair is a mystery to me. A wonderful, special and ageless mystery that will make a little more sense when my time here has passed and I move on to my next adventure.