i bought a cardboard chair today. it was delivered by ups in a cardboard box which i think is kind of ironic. i had one a long time ago, but it was an armchair. i didn’t like it. this one is nice and small and i will  keep it forever. i have plans for it.

a couple of light years ago, my family moved into “the new house.” the day we arrived, i was super anxious and completely mental.  fear of change. i stepped out of the car and fell facedown onto the ‘new sidewalk.’ as i lifted my head, i made out the words “THE NEW HOUSE” scrawled in the now dry concrete along with various old school graffiti. i was most delighted and looked upon this as a good omen portending the presence of at least some bad kids in the neighborhood.

the house was still under construction, so there were movers, carpenters, building supplies, my parents, my three brothers and my baby sister. my brothers and i were all at that awkward age. prepubescent. rambunctious. wild. energetic. trouble. overtired.

my first order of business was to see what the inside looked like. i entered a basement door into a huge room, one big room the size of the whole house with sheetrock nailed to the walls. a huge wide open space. this would become the place where everything happened in this house, in our lives.

back to the fateful day. no signs of life down here. just me and the beautiful sight of a a red bell wall phone mounted on unfinished sheetrock. nailheads everywhere. beams. pipes. a tool room. well alright then.  i took one step into the room, tripped over a 2x4 and landed on the corner of a large piece of plexiglass, straight into the place where my heart used to be.  my first secret scar. it remains about an inch and half long and pretty thick due to the fact that it was a secret from everyone including any medical personnel. stuck some paper towels on it and made a mental note: calm down and stop falling. please.

met up with my brothers on the front porch where we proceeded to do what we always did. make fun of each other. my brother joe always won because he enjoyed it so much more than the rest of us plus he had no boundaries. so we’re doing what we do and suddenly out of nowhere there’s like 15 kids on bikes approaching. within minutes we had an excellent stickball game in the street in front of “the new house.” more and more kids just kept coming. there must’ve been 5 kids in every house on this block. by the end of the day, we had about 30 new friends. we’re all in and out of the basement all day, the screen door slamming just like in a bruce springsteen song. what the hell? life was imitating the art of the future?

i even had a boyfriend. i can’t remember his name but he was such a dick. i swear to god, this kid looked exactly like a miniature version of mel torme, with braces. he always had money, he never got off his bike, and he always had 3 brand new spaldeens wedged in the bars of his stingray. he looked so much like mel torme you half expected him to roll up on his bike in a tuxedo. after a week, i made him disappear.

anyway, as the summer went on it got better and better and better. i loved the new house. it was the best summer of my life. i loved the kids who were always around. ten of them in the pool full time, the endless stickball games, punk smoking, radio blasting, score you out summer. but what i loved most was the wall with the phone. one day my father was “on the phone” and he wrote a phone number down ON THE WALL. ‘it’s just sheetrock’ he said.  well that was an invitation none of us could refuse.

in no time at all,  that wall was covered in phone numbers, notes to each other, shopping lists, drawings, hangman, cruel hoaxes, etc. the whole neighborhood used it. it became more beautiful every day. and nobody ever lost anything they needed to remember. it was on the wall. you just had to stand by the wall and retrieve your information. what i loved most about it was that it was permanent, like a tattoo. this wasn’t a bulletin board or a memo pad. this was an actual wall in my house. nailed to 2x4s, it would be there forever.

and it is.

when the summer was over the wall was covered, much to everyone’s sadness, by paneling.

i know that if i really wanted to, i could go to my parents’ house and take down that piece of paneling to reveal the wall of my summer of love in all its glory. and one day i will. but right now, i’m embarking a new summer of love… with my cardboard chair. if that summer taught me anything, it was that change is inevitable… but things can work out in ways that you never imagined. so here’s to my cardboard chair.  it’s my new place. i’m writing phone numbers, credit card numbers, poems, hearts, bubble letters, passwords, everything….  it’s for me and everyone in my world to record everything that’s important and everything that’s not and everything in between.

the cardboard chair, like the wall, is permanent. it’s a piece of furniture. it’s solid. yet, it’s ok to write on it. ‘it’s just cardboard’ i’ll say.

dd