Life is a long succession of hot seats. . .
Be sure to greet each one with a smile.
Be sure to greet each one with a smile.
Chairs I Have Sat In by Paul Smith
I have sat
in lots of chairs. I don’t really remember my first one. It was probably a high
chair. Having had my last look at a picture of it, I can sort of piece together
the circumstances. I was, of course, a toddler at that time. The snapshot is of
mother feeding me porridge. No one eats porridge anymore. I am leaning forward,
a spoon with porridge is coming my way. I vaguely remember crying loud and hard
to get more porridge, and then spitting it all up, or pooping, laughing with
glee as mother has to tend to me.
The next
chair I remember is a wooden school desk. You crawl in one side, plunk your
butt down, and put your books in a drawer-like thing under the desktop. In
summer it was hot and your rear end sweated a lot. I would sit in class and
wonder why I was there, wishing I could be outside playing. Then I remembered –
I was redoing my grade, 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc. in
summer school. As I got older in high school, the desks changed. To begin with,
they were quite small. They got slimmer and more modern-looking, made of a
plastic material that resembled pressboard. Books were thrown on the floor
under them. I remember being told how all this school was going to help me one
day.
After that I
got a job and had a plain wood chair in a cubicle. It had no padding. The
cubicle had no window, just a view of more cubicles. I didn’t like it. Others
like me had chairs like me, cubicles like me, lives like me. I didn’t like
them. I wanted a better chair. I discovered that being really nice to my boss
and really snarky to the others that had chairs like me helped as I worked my
way up through the ranks. Soon I had a slightly bigger chair with a removable
pad for my posterior. After that there was a chair with padding actually
attached to it. My butt really liked it. Down the hall from our maze of
cubicles was the Board Room, where I heard there were big comfy chairs. That’s
where my boss’s butt sat. I sort of liked my boss’s butt, but I also sort of
resented it. I found out ways to make myself look good on paper, fiddling with
figures in my cubicle. As much as I liked my chair with the padding stapled to
its seat, I knew there was a better chair for me down the hall.
By hook or
by crook my rear end finally made it into the Board Room, right at the head of
the table, with the best chair, one that resembled a throne. It had a high
back, arms, and two spiky things on its back that resembled steeples. I had
made it. But I also noticed those who sat at my feet. They all had the same
look in their eyes, a look of envy, a look that told me they wanted my chair
for their rear ends. I couldn’t let them have it, of course, so I did all in my
power to hang onto what I’d worked for. There were others who began to look
good on paper, those who were copying the things I did, and there were those
who caught on to what I’d done to get where I got to. One of them, an accountant,
had the balls to suggest I’d been sly or crooked. I hadn’t, of course. I was
just trying to get a bigger chair, that’s all. So I had him snuffed out in the
freight elevator one day. Then others came forward, those with lesser chairs
than me, and accused me of something called premeditation. I have discovered
that jealousy and envy play a big part in our lives and motivate people to
sabotage those in bigger chairs. Alas, after the trial, my new chair was not a
chair at all, but the edge of a bunk in a Correctional Facility.
There was
one more chair to go, though.
The chaplain
in this facility explained to me how my last chair would work. I would be taken
to it, strapped in it, a thing put over my head, and then get a thunderbolt of
electricity, and I would die after getting my last meal. I nodded at all of
this, not really caring how big it was or how comfy. My focus is on what the
chair actually did. It killed you. As he went over the details, my butt started
to sweat. All those chairs! We talked about regrets. I had lots of them,
starting with my high chair. Why didn’t I have a better high chair? Or maybe a
worse one? If something had been different, I wouldn’t have wound up like this.
It started with my mother, shoveling all that food down my throat. What was
going through her mind? The hour got
late, and the chaplain said he was going. One last question, though. What did I
want for my last meal?
Ha! I’ll bet
you think I’ll say porridge. That would be so neat and clean, wrapping up my
life in a little package with a bow on it. Like life gets all summed up so that
there is meaning to it. Ah! How smart, how clever, how symmetrical! But things
were all going to end tomorrow without a neat tidy ending. They would stop with
an apostrophe, a question mark, an asterisk, something like irony. Now, at the
tail-end of a regretful life, I thought hard about all I wanted and had gotten
and decided what would be the most logical choice.
“So what’s
it going to be, my son – steak?”
“No.”
“Lobster?”
“No.”
“No.”
“Osso Bucco?”
“No.”
“What, then,
my son?” the chaplain spoke, looking sad.
I patted the
metal surface of the bunk I sat on and smiled back with my own sad eyes.
