And This Chair Was Just Right...

It sucks because I wrote two really long stories last night,
and when I clicked on "publish post"something went terribly, terribly wrong.
And it deleted them! I swear I didn't do anything wrong! : (
And I haven't been able to get them back, tho' I have looked around.
One of the posts was about a chair, my Dad's chair:

As I mentioned, my Dad, my parents had ideas about things. Such as
wearing things with corporate logos on them. Nike. Vans. OP. Ditto.
Later it was Levis, etc. ( " Why should I pay THEM to advertise for THEM?
They oughtta be paying ME if I'm going to walk around with their name on my butt.")

Oooooh, I just remembered another hated belief of my parents - we
didn't get paid for good grades. We were like the only kids in L.A. rich
or poor that didn't get some sort of reward for good report cards.
The reason : " Knowledge and learning is it's own reward."
Um, great, Daddy. Thanks.
I personally think that it's because my brother J and I would've
broken the bank. We got really good grades. And yet we didn't get anything,
and our classmates would be showing off new things, or money, and bragging
about what THEY got for their piddly 2 B's! It wasn't fair!
Aw, well. I know that my parents were right, at this point in my life.

Ok, so the chair. The Chair.
One fine summer day in the late 70's ( at least I remember it as summer), my Dad decided
for no reason that he would build a chair. He was enthusiastic and happy, and had me sit on boards for sawing, and help him a little. It was a nice bonding experience. He was a pretty quiet
guy most of the time though, so he didn't really explain what kind of chair it was going to
be, or any other details.

So he worked on it for I dunno, probably a few weekends or so, so that there was
kind of a build up. We were curious, and as the Chair got closer to being finished, my Dad
got more secretive about it. After a certain point in the Chair process we hadn't been allowed to look at it, touch it, be anywhere near it.
Finally the chair was finished.
It sat in the living room, near the sliding glass doors, and even with a sheet we could tell
it was big. My Mom and J and I looked on as my Dad took the sheet off, and we
saw it, and started laughing. We didn't know what to think, it was as if my Dad had gone nuts,
if you'd only seen how tickled he seemed to be both when working on it, and when it was finished. We were puzzled, and yet we couldn't help but laugh.
Because here's the thing about the chair:

The chair was a regular chair, non-descript and ordinary
in almost every way. ALMOST.
Except it was HUGE. Not just tall, but HUGE. It reminded us of the huge
chair Lilly Tomlin sat in a skit on Laugh- in, It wasn't quite THAT big, but still. This was a straight backed chair, with arms. Not a rocking chair.
My brother and I weren't laughing at what my Mom and Dad had to say next : "Stay out of the Chair! Both of you! "
So we weren't even allowed to plant our eager juvenile behinds in the most awesome chair
we'd ever seen! We wanted to play in the chair BADLY.
And of course we DID sit in it the minute that we were allowed alone! And we discovered that
it made our legs stick out comically because the seat was too long for our legs to hang
down! And our arms had to reach up to rest on the arms. We'd had to climb up to get into it in the first place.

Fast forward about a month, and my brother J and I are snooping around, we didn't steal
from our parents or anything like that, we were just looking around in drawers, because we'd
discovered before that our parents had some neat things. Like some funny playing cards with pictures of Nixon and Carter and other presidents on them. George Carlin and Bill Cosby records.
Varous neat, funny things.
I dunno, don't most kids snoop around a little?
So we are snooping, and my brother finds an envelope with pictures in it. He looks at a couple
of the pictures and starts laughing so hard that he's practically convulsing. I of course have
to see for myself, and this is what we saw :

There is The Epic Chair, and there is my Dad, sitting in the chair. Only NOW I know what
the chair really was. A throne.
For there is my Dad in cape like garment with a jewel ( I think it belonged to my Mom, lol), sitting in the chair, in one hand a toilet plunger held aloft as a scepter, behind him was a flag with a giant can of Budweiser imprinted on it, and he appeared to be wearing a paper crown from Burger King!
Yep, it was a throne all along.
And the other pictures consisted of all my parents' friends, all in the Epic Chair with the
plunger-scepter, and the paper crown, and the royal cape.
We about peed laughing at these pictures. And when we were done, we put the pictures away like we'd never seen them. But if I recall correctly, for awhile afterwards it was kind of hard to look at our parents without wanting to laugh.