Rocking Chairs

On the porch of my childhood home are two worn and weathered wooden rocking chairs. They've been there as long as I can remember and are an important part of my childhood memories. It was in those rocking chairs that I would sit and have personal interviews with my Dad.

"Meet me on the porch in ten minutes," he would say.

Sometimes, it was with a tremendous sense of fear and foreboding that I, or one of my siblings, would make our way to those rocking chairs; depending, of course, on our current level of guilt or shame. Many confessions were made in those chairs, and discipline was frequently issued forth. But it wasn't all doom and gloom. Dad often met us on the porch just to know how we were doing.

Some of the best advice I ever received came while sitting in those chairs. My Dad, with his soft and thoughtful expression would slowly rock, then slowly speak, and the world would suddenly seem to make a little more sense. That's the way it was with him. He's never been a man of many words, but he's the kind of man you absolutely want to listen to. If he's going to say something, it's going to be valuable. We learned early on how important it was to listen.

I'll never forget those moments on the porch. I don't remember specific conversations, but I remember how it made me feel - to know that he was there, that he cared.

Those conversations with my Dad were character-infusing. And that's what I'll remember about those rocking chairs. They rocked character into me.

*I've just completed a course on composing personal history. I've often considered my blog a great way to capture the important parts of the here and now, but I realize that I quite infrequently record memories from my childhood and have failed, in the past, to understand how special such a thing could be. This course has certainly changed things. I now have 32 pages of personal history - details about my parents, my childhood home, the establishment of my personal testimony, and much more. When all was compiled into one document, I nearly cried when I realized how valuable it suddenly felt. It isn't like a journal, I don't think. I was an avid journal writer when I was young and wrote much of my experiences as a child, and a youth. But this is different. To look back with the added perspective that comes from adulthood is an amazing process. I hope to write more, to add to my written personal history as I... well, as I add to my actual personal history by living.

This piece about rocking chairs and my Dad was part of an assignment to write about concrete objects within my childhood home. Funny, nearly every thing I wrote about was intrinsically linked to my memories of a person. But that's the way it was in my home. It never really was about stuff. It was always about people.