My Room

When I bought my house, a little over thirty years ago, we were looking the place over with the broker, and I noticed a small window that opened from the crawl space. I got down on my knees and, with my face right against the glass, I could see a small dug out space with a green rocking chair setting in it. Back then, it wasn't expected that the homeowners make themselves scarce when there was a showing to potential buyers, so I asked the old lady who owned the house if it had a basement. She explained to me that, no, there was not a basement, it was just a place her son , Yen, dug out, where he liked to spend his time sitting in the green chair under the house.


I knew the old lady's grandsons, they were about my age, and I had met Yen before. I think that Yen had suffered from PTSD (called shell shock back then), and he was far from normal. He could drive, and once he took me and his two nephews swimming a nearby creek. I remember, he got in the water about neck deep, and just stood there for at least an hour, with out moving or talking. Yen came to a bad end, he was killed by a self inflicted gunshot wound in what appeared to be a hunting accident in the woods behind McAllister School. Yen's parents, being well on in years, had decided to move to Virginia to live with their daughter. One of the prerequisites to selling the house was that they realized enough money from the sell to dig Yen up and take him with them.


I don't particularly care to sit in a chair under the house, and not having been to war, I don't suffer from PTSD, but I do appreciate Yen's preference for solitude in a confined space. I'm writing this post from my little fortress of solitude, upstairs across from the bed room. It's the place where I spend most of my spare time when I'm awake, and a good bit of time when I'm not.



It's a tiny little room, only seven feet wide, and thirteen feet long. It's a lot more crowded and cluttered than Andy Rooney's office. I sit at an old wooden desk in a chair with a high back, so that my head is supported when I doze off. It looks out through two floor to ceiling windows to my back yard. Right now the blinds are open so that, this afternoon, I could watch the snow that fell, but right now all I can see is the black of night. My wife's desk is also in the room. It is one of those big wooden office desks with a lower side section at right angles to the main desk. It takes up one entire end of the room and I can rest my feet on the end of it if I want to. In addition to the two desks, there are two computers, two printers, a little table with phone and answering machine, two guitars, a file cabinet, two desk lamps and a pole lamp, a paper shredder, a book case that takes up the entire other end of the room, a TV, two chairs, my Kindle, and me. It gets a little crowded when Kathy is in the room, but fortunately, this room is not where she prefers to spend her time. No reflection on me I hope. There are no pictures on what little wall space there is, but when my laptop is not in use, it slide shows the pictures I have filed on it. Facebook is generally running, and I check it from time to time. I have to go all the way downstairs to get a fresh beer, but there's no place to put a refrigerator without moving my wife's desk out, and I haven't even bothered to ask. I don't drink that much any way. My desk has one of those pull out boards for extra space beside the chair. It serves as a nice footrest, with my laptop laptopped, or when I'm reading or watching TV. Right now I can actually see part of the top of my desk, but when I set my computer down on it, it will be completely obscured.





Spring will be here soon, and maybe I'll come out of my hole. When it gets warm enough, I might go for a swim.