ANDRE BEGIN

There is nothing more relaxing than enjoying a warm day in the great outdoors, in the company of friends or family, feasting on barbecued food and sipping a frosty beverage… until your back locks up and you can’t get out of the freaking lawn chair.

Or conversely, to not be able to get out of bed the next day from lower back pain.

This happened to me a few years ago which had my normally brisk walking pace down to a slow shuffle, resulting in a series of visits to my trusty chiropractor’s office for weekly tune-ups to get things back to normal.

That being the case, in an effort to make the most of our short outdoor season, an annual ritual emerged: testing lawn chairs in the hope of finding the right one for me.

If you have been around for a few decades as I have, you’ll probably remember that the worst thing that used to happen with lawn chairs was to get up and having a checked pattern imprinted on the back of one’s thighs from the plastic webbing. I miss those days of plaid thighs, but I don’t remember issues relating to back health. Let’s chalk that up to youth being on our side and leave it at that.

I’ve accepted the reality of blood circulation randomly deciding to cut out, grunting when I pick up things from the floor and discs degenerating by the hour. These occupational hazards of aging are tempered by the bright side of accepting that these are signs of still being alive to write and to laugh about them… or is that just me?

But at this age, one size of lawn chair does not necessarily fit all. And for a chair in which I may be sitting for a few hours, it needs to fit in the right spots. That being the case, I can’t say that I have found the perfect one yet.

A few years back, my partner and I spent an entire lunch time testing lawn chairs. For both of us, it was one chair after another with things not fitting quite right. Even with the ones that were tagged as ergonomic (and priced accordingly), the perfect throne that ticked all the boxes for me has yet to cross my path. The joys of being over 50!

We often found ourselves saying, if we could take the backrest from this one, the seat from that one, and angled like this other one, it would be the perfect chair. But I am not about to buy three chairs, tear them apart and reassemble them no matter how much natural talent I may demonstrate at assembling flat-pack furniture.

The challenge is that even though for some chairs, I can tell right away when it is not hitting me in the right spots, there are times that another chair might feel fine at first, but it’s only two to three hours later that things sneak up on me and I am walking around like a “>” symbol.

It’s not like I can camp out at the store for a thorough and scientific test drive. So when I do buy one with the intent of trying it out at home, I know I need to ask about their return policy, just in case, and to leave on all the tags, just in case. Then I’ll try it out by spending an evening (… or two) (… or three) watching TV in the new lawn chair with the highest of hopes that this might be the one.

To make the test driving equation even more complex, my back might only feel a lawn-chair-hangover-effect the next day while doing something else. But once the back is irritated, it’s game over, no more test driving. Every chair I try will likely hurt after that point. I need the back to make a full recovery to return to my factory default settings to resume test driving, which takes time and healing.

I realize it might be a lot to ask a lightweight, portable, foldable, affordable canvas chair to properly support every spinal imperfection, but I can’t be the only one for whom lawn chairs are another reminder that I am not as young as I think I am.

Hopefully manufacturers are getting creative, working on the next great model, mixing and matching different features that will combine the backrest from one model, the seat of another model and angled like a third model. Then, hopefully, that might be the right lawn chair for me.

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Sincere thanks for reading!
Have a great day,
André