Chairs

This would be my ultimate dream.

Where we sit when we’re relaxing or reading or watching televisions is important to us, don’t you think?  I would bet that everyone, no matter how elegant or humble the home, has a favorite spot.

My grandfather had his straight-backed wooden chair, with 3 slats at the back.  Only the seat was upholstered.  He sat in it to read his paper and listen to the radio, his feet on an ottoman.  My grandmother didn’t sit down exactly; she perched in between chores, unless she was energetically playing rousing hymns on the piano.

As a teenager I used to flop down in my Dad’s leather club chair with footstool (which had been beautifully reupholstered by him) to read and to nap before I had to help with dinner.  Later Dad would watch TV and read and often fall asleep there himself.

My mother has a favorite chair, too, but I don’t remember her having one while we kids were growing up.  She was too busy waiting on my father, or refereeing fights between my brother and me, or going to choir practice or washing the kitchen floor.  When she stopped it was more to nurse a migraine in her darkened bedroom.  Now she has a recliner/rocker, which she’s used as headquarters for many years, next to her an end table, one of those blond wood, 2-level ones from the 50s.  It’s piled high with half-done crossword puzzles, People magazines, books and pencils.  Beside her on the floor is her purse.

We have broken tradition in our home.  We have a large Mission-style couch, which I bought when I was working and had money to spend on furniture.  It has three big cushions.  The one on the right is “my area”; the one on the left is my husband’s.  I have two sofa pillows on my end, one I bought in Greece, the other I got just a few months ago in Vancouver, B.C., and a crescent-shaped airplane pillow, filled with buckwheat, to burrow into while I read books, newspapers, magazines, write, play with my iTouch or watch TV.  It is the center of my operations, where I drink my morning coffee, where I do my thinking, where I talk on the phone.

At the other end of the couch my husband watches TV.  For anything else he has another place, a loveseat, which looks like a large version of Archie Bunker’s chair, or Frazer Crane’s dad's chair, though it doesn’t have any duct tape repairs on it…yet.  This is where he reads magazines, plays with his iTouch and naps.  I have tried for years to buy him a nice chair but to no avail.  It’s formed to his body like a comfortable pair of shoes.

When I visited my son and his family in Wisconsin earlier this month I realized early on that I was sitting in someone else’s spot.  It didn’t take much intellect to decipher the longing looks and outright plaintive meows from the two cats in the house.  In the evening when the two adult humans in the house inhabit the big leather couch to read or watch television, the cats, Lucy and Sadie, share the “big, comfy” chair, as it’s called. The friendlier one, Lucy, sits on the seat cushion, the more skittish Sadie lies alertly on the chair back.  I felt badly that they had to find other quarters while I was there, but I wasn’t about to perch on the windowsill so they could have their “spots”.  Other cats might have snuggled up to me and shared the area, but not these two.

 I have experienced the same emotions as these cats when people are visiting us.  The visitors tend to take one or the other end of the couch, where my husband and I are usually ensconced, with my feet on his lap, our fleece blanket warming us.  During these visits I cannot stretch out as usual and my husband is banished to his loveseat.  At least I get my end of the couch.  Recently my husband’s mother was visiting.  She was with us for 2 weeks and when she left for home we both took possession once again of our beloved corners, just like the cats did when I left my son’s house.  We were purring and happy again, like the cats must have been, back in our adored and comfy nests.

Save My Morning

Bob Rivers at the mic

I wouldn’t have thought it would matter so much.  I wouldn’t have expected to feel a hole, not only inside of me, but also in my daily life.  I wouldn’t have expected to react so strongly.

My radio show went off the air on Friday, October 1 and I didn’t realize it until yesterday morning.  Friday I turned on the station, heard rock music and assumed that my radio show people were taking a vacation, though this programming was different than usual.  In the past when they’ve taken a vacation day or week, the station has played old segments, interspersed with the Twisted Tunes we listeners  all love and sometimes even help to inspire.  The news will be current but the rest of the show will be old material, like a great interview with a comedian or a musician, topical issues that can be repeated for our entertainment. 

I didn’t think too much about it until Monday morning.  I turned on my show, preset in the bathroom, and while I was getting ready for the day, washing up, brushing my hair, I noted a difference.  Today it was the Gary Crow Show, blatantly not my show.  I turned it off.  I turned it back on in the kitchen, preset there also, and found the same thing.  My brain was refusing to believe what my ears were hearing.  I imagined that maybe there had been an accident, that the entire show was so affected that they’d had to take time off.  I turned on another station, KPLU, and listened to NPR for an hour.  At the top of the hour, 9:00 now, I tried KZOK again, and this time the awful truth sank in.  My Bob River’s Show was gone.  I actually stared at the radio in disbelieve, crying “no, no, no”.

There had been no announcement, no forewarning—it was like a sudden death.  Bob, Joe, Spike, Maura, Pedro and Luciana gone.  Anyone who hasn’t listened to this show for 17 years, as I have, won’t understand how this can feel so bad.  These people were my “morning family”.  I laughed at their jokes, I rooted for Pedro to get his jokes on Leno (which he did), I was excited when Bob encouraged Spike to form a rock bank and chortled when fellow listeners suggested the name, Spike and the Impalers for it.  I heard all the auditions to replace Casey when she chose to leave to pursue TV work and welcomed Maura back from parenthood retirement.  I cheered Arik and his wife when they finally adopted their Korean son, A.J.  I cried when Bob’s oldest son, Keith, came back from Dakar, Senegal, so moved by what he saw there that his reaction moved me to adopt my own Senegalese child, Sokhna Diarra, through World Vision.  I’ve listened to Bob’s younger son, Andrew, struggle to become a stand-up comedian and to get better and better.  I’ve grown to know the wives, Lisa, Melissa and Kelly, and all their daughters.

I think the worst part of this absence is that I no longer have a finger on the pulse of what is going on in the world of entertainment and the scientific and political news, because these guys are the ones who used to debate it the way I liked, with all sides heard, with humor, with irreverence, with intelligence and balance.  I can’t count the times my husband came home asking if I’d heard the latest on a brain study or a sensationalized news item and I’d answer, “Oh yes, they were discussing that on Bob River’s this morning” and then I’d quote some of what was said by Joe and Bob and Spike and listeners who called in.  Their discussions so often helped me make up my own mind about issues in the news.

I’m probably not in the demographic that the network thinks was listening to Bob Rivers and crew.  I am 66 years old, retired, didn’t start listening until I was 49, but was quickly hooked by the large personalities and the camaraderie of this group of diverse and wonderfully interesting human beings.  I am missing them terribly and judging from the website I’ll put at the bottom of this post thousands of others are, too.  We want them back, to help us start our days, to entertain and inform us, to open our minds to new ways of seeing things, to share their crazy songs with us, but most of all to keep us company in those early morning hours as no other morning radio show group ever has.  My morning coffee doesn’t taste the same without them.

If you are a listener, or a person who thinks it’s unfair to yank a show off the air that has thousands of devoted listeners, click the link below—all you have to do is click “like” and you will be counted among those who want to save the show, whether it’s at KZOK or some other Seattle station wise enough to pick them up.  Help me get my morning back.

http://www.facebook.com/BringBobRiversBack