Catch Jim Reed’s Red Clay Diary broadcast/podcast: https://youtu.be/IZyFEUI2L-
or read the transcript below:
THE HIDDEN WORLD OF THE UPSIDE-DOWN ROCKING CHAIR
Thirteen vertical wooden bars. That’s all it takes to imprison me today.
Today I am four years old, way back in time, in the living room of my family’s small bungalow in long-ago Deep South Alabama.
This is a time when a gigantic world war is winding down. Soon my military uncles will be wending their way homeward from Europe, carrying purple hearts and small souvenirs, sporting battle scars, telling riveting stories to us adoring civilian kids.
While we wait for the world to calm down and get going again, we summer children just play and entertain ourselves, as if nothing strange is happening in the rest of the world.
That’s why I am behind bars, waiting for older sister Barbara to discharge me from jail and proceed to play cops and robbers and cowboys and Tarzan again.
The jail is actually an old curved-wood rocking chair with thirteen posts that, when turned upside-down, makes a great cage for small tykes to crawl into. I peer through the spaces between the posts and await my fate.
Mother used to rock us kids to sleep in this chair, but since we no longer require infant care, the chair is a perfect time machine.
Later, after we’ve tired of conflict games, the inverted rocking chair becomes a teller cage. I’m the banker dispensing change and old cancelled checks between the posts. Barbara is the pretend grown woman who is extracting pennies and nickels from Mother’s old purse. We try our best to imitate adults and make smart monetary decisions.
Our Aunt Gladys is postmistress of the tiny nearby town of Peterson. When we visit, we see her reassuring face through metal bars as she takes care of postal patrons. She is framed by green combination-lock mail boxes.
With this knowledge in mind, the upside-down rocker becomes a postal cage with one kid playing Aunt Gladys, the other pretending to purchase used stamps to place upon discarded postcards and envelopes. Play money consists of checker pieces, butterbeans, bus tokens and whatever else seems to be negotiable.
When break time occurs, I sip my lemoned sugared iced tea and, turning the chair rightside-up, sit and rock myself into daydreams. The chair’s creaks and moans are music to my ears. They become sound effects to accompany Dr. Frankenstein’s loping monster.
After sundown, after we’ve had all the firefly-catching, mosquito-bite-scratching, banana-popsicle-munching fun we can stand for one day, I retire to my small bedroom, listen to the cricket chorus through open windows, snuggle beneath handmade quilts, and soon nightdream about heroic soldiers and brave jungle natives and squeaky pedal cars and Santa in his faraway workshop, carefully handcrafting my next Christmas surprise.
The forlorn rocking chair sits in the darkened living room, awaiting the attention it craves.
And, today, many decades later, the rickety old chair still rests in mellow retirement at my faraway Deep South home. The chair is too fragile to rock infants in, but too precious to send away to strangers. I smile each time I pass by, recalling how sweet and innocent we kids were, how sweetness and innocence still abide somewhere deep, deep inside me
© Jim Reed 2020 A.D.