Pull Up a Chair
“Pull up a chair” is a catchy phrase that you might hear when visiting an older friend or a relative as they welcome you into their home or to come up onto their porch with the invitation to “set awhile and have something cold to drink on a warm day. Maybe they’d ask if you’d like a cup of coffee. This was a casual greeting that I’ve often heard when visiting my Grandmother Rebecca Rugg Miner. She would be shelling beans and ask me to help her with the words “Pull up a chair” here’s a pan. You can help me. She would say the same thing when she had her quilting frames up and she was sewing a pattern to connect the bottom to the “pieced” pattern of the quilt top. The design of the to-be-sewn lines had already been sketched lightly with a pencil. She’d hand me a threaded needle to sew the straight lines. She kept the fancy scrolls and designs to herself stitching them with her practiced arthritic fingers.
Have you ever been somewhere and a good friend enters? Have you ever saved a seat and said “pull up a chair” and join us knowing that it would be special to have them sitting with you? Then there are acquaintances that cause you to cringe when they “pull up a chair” because they either rub you the wrong way or they prattle on talking about one subject after another. Do you deny their desire to join you?
I remember while in the United States Navy Corps School of playing poker to while away the weekend. I would hover around the area where a poker game was happening until someone quit the table and I would “pull up a chair” and join the game. The pots were soda pop top tabs instead of nickels or the larger tabs from cans on nuts or Pringles instead of dimes. Because gambling was against Navy regulations, the actual money was hidden from sight. I never lost or gained money, but would often make money by selling my seat to someone who wanted to join the game and “pull up a chair.”