love letter to the chairs on the occasion of seventeen years

by bam

dear chairs, 

a calendar turned the other day, a yearly one. and it turned for the seventeenth time. thus begins the eighteenth year of this little old chair. 

that first day of that first year –– december 12, 2006 –– i faced a blank white screen and a motherlode of trepidation. that screen plus the trembling inside equaled a scarier form of publishing than i’d ever really done before –– and that was 25 years into my stint at the late great Chicago Tribune. 

to write what at the time was a newfangled thing — a blog, an ugly gutteral word if ever there was — was, to my mind, to take away the filter that might have allowed me to occasionally put my heart to my sleeve in the stories i told and how i told them, but it shielded me from going deeper than that, from willingly baring my soul, where my truest self stirs. 

i was compelled to write the chair because i was convinced that the deepest truths of our lives are played out in the quotidian. on the humdrum stage of our day-after-day domesticities, and the confines of hardly exotic daily rounds. i’d come to believe that the common, plain-wrapped stories of our lives are in fact imbued with the sacred, the lasting, the shared. and more than worth holding up to the light.

i still think so. 

chances are, you and i are not going to find our names chiseled in the roll call of global heroes. we are going to live on in the scant traces we leave behind, the simple kindnesses, the one or two times we mustered just the right words, the softening we brought to someone’s unbearable hour.

and so, i thought then and think now, if this one bracket of time is ours, then perhaps we’d do well to plumb the depths of it. or at least plumb a little more pointedly. root around a bit. not shy from asking the tough question, the true question. search for the sacramental. name the holiness where we find it. shine the light on it. make known the magnificence that runs through the river of each of our lives.

because i firmly believe that, in the end, we are all animated by a few certain yearnings: to love and be loved; to be seen or be heard; to reach out in the darkness and be met with a soft and warm hand to hold onto. some of us live to be stirred, to feel our hearts beating hard against the wall of our chest. to delight in the whimsies of each and any hour. and to know more when we fall asleep than we knew upon waking that day.

so i offered up the stories of my own life’s spool. i scanned the day to day, and plucked the shards that shimmered the most, the ones that seemed to hold the most questions. maybe even a quiet holiness. the ones i’ve described as exuding the most wattage. the ones i thought might resonate a bit more than all the rest. ones worth examining.

and so for 17 years i’ve turned here, plopped my bum on this rickety chair that’s missing a spindle, tapped at the alphabet letters as if i was at once alone and in the company of the dearest of soulmates. i’ve pushed toward the truth, even when i worried you might wriggle a bit. even if i pictured you rolling your eyes. to write the truth is to blot out the worries of just how your words might land. especially if your mother-in-law or your mother is one of the ones reading your words. (i learned not to hyperventilate on the days when only a weighted silence followed a post, when my usually exuberant mother-in-law chose silence as the way of letting me know she was, um, not such a fan of whatever i’d mused that morning.) 

over the years, dear chairs, you’ve chimed in, and made me laugh aloud, and more times than you might imagine you’ve moved me to tears with the words and the wisdoms you’ve brought here. 

and this year, this darn nasty year, you all but kept me from keeling right over. 

the fourth wall, the one they talk about in the theater, the invisible screen that separates actors and audience, it’s non-existent in the realm of writing, or at least in the writing i write here. 

ever since that long ago first morning, i’ve meant for this to be a back and forth, a call and response. yet i never imagined the friendships that would leap off the page, break through the cybersphere and become so very real, some of the dearest in my life. 

whether we’ve sat in the same room never or once, or dozens of times, your very big hearts, your high-soaring souls, your whimsies, your tender ways, have worked their numinous magic in a world that’s sometimes so, so dark: you’ve become true, true friends. the sort you tell truths to, the sort whose hands you reach for when your own are trembling like leaves in an autumn wind. 

so all of this is a long-winded way of simply saying thank you. from the bottom of my very big heart, the one i’ve long worn on my sleeve. where it now shares a space with my soul. 

and thank you to willie, who long long ago, got me started. and to teddy, who long let me tell his collection of growing-up stories. and, of course, to each and every one of you, whether you ever leave a trace, or tiptoe in and out quiet as a mullipuff bobbing on the breeze….

where do you sense the holy in your lives?

photos by Will Kamin, long long ago. xoxo