Here is a brief reminiscence about a small rocking chair I once had. This small wooden chair was given to me sometime around the middle of the 1970’s decade. No one seems to remember where exactly it came from – possibly from my parents or Grandma Range as a Christmas gift – but I know that I spent many a happy a moment in it, parked in front of the TV, watching my favorite Saturday morning cartoons like Land of the Lost and The Monster Squad or sitcoms like Shields and Yarnell and Gilligan’s Island.
One cool thing about the rocking chair was that when you rocked in it, a metal peg protruding from a small, beige plastic box attached to the leg would pump a small music box neatly encased within. I can’t name that tune, but I can still hear the metallic jingle of that song in my head. Sometimes I would turn the chair upside down and pump it with my thumb. I kept the chair for a long period of time. It traveled from our house on Echo Hill to our living room on Winterset Drive. Denise, too, got a kick out of sitting in the little chair. Below, Ashleigh, flanked by Grandma Range, also parks herself in the chair.
One would think that this is the type of item that just disappears and no one would have any recollection as to what happened to it – but that is not the case here. I know exactly what happened to it. At some point, I actually brought it home (from where I’m not certain) to my current house, where for several years it sat in the dining room. Carolyn lived here at the time, so it was certainly into the 2000’s. But one day, aggravated by the fact that it had nearly completely fallen apart (some of the legs had broken off inside the wooden rocking arc), I simply discarded it. I thought about it for a minute, and then decided that it would be better to consign this old chair to my memory than to look upon a broken, run-down pile of wood that I once enjoyed so much as a child.
Rocking chair, I salute thee…
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