My Ode Chair — IFSF PUBLISHING

It’s such a great chair, the chair of this and that, sitting in my private space downstairs, a chair being sat in but not being sat on.

I’m often overwhelmed, even when sitting more or less comfortably in my black chair, unable to name what overwhelms me, whether it’s reading or writing, one of each or both of them, reading and writing. In either case, each is the other’s equal.

I never saw my father read or write though he did often sit in a great chair, a big green chair as I remember it, not a black chair, a green chair with some sort of fabric that covered the chair and seem to envelope my father, a big man, with its great greenness as if taking in a stranger who’d walked alone through a great forest. I seem to remember too a light yellow color of the same fabric that was interwoven into the green, so that the green chair had lightened up by the end of the day to allow my father to sit in the chair comfortably and not read or write, two of the things he did not do. I imagine he had thoughts while sitting in his green chair, though it’s possible my great big father felt small in the chair, only wanting to put his feet up on the green foot-stool and close his eyes and sleep for a few minutes like a child.

Who can sleep though? I don’t know anyone who’s truly sleeping these days, perhaps a child still sleeps, or an interesting older person with a calm but vital inner-life, a person the age I am who’s doing a few laps in the pool for relaxation and doesn’t overthink things the way most of us overthink things.