Eames Chair

The family story is that my mother acquired two Eames chairs after she interviewed Rae and Charles Eames at their studio/home in Pacific Palisades sometime in the early 1950's.

There were originally two Eames chairs in the family; I'm not sure where the other is now. If anyone knows it's my brother but every time I talk with him I forget to ask.

My mother said they were a gift from the Eames for a story she wrote about them in the Christian Science Monitor. I'm not sure that's true, though I never knew my mother to lie, only to burnish little things to her advantage.

My mother wrote her stories while sitting in one of the Eames chairs. I was a little kid and I'd watch her as she wrote. Sometimes she'd go round and round, like someone is still capable of doing in an Eames chair, struggling with her writing, crossing out words she'd handwritten, typing whole sentences on typewriter paper, cutting and pasting her writing together until she had something as good as she could make it.

I sit and write in the Eames chair today, though I'm not sure it really is an Eames chair at all. I don't think my mother lied--
I never knew her to say anything that would hurt anyone other than herself--but she was a writer and writer's often think and say things to their advantage, whether what they're saying is true or not, in pursuit of some larger truth that always remains just out of reach.