You hear about these people who acquire weird little quirks — baseball players who don’t shave during their playoff run or lawyers who wear their lucky socks to court, and then there are writers with their special coffee mug, special pen, special notebook or, in my case, special chair.
It’s only because I write longhand that I developed an attachment to my chair. If I wrote on my computer, like a normal person does, there’d be nothing special I’d require in a chair, it’s purpose being more functional than muse-inducing. Writing longhand, I can sit, relax, let my mind wander on its creative journey, and lounge in my chair. It sits on my front porch. Honestly, if I could, I’d choose my front porch for most things. It’s such a delightful place to be.
It’s the view that’s key in all this, and mine is superb, with its abundance of flowers, shrubs, trees and fields. Sometimes a bald eagle swoops down among the treetops, and sometimes the cow makes an appearance to rest in the shady grove in my neighbor’s back 40. But it’s the flower gardens that seal the deal. I live in a farmhouse, and when I moved here, the gardens were in a deep state of unruliness. I stepped up to the plate and offered to take over management of the gardens I can see from this one spot — from my special chair. Then I got to work and built myself a pretty view that ever changes with the seasons.
That special chair is an Adirondack, complete with a cushion for lumbar support. There are some (many?) writers who sit at desks with their back to the window so as not to be distracted by the outside world, adhering to what I call the Edna Ferber rule. Edna was a writer of considerable fame during my parents’ era. She became so successful, she moved from New York City to the countryside in Connecticut to a town I lived in one era later. In her autobiography, she wrote about how shortly after moving in, she was sitting at her desk, tap tap tapping on her typewriter while enjoying the view from her upstairs window of the hired muscular men working on her new gardens. She understood one important thing as she gazed upon those rippling muscles, wishing she, too, could be out there digging in her gardens. That one important thing she realized was she could be a writer or she could be a gardener, but she couldn’t be both. So she turned her desk around to face a blank wall. Me, I turn to the gardens. I need the tapestry of light and color to turn on the creative juices.
I’ve taken that Adirondack chair to every porch I’ve inhabited for the past 30 years, and it’s not failed me yet. I can’t count the number of times I have been devoid of ideas, not knowing where the next word, the next sentence, is going to come from, but then I sit down in my special chair, take in the caledonia view, and the ideas begin to flow. Every single time.
Life should always be that easy.
A real throwback this week for our musical interlude — Ricky Nelson …