The Chair Without

A few days ago, a fellow blogger wrote a post having to do with Dr. Seuss.  I commended and confessed- great post, brilliant writing as always, I don't love Dr. Seuss.  It has something to do with the fact that when I was a little girl, Mom used to read my brother and I the story about the pants that had no body.   The image of legless, bodiless pants, moving about darkened roads on their own scared me.  As a child, I was frightened.

As an adult there is something, less frightening, more poignant about the object missing it's purpose; about a chair without someone to sit in it, about a pair of pants without legs.

Last night I took myself out.  I took myself on an 'end-of-a-Groundhog-Day-esque-week' date.*  Every day this week has seemed oddly the same- and yet progressively worse.  Yesterday ended in my car going again to the Garage and my dog slipping his collar and running into traffic.  My emotions have run some sort of gamut.  Not necessarily the good kind of gamut, either.

So I packed my bag with my wallet, The Divine Pilgrim, some index cards (for poetic note-taking naturally) and my phone and set off to the Station.  I sat in a back corner, in front of a window that overlooks the train tracks running through town.  And as I waited for my drink, I stared, somewhat blindly, out that window.  My eyes took their time to focus on a beigeish Adirondack chair, placed on some ancient wooden platform, underneath a tree.

And when they did focus on it, they could not look away.

I stared and wondered, captivated.  I wondered who had sat in that now-empty chair.  Who took the time to angle the chair just so- and when did they do that?  What were they watching when they sat there and were they alone in their watching?  Were they as lonely as that chair now is?  Did someone tell stories there, read books there?  Where was there to that person, that chair?

I wanted to know the story of the chair- I knew it was a chair without an inhabitant, but what was it when it was a chair with one?  If it told me about it's life, would it tell me about the man who sat upon it- reading Hemingway, drinking scotch and smoking cigars?  Or did he have a pipe?

As my eyes focused and could not look away, my mind made a life for that chair without- made a life for the person who once made it a chair with.  I lived the life of the man who sat there, waiting.  I wondered, still, for what he waited, and I waited with him.  I sat at his feet and watched myself- from across the tracks- watching him, years in the future from decades in the past.

And then my margarita arrived.  And I, sitting in my chair, on a date with myself, took a sip and turned to my book.  Leaving the chair without to itself.

And until next time… My dears.


*Ranger weeks are weird.  The calendar Sunday is my Friday.