The Magic of Riding Lawn Chairs

It’s the weekend. Congratulations. You made it to the great weekly exhale.

Words can’t describe the pride I feel in my three kids — each of them so different, each of them a reflection of their mother and me. There’s Emory, my oldest, a 911 dispatcher who talks strangers through the worst moments of their lives for a living. There’s Savannah Rose, my daughter, a friend to many a Disney character and, these days, a budding Broadway star who goes by Posy. And there’s Ashe, my youngest and the focus of this writing.

Years ago, on a spring weekend much like this one, I extolled to Ashe the virtues of one of my relaxation techniques. Ashe is short for Asher, which fits him about as well as it did on a poster of the 12 tribes of Israel that hung on a Sunday school classroom wall.

His middle name is Blue — for blues music, the blue sky, a blue ocean and simply because it’s a cool name.

But I digress.

“Tonight,” I explained in my best dad tone, “I’m going to teach you how to ... ride a lawn chair.”

His brow furrowed with wrinkles that perfectly illustrated his mix of thoughts, which bounced between “Sounds intriguing” and “You really have lost what little sanity you had left, old man.”

I instructed him to retrieve a couple of lawn chairs from the garage and meet me in the yard. With soft grass between our toes and twilight settling in, we took our seats.

Then we started — together — to reminisce and ponder.

I told him about the summer I spent working construction during college.

I described how I’d come home each night too tired to do anything but sit in the yard and watch the light fade — and how that tired, quiet stillness taught me more about patience than anything before or since.

I told him about another lawn chair, too, from a harder season. In the days after 9/11, I sat outside and stared at a quiet sky, waiting.

Jets full of passengers on their way to the Atlanta airport used to scream overhead in descent, a sound so constant you stopped noticing it — until it was gone. I’ll never forget the feeling when those planes finally returned overhead.

It felt like a beacon telling me everything was going to be OK.

Ashe listened, the way teenagers do when they’re pretending not to care but actually leaning in. Then it was his turn.

He reminisced about family trips to the beach and the games of Whiffleball we used to play, our batter’s box covered by Bradford pear trees.

The house was the fence over which towering moonshot home runs went whizzing.

You could call it a bonding moment — a father and son talking, laughing, dreaming, all from a couple of lawn chairs. Boy, did we ride them. We stayed out there long after the fireflies showed up. We didn’t care. Some conversations are too good to cut short.

That particular night, Ashe was still too young to have given much thought to a career. That conversation came years later, in a different setting, though it carried the same unhurried honesty as the lawn chairs. One evening, he came to his mother and me with something to say.

“Don’t worry. Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “I don’t want anything to be wrong.”

He told us that was the exact reason he wanted to see a therapist — before he needed to. He paired up with a counselor named Austin, and for months they met regularly. It was during those sessions that he developed a love for counseling.

He earned his degree last December and now is in his first semester of chasing another piece of paper — the master’s he’ll need to become a licensed therapist.

He’s found a calling and dived headlong into it. He often speaks of psychological constructs and how various famous psychologists felt about a particular issue.

I think about that lawn chair night more than most nights from that whole year — not because anything was resolved. It wasn’t, not really. But because for an hour or two, neither of us was in a hurry to be anywhere else. No phones. No deadlines. Just two lawn chairs, a darkening sky and the rare, unhurried honesty that only seems to show up when you stop trying to schedule it.

That’s the real trick of riding a lawn chair. It’s not really about the chair. It’s about giving yourself permission to sit still long enough for something real to surface — a memory, a worry, a piece of advice you didn’t know you needed to give or receive. Ashe found his own way to sit still like that. Mine just happened to come with two lawn chairs and a yard full of fireflies.

Take some time this weekend. Ride your own lawn chair, your car seat, your porch swing — whatever your version happens to be. Paint. Go for a walk. Mow the lawn, if that’s your thing. Call your kid or your dad, and just sit with them a while, without an agenda. But spend some time doing what you love, with the people who matter, without checking the clock.

Monday will be here before you know it. Face it relaxed and ready for what it brings.