Recliner # 7

 “No real adventure starts in a recliner,” read the ad on my laptop this morning. Curiously, the ad was on the screen where I log-in to my e-mail, a recliner ritual I do every morning.

It seems an innocuous enough tag line for an ad for a RV show, although the captain chairs in a big-ass Winnebego RV look to me like recliners-for-the-interstate. I’ve always thought RV’s were a far cry from “camping.” But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about my forty-four-year love of recliners, the living room sort of reclining easy chair.

I’m a crusader about the value of recliners. I go visit relatives in nice homes and harass them when there’s no recliner for me. Nita’s and my first apartment, furnished with family hand-me-down furniture, included my granddaddy’s recliner.

That first second-hand recliner was ultra-modern white naugahide, imitation Danish style, and deceptively comfortable. When Nita and I bought our first new living room furniture six years later, a big-ass ugly tan velour recliner was part of the set.

I think I’m now on the sixth replacement recliner since grandpa’s Danish knock-off.  And Nita now has her own recliner across the room from mine where she diddles on her i-pad while watching TV. It took me forty years to win her over, but I’m nothing if not persistent in some things.

Back to the ad, I beg to differ about no adventure can start in a recliner because I’ve started and written 3 ½ war and adventure novels while tapping a computer keyboard sitting on my lap, with my feet up and my butt in my recliner. And writing those 3 ½ novels has been a huge adventure in my life. And I didn’t write the first word and won’t write the last word while hiking or biking or moving anything but my fingers.

 My recliner is my office. Nita calls my recliner and the side table my “rat’s nest.” As I look at it right now, I can’t quibble. The photo is my nest, or Recliner #7 as I call it, as it looks this morning with everything but my rump and bare feet, and me chewing on my lip as I ponder what keys my fingers should tap next. 

In my defense, the nest includes in-progress paperwork for a Kiwanis Club project, copied book chapters by other writers to be critiqued for our weekly gathering, notes I used to finish a quarterly newsletter for our Civil War reenacting club, novel research and pleasure-reading books, sundry single pages and yellow pads of notes about all sorts of random things, and my ubiquitous box of tissues.

Yeah, it’s a rat’s nest. My New Year’s Resolution for 2016 is to shift my writing station to the desk in the study, where I once intended to sit on the antique wooden secretary chair there and write the first McBride bestseller. But, the nest in the living room won out, and the bestseller is still locked in my head while I search for the key.

My writer’s study is a great room for a Civil War nut, a wooden desk flanked by tall bookshelves loaded with old friends and new books waiting to be read, walls decorated with Civil War prints. A dozen or so Civil War hats and kepis line the top of the book shelves, and four reenacting muskets and a sword lean in a corner. 

There’s a nice view out the window onto my wife’s rose garden behind the wooden picket fence I built one spring. (Yes, yellow roses. Nita's a Texan, too.)

Yet, I do clearly remember exactly why I abandoned my writing desk in that study designed just for me.

I left my writer’s haven the morning I leaned back, hooked my hands behind my head to think, and the old wooden antique secretary chair and me fell over backwards and bounced off the floor. Hmmph. That sort of ruined the mood. 

I fled to my safe and secure recliner in the living room. Last fall I bought a modern high-backed leather “boss’s office chair” at a garage sale. We’ll see if it’ll keep my percolating brain upright. If I can tear myself away from the Recliner #7.

Happy New Year to each of you. I'll let you know if the next blog post is written from the study or old #7.

Over the holidays I read a couple of good spy novels and a spooky book titled “One Second After.”