My mother gave me everlasting life.
And it resides in a rocking chair.
With
her final paycheck from her last week at work, Mona Thompson purchased a
Lazy Boy recliner rocker. This is 1963. Not a lot of rocking chair
choices for expectant mothers back then, so my Mom went all out and
bought a solid piece of furniture that she thought would last. I’m not
entirely sure she thought it would last this long, and have adventures
few rockers do.
Eating
celery sticks like some kids eat candy — on doctor’s orders to keep her
weight down due to high blood pressure — Mom, for the first time in her
workaday life, stayed at home, sat down in her new chair, slowly rocked
back and forth, and watched a soap opera… on the late morning of Friday
November 22, 1963. Little me rocking from within, the rocker and my mom
rocking from without, discovering that even soap operas can be
interrupted for real breaking news, the kind that ushers in new life
with the death of another.
Six
months after my birth, people in Washington DC and around the world
still grieved for the slain president, and I wailed, too, sitting on my
own now in the rocking chair. My pain, however, lay external, due to a
severe ear ache from tonsillitis, but it afforded a very young, first
memory of what would be many with my lifelong pal. In the days that
would follow, I would go under the knife, too young for that much lauded
post-surgery ice cream. Overthinking, surely, the connection between
sorrow and joy, but a kid who doesn’t get that coming-of-age treat as
all other kids do… well, that’s foreshadowing of a life where rewards
will only be hard work earned.
Flash
forward a year, and I’m dolled up in a white silk dress. It’s my first
birthday, you see, an occasion to be celebrated like man walking on the
moon or New Year’s Eve. I must have sensed the haughty affair, as a
photograph captures me smiling wide with laughing eyes. For the first
time in my tiny life, I’m happy… sitting in the rocking chair.
“Oh, Mona, what an adorable baby picture. You should enter Barbie’s photo into a baby contest,” a friend said.
Smiling with pride as any mother would, my mom said after a chuckle, “Oh, no.”
Boasting, bragging, public exposure for mere beauty… no, that wasn’t how Mona was raised, and she would not raise me thus.
Childhood
years would melt one into another as I usurped my mother’s chair and
claimed it for my own. If the chair could walk with each robust rock I
gave it, we must have rocked around the world, several times. As a
toddler, I wore the original upholstery clean through to the padding,
and over the decades, the Lazy Boy endured three recoverings and four
spring set replacements. From the start, I was no shrinking violet, and
would clock many of life’s miles in that chair, rocking full-on, no
gentile action from this kid, no hesitations made. If in life one must
rock, then one must rock with gusto.
I
and my rocking chair travelled across Canada four times; it in moving
vans, me in cars, both of us barrelling down the Trans-Canada Highway in
good weather and bad — through heat, humidity, rain, fog, sleet and
driving snow — forward to life’s promised moments and retreat from
sorrow-filled times. With each move, the chair snuggled in tight with
the other furniture, my rocker travelling without me. When we were
apart, I would erase all thought of it sitting empty and cold. When we
met at our new destination, I would greet it smiling wide with laughing
eyes and warm its stiff frame with my body. Together, at last! To rejoice, the chair would gently creak as we rocked — the sonorous equivalent to a purring cat.
My
rocking chair is now 56 years old, one year my senior. My mom having
passed three years ago, I and my chair live as orphans. These days, the
Lazy Boy sits in my master bedroom, officially retired, put out to
pasture, for its arthritic frame can no longer endure boisterous rides.
It groans more than creaks when my body fills its seat, its bones
suffering from old age, as mine are, too.
I
don’t know when it happened, but I eventually outgrew the chair. It no
longer physically cloaks me nor offers me the emotional security it once
had. That fact has been hard to swallow.
Maybe
that’s what happens when you age. Maybe you simply outgrow life’s
earthy realm, yet with its soft creak as I gently sway, we both still
want to live. There are more years ahead; more sights yet to see. The
chair and I have lived as one, experienced as one, loved as one and
cried as one. It survives as my rocking diary. My soul is connected to
the chair as sinew connects muscles. I fear that when one dies, the
other will surely follow.
In
this life, I could eschew many a material thing, but my mother’s rocker
will never be one. It was the first earthly thing my soul felt by its
side, and it will be the last material thing I touch as I leave this
great world.
To end as another begins — is that not the true meaning of life everlasting?
The rocking chair knows. It sits silent, and waits.