american seating

My three children are adults now. Lately I've found myself strangely drawn to children's things.  Maybe I'm in the early stages of latent grandparenthood?

Last Friday, on my weekly Gee-Dub stop, I found a tiny pair of 21" school chairs from the 1940s for $7.00 each.  I love their industrial style, as well as the mellow patina. 

The seats stand only 11" from the ground, so they most likely were used in a kindergarten classroom. They are marked "Envoy", and were made by American Seating, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

American Seating, founded in 1886, is responsible for just about every kind of public seating imaginable, including schools, courtrooms, schools, churches, stadiums, even buses and trains. They also manufactured vital materials for our soldiers in WWII.

Click on this link to the American Seating Museum for a lovely trip down the memory lane of chairs.

musical chairs

I find myself restless

while the record plays,

get a charley horse

between loose seats.

Unable to do whole books,

I'm a magazine reader,

a reader of poetry,

of grab-and-skedaddle,

anything stab-worthy

with plenty of chutzpah

and ambiguity, like Facebook

or Mother Goose.

tk/November 2011

Listen to R.A.D. Stainforth's reading of this poem:

(Visit his excellent blog Black Dogs here.)

Join Magpie Tales creative writing group here.
image from Google images, unknown photographer