Memoirs from a Red Armchair

The red armchair is placed fittingly in the middle of the sitting room, a room in which every aspect is perfectly matched with the overall shaker décor of the quaint house. Every item orbiti

 

The red armchair is placed fittingly in the middle of the sitting room, a room in which every aspect is perfectly matched with the overall shaker décor of the quaint house. Every item orbiting the chair has a meaning and its own personality, the whole temporal aspect of the cottage-like home is a personification of the woman that sits in that very chair. She is woman of meaning, of stories, of personality, and of personal simplicity, but a characteristic of grand variety. The house may appear to be oddly simple, but a single story from her lips makes the whole room a glistening gold...at least to the eyes that see it as such.  Afternoons spent in that "cottage in the middle of the suburbs" are days spent in a far-off world, a world of the bizarre, and a world in which all the real things on this Earth, that are normally taken for granted, are always foremost in the mind...a world of simple stories.

            In no way can I, a senior patron of that cozy theater, retell all the acts that were performed on the stage of the red armchair, but I lend my senses to you just for a moment of a single memory of one of those afternoons spent, snuggled up in a simple shaker-like couch before the red armchair, matching in style.

            "Big Susan...I looked for that book for all my life. There was a small library across the street from my school, it was no larger than this room, but I remember always re-checking that book out. I was heartbroken when I moved on from elementary school, because now I couldn't check it out." She said, slowly letting each word mix in the air.  When she spoke from the armchair you could hear every articulation she made and even every breath she took as she spoke. It was as if the words she spoke were simply exhaled with her every breath. "Ha! That's right!" She exclaimed, looking down at the book, "Smart School, that was the name of our elementary, Smart, Robert Smart Elementary." She continued to flip through the pages as the breeze from the fan simply took away each page from her fingers and she moved on to another part of the memory. "Well I looked forever for this book, and I finally found it in a catalogue. It's a reprint, but still the same words, so I'm happy!" She laughed, but the laugh soon left her, and she went on, "You know, I wouldn't even bother showing this to Susan, she wouldn't even care to hear all about this crazy story or even why Tom and I named her Susan...Ah, Big Susan was a great book." She seemed to have let the thought drift off in the air to rest upon the hearer and she leaned over the arm rest of the chair and replaced the story in the bookshelf only to pull out an old, blue-bound book.  She handed it to me to look at, "Huh, Little Black Sambo, this is quite the old book huh?" I asked with a smirk on my face. She went on to tell yet another story of how she came to love this book, and she continued to just breathe the words and thoughts and memories in and out. Some of the older memories were caught in the wind and floated around my mind, and she released them as to tell a newer story of different mood, as any good story-teller would. "So I went to that game of Bunko with some of the ladies from church this week" She said starting up a new wind, and beginning to chuckle slightly, "I was losing horribly, as usual, but it was fun." Then she began to laugh. "Everyone was nice there except for Mrs. Goody-Buttercup!" She said sarcastically, and then continued laughing, "I lost yet again and so I said, O carp! Little Mrs. Buttercup tells me, I don't think God would really like if we said crap." She laughed, and I did too. I can never re-tell the very inflection of her stories. "So I told her" She started up again, "O well crap! That was the word I needed at that moment... I don't think in this case God really cares about that kind of crap!" Her laugh, like her personality, simply filled the room. Yes, like everything about her, the house, her voice, even her stories, they are simple, but they fill the room.

            I moved from the nest I had made in the couch to a well carved, wooden chair in front of that red-upholstered stage to sit at the small living room table in front of it. She reached over to the side table and pulled out a beat-up tin can. The small rectangular tin had the nostalgic image of jolly St. Nick gargling down a perfect glass bottle of Coca-Cola. She flipped the lid out of its place and pulled out a not so gently cared-for deck of cards with the same picture as that on the front of the small tin. I asked no questions as to what we were supposed to be playing, but she simply began dealing out the cards. By the time she was done dealing I quickly found out that we would be playing dirty-eights. Dirty eights was a favorite of mine, one the two of us would play all the time when I was little. We began to deal and shuffle and laugh at all the spiteful moves we'd pull over one another, but always very leisurely. Yes leisurely, because spending an afternoon with her was one of earth's most profound delights. As we played, a wide smile grew on her face...she was about to tell one of her favorite stories. "You know ever since I saw the movie, It...you know the one with the alien, I've been scared of being abducted. I slept under the window in my room that looked out to a wide, empty field." She told me, as her voice matched the drama of her tale. "Every night I would look up over the window to see if there was a UFO landing in the field" She said, pretending to, wide-eyed, peer over a window. "I mean I always expected a flying saucer to come spinning down near my window" She laughed while making a high-pitched whirling noise and a spinning motion with her figure. "Well they eventually built more homes on that field, and of course all the grown-ups complained...but I was happy about it. It really was a perfect place for a UFO!" She chuckled, thus bringing the close to yet another story.  When the last sentence of that whimsical story left her lips, so did the image of that UFO and the small Indianan house and field, and it would come to land upon my mind. A visit to this suburban cottage was more than just a chat, but a bank robbery of sorts, yet one in which the owner freely gave away all their treasures, because you were the only thief to step foot in the gold-crested halls. Because you were the only one who actually saw gold, rather than dust, and paperclips, and old candy. Because you were the only one who saw a bank with grand marble columns and glistening halls, rather than a small cottage in suburbia. Because you were the only one who saw this woman as one with wealth beyond compare, rather than an eccentric with stories that may, or may not be true.  She gave away her stories to me and I saw them as such...gold. I did not look upon her stories and call them, "crazy tales from a simple-looking chair", but "Memoirs from a Red Armchair" 

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