The Comfort Chair

Instead of being smart and efficient and starting preparations for next week’s trip, I’ve been dawdling away, remembering my first journey to New York. This afternoon I remembered my flight over and sitting next to one of the nicest couples I’ve ever had the privilege of meeting.

They were Irish: in their late fifties, early sixties. He was a hospital administrator. She was a primary school teacher. It was their first time flying. They never thought they would ever fly, but their daughter was going to get married, and so… here they were.

We spent a fair time getting to know the skeleton information of each other’s lives, by which time, more than half the journey was over. Then the man starts telling family stories. Amazing family sagas. I wished to clap out in glee and swoon for all the twists and turns of his tales.

In one story, he tells about his great uncle running off to America at the beginning of the 20th century. This great uncle disappears for twenty years, only to write home and ask his parents to send him over a bride. So they send over a second cousin and her older sister (as chaperone). Thinking the older sister would come home once her younger sister was married and settled into her new home. Well, the older sister never returns. The three of them live in sin for forty years. And no one spoke about them since.

This was one of many stories this man tells me on the flight. His wife listens attentively, laughing at all the right places, prompting him on to tell one after another.

The last story he tells, before we land, is about the family’s Comfort Chair. The couple live with their children in a small house outside of Galway. When the family comes to visit, there are so many of them, they have to improvise with seating arrangements.

The most uncomfortable seating is the wooden garden bench they bring in and covered with a rug and a few pillows. At every party they hold, this is the first seat that is occupied. It is as if everyone feels it selfish to choose a comfortable seat. It is as if sitting on the garden bench is an act of humbleness.

The first few times they had a party, the couple try to suggest that elderly relatives sit somewhere else. Inevitably, the response would be “No, no. Wouldn’t think of it. This is as comfortable as can be.” So the family started calling the bench the Comfort Chair.

And then, the woman of the couple turns to me and with tears in her eyes says that all the best family stories have been told on that Comfort Chair. She didn’t quite know how her daughter marrying and living in another country, is going to be able to hear the stories any more.