My dining room chairs

 Thanksgiving is a time to enjoy being nostalgic, by telling stories and sharing family traditions. But, this year found another surprise, in the source being our dining room chairs. We made many valuable friendships during our time as a Navy family and some people we never forgot. 

My social media picture was intended to highlight the centerpiece on our dinner table but my lost and now found friend Lynne, she saw the chairs.

During our shared experiences living in the special Subic Bay community in the Philippines, we created lasting memories because our friends were young people with growing families who came together from every conceivable walk of life. One of those special friends were neighbors who shared our carport on our street in base housing, where our houses can be described as more or less like Baltimore row houses without marble steps.  We had zero influence about who our neighbors might turn out to be, but fortunately all of the Navy folks in our neighborhood were wonderful people. Our shared carport created a special relationship with the Northover family.  John and Dick became instant friends and Lynne seemed to look to me for advice about nearly everything from what to serve for dinner and how to shop for cloisonné. Nevertheless, the years fell away and we lost contact, although their last known address was in San Diego. Recently, while browsing around my Ancestry account, I tried to find the Northover family but, unfortunately, during my search, I found an obituary for John, so I did not go any further in my search.  Somehow, mental telepathy seemed to be transmitted via social networking!  Lynne received one of those pop up messages about people who might want to connect with her and my name showed up in her news feed. 

 How did she confirm it was the real "me"?  She went to my Facebook page where she saw the Thanksgiving picture I put up to show off our table centerpiece.  "I knew it was really you when I saw the dining room chair," she told me in a delightful surprise instant message.  In fact, she owns the exact same set of dining room chairs as mine, because we both custom ordered them from the artisan furniture maker who made them  for us with Philippine Narra wood, when we showed him a picture from the Ethan Allen catalogue.  Narra wood is the national wood of the Philippines and is more or less equivalent to Rosewood in beauty and quality. Lynne kept her married name, although she remarried after John's untimely and sudden death.  She still owns the boat they shared, named "Wisp of Heaven" and her son races it in the San Diego Harbor. As a result of a social media picture with the unintended image of my dining room chair in the photograph, I am reconnected with a dearly missed friend, who I hope to visit with again soon.  As a matter of fact, Lynne lived in South Portland Maine when she was a teenager because her father was stationed there during his time as a Coast Guard officer.  

And the  moral of this story is that a chair is always a way to welcome a friend into our homes, even on social media!  Our friendship with Lynne is now joyously renewed. The emotional beauty of Thanksgiving.