My Father's Chair

 MY FATHER’S CHAIR

A stuffed armchair given to him for his birthday. I don’t remember which, but I’ve been dragging the thing around for sixty years. Damn near everywhere I’ve lived in this country - Montana, West Virginia, Nueva Yorca, Connecticut, City of Angels - I’m there; It’s there. If I could have packed it I’d have taken it to Italy, Honduras, London, Prague, Budapest, anywhere I went that they’d let me lug this thing across the border. When I need to sit, it’s where I sit. He died. I took it. Since then I’ve seen him in it once. We’d moved it from his bedroom to the living room. I came in late one night and saw him sitting there. I’m not saying it was real. I’m not saying it was supernatural. I’m just saying I came home and, for some second or two, saw him sitting there. 

His World War 1 naval uniform sits in my closet still in its dry cleaner bag. My sister recently gave me a robe of my father’s that she’d salvaged. Satin with red lapels, rich burgundy but a bit gaudy for 2022. Patch said I looked like Hugh Hefner. Patch is my brother-in-law and a very funny guy. Somewhere in a drawer I have a brand new shirt of his that never left its wrapper, Polo, robin's egg blue, $1.95. Somewhere else a few tie ‘em yourself bow ties. A wooden index card file box sits on my ancient, oak file cabinet. Remnants of addresses on streets that no longer exist. That’s what’s left of my father. Oh, yes, his bamboo cane and a pair of silver cufflinks. He was a dandy. Pictures of him as a young man show him wearing spats, white trousers, starched shirt, bowtie, and cutaway tails, sporting a smile, flanked by two blondes. Shiksas. Goyim. Oh, my.

My father then was not the father I knew. Glimpses, maybe, but nowhere near. He was too sick. There was no cure. Paget’s disease is a chronic bone condition whereby new bone is created too quickly and therefore misshapen, prone to fracture and osteoporosis. He must've been forty when I was born, which is when his disease, which really presented at seventeen with a growth on his leg bone, began to manifest itself. We were told that when my father walked it was like a normal man running with a twenty-five pound pack on his back. His body had become so deformed his clothing needed to be custom made, so, for my Bar Mitzvah, he commissioned a new suit - Jake the Tailor, needle and thread, cross legged in the window, I swear - a suit with a vest, dark blue, pin striped, hand sewn, elegant. Reuben Henry Foreman was The Man!...Except one day I caught him looking at himself in the mirror. He’d left his bedroom door open enough so I could see him staring sadly at what he had become. His body was in the process of caving in on itself. He’d been five-ten but was now five-six. His weakened legs bowed out under the weight of his body. He needed two metal crutches to walk. It was the saddest I’d ever seen him look. 

‘What have I become?’ 

By the time he died at 63 there was little left of him. We buried him in that suit. But, do you know something? We never heard him complain, never heard him say a word about his condition, never was the word “cripple” even uttered in our house. It wasn’t banned. It didn’t exist. It just wasn’t. How could he not have been in pain? How could he have been in pain and the family not have known it? Two months before he died he had nineteen feet of lower intestine removed and went back to work a twelve hour day with a hole still healing in his stomach. Never heard a word. He must have suffered. How could we not know? Pain medicine? Here’s what I remember: a single shot of Four Roses mid morning; a single shot of Four Roses late afternoon.

Why am I talking about this? I don’t know. It just came up.

My father in the chair.

There was one other time I saw him, rather, heard him, to be exact, decades after his death. I had a desk at the Los Angeles Library’s main location in downtown LA where I was doing some research. I faded out and put my head down for a little snooze. At some point, I heard my father walking by and lurched awake. In reality, it was an old lady passing my cubicle but she was using two metal canes to do so, as he had. The metal canes clanked exactly like my father’s years before, like keys on a ring, only sharper, more sonorous, a jailer’s keys, perhaps. It obliterated my consciousness. That’s all I heard - the clanking of those canes. Dad?

Oh.

Nearly forty years after his death I’m in a true survival situation in Alaska. I’ve written about this before. I was seventeen miles from Eagle Village on the Yukon River, however my feet had been so badly injured I had to walk a good piece of those miles in a mountain creek to freeze them. To say the least, it was extremely unpleasant. To say the worst, well, worsts do come to mind but not the worst. Singular. There wasn’t any one worst. It was all worst. At some point I asked myself, “Why?” My father’s doctor’s words came back to me, struck me with wonder. “When your father walks it’s like a normal man running with a twenty-five pound pack on his back.” My father never complained, never said a word. He did what he had to do and didn’t say squat about it. I’m thinking this and here I am trudging along, step by gruesome step, pack on my back, refusing to quit. It hit me like a jackhammer. Holy shit, I am his son after all!