The Charm of the "Chairman"

**Please see original post on April 3rd before reading.

I experienced deja vous yesterday. Strange feeling, isn't it? Faith and I were returning to school to pick up Hopie after an orthodontist appointment. As we turned the corner, I noticed 4 more folding chairs on the side of the road....at the very same house I got them from last week. How could this be? Was it an optical illusion? Was it God providing "manna" in the form of folding chairs? I looked over at Faith to make sure the younger eyes of my daughter were seeing the same thing. Mine haven't been working that well lately anyway....must be the "approaching 40 thing." She concurred with my visionary assessment. My eyes weren't deceiving me! There really was more!! Oh glorious day!!!

I walked up to the house, just as I did last week, to make sure it was ok I took the chairs. I am not sure why I feel it necessary to get permission when I am "garbage picking." I just want to be polite about it, I guess. It feels like stealing, otherwise. In the garage, I found two elderly men working on a tractor. One I recognized from my "find" last week. I dazzled them with my "award winning personality" ( groan if you must) and asked if it would be ok if I took the chairs. His response was the same as it was last week.....a simple fling of the hand, and the words "take 'em." My first round of chairs has generated the same question from friends and family of "Where did these originally come from?" So I had to ask some background on the chairs. Here is the story:

1) The chairs are from a funeral home in southern Ohio.
2) They purchased them at an auction.
3) They started with 30 of them years ago, and have been gradually putting them out on the side of the road for the garbage man. But he has yet to see one of them, because they are always picked up before hand by people like "yours truly."
4) He only has two left, and is going to keep those. Unless.....I put on my charm again. :)

There is so much more to this story than meets the eye. The man who did most of the talking with me is 90 years old. He is short, round, with thinning white hair. His tolerance for my questions was "hit and miss." Sometimes he didn't mind answering them... sometimes he showed that he did. And if you are 90 years old, you have my complete permission to be that way. The former mechanics teacher shared with me that he is raising his 10 year old grandson by himself. His son had died, and the mother is in prison for arson. She is due to get out very soon. I was speechless. My thoughts drifted to the Hestergirls' newborn/toddler season, when I was parenting alone and how exhausted I was. THIS MAN IS 90 YRS. OLD!!!!! His hardship takes away any probability my complaints of occasional single parenting will hold any water in the future. I kept commending him on what he was doing, and the value it had on his grandson. But that was all I could say, because I was left without words. I thanked him for the chairs, and went back to load them in the van. The chairs suddenly seemed worthless to me. Here was a man who was spending the "twilight of his twilight years" trying his best to make an investment in future generations of his family....no matter how troubled they appeared.

My mom was here for the weekend, and commented "I bet there's a story behind those chairs" when I showed them to her in the garage. (And, that's when we only had 5 of them.) Boy...she wasn't kidding! We didn't know the half of it. As we re-cover each one of them, I will pray for this sweet, yet cantankerous elderly man, because there is certainly more to him than meets the eye. He will always be the "chairman" in my eyes.