Falling Asleep In The Recliner With Grandpa

A Grandpa Gift From Grandkids for the Man Whose Recliner Has a Waiting List of One

A grandpa gift from grandkids does not arrive in a bag from the store. It arrives on a Sunday afternoon, barefoot and smelling like grass and the backyard hose, and it climbs into a green recliner while the football game plays on a television nobody is watching anymore. Mine weighs about thirty pounds. She has two front teeth missing and a laugh that sounds like someone surprised her from behind a door, and last Sunday she fell asleep on my chest before the fourth quarter started and did not wake up until her mother said it was time to go home.

The recliner is fourteen years old. Dark green corduroy, worn on the left armrest where my hand has been resting since the day I carried it through the front door with my son because neither of us trusted the movers not to scrape the frame. The handle on the right side clicks when you pull it. I know that click the way I know my own front door. Everyone in this house knows it means I am done for the afternoon and I am not getting up until someone needs something or the dog starts barking at the mailman.

My wife has her side of the couch. My son tries the recliner at Thanksgiving, lasts about four minutes before I walk into the room and he stands up like he got caught at the teacher’s desk. The dog was relocated three times. That chair belongs to one person, and for fourteen years the rule held. Then a four-year-old broke it without knowing there was a rule.

Sundays go the same way at our house. The kids come over around eleven. Two car doors open in the driveway and the small one is out and running before anyone can get the baby unbuckled. She heads for the backyard with her shoes kicked off at the screen door, bare feet in the grass before my wife finishes saying hello. The sprinkler runs for two hours. My son throws the wiffle ball until his arm gives out. The baby sits on a blanket under the oak tree and watches everything with the look of a person memorizing a world she does not understand yet. By three o’clock the yard is quiet and dinner is on the table, the whole house smelling the way a kitchen smells when someone has been building Sunday from scratch since noon.

After dinner I pull the handle and the football game goes on. Third quarter, usually. Sometimes I make it to the two-minute warning. Most Sundays I do not. My eyes close somewhere around the third possession and the television keeps going without me, the sound of the crowd turning into the same low noise a running faucet becomes when you have been standing next to it long enough.

What Are Some Good Gift Ideas for Grandpa From Grandkids?

Good gift ideas for grandpa from grandkids do not come with a receipt. The best one weighs about thirty pounds, shows up without wrapping paper, and climbs into his recliner while he is sleeping through the fourth quarter. She crossed the living room on bare feet so quiet I did not feel the chair move until her weight was already on my chest. One hand on the collar of my shirt. Head tucked under my chin. She was asleep before I knew she was there, and the two of us stayed that way while the television played to a room that did not need it.

Some Sundays we watch the game together on the big chair, her asking what the yellow flag means while I explain it the same way every time. Those are different Sundays. Loud and full of questions and she eats most of my popcorn. The Sundays she falls asleep are the ones I carry. The weight on my chest. Her breathing slowing until it matches mine, the two of us keeping the same time in a green chair while the afternoon goes on without us.

Her pink slipper was on the carpet below the footrest. The remote had fallen face down beside the chair sometime between my eyes closing and hers. Nobody picked up either one. My wife came in from the kitchen, stood in the doorway for a moment without saying anything, and laid the yellow blanket over both of us. She has been covering me with that blanket for thirty-eight years. She has been covering both of us for four.

Her Father Used to Fit in That Chair Too

My son said it in the driveway while his wife was buckling the baby in. Our granddaughter was asleep in her mother’s arms, still warm from the recliner, one sock missing from wherever she kicked it off inside the house. He stood next to me with his hands in his pockets. “I used to do that, you know,” he said. He was looking at the front window, not at me. “The brown one. At the old house. I would wait until you fell asleep and then climb up.” Thirty-one years and I did not know he had been doing the same thing his daughter does every Sunday, in a different chair, in a different house, with the same man. He got in the car. The taillights turned the corner. I stood in the driveway for a while.

The crayon drawing on this tee is that Sunday. A man in a red plaid shirt and jeans reclines in a big green chair, his head tilted to one side, eyes closed, mouth open the way a face looks when sleep arrived without permission. A yellow blanket covers his lap. On his chest a small girl in a purple shirt and pink pants lies with her face pressed into his shoulder, one arm dangling off the side of the chair, one pink slipper on the carpet and the other barely hanging on. The remote is face down on the floor. A television on a brown stand glows blue with static because nobody changed the channel and nobody needed to. Underneath them, in a four-year-old’s handwriting, the rainbow crayon text says: falling asleep in the recliner with grandpa.

Grandpa gifts from a toddler do not ask permission. They do not knock or check whether the chair is available or the game is over or the blanket is close enough to reach. They climb up on bare feet and fall asleep and leave a pink slipper on the carpet and a handprint on a shirt collar and a weight on a chest that a man will feel for the rest of the afternoon, and in some quieter way, for the rest of his life. This tee is thirty-nine ninety-nine. We ship it free. From the Little Hands Collection, where every design is drawn in the crayon-art style of the small hands that changed everything.

The chair is fourteen years old. The rule is fourteen years old. It broke the first Sunday she could walk, and I have never once asked her to get down.

She is the only person in this family who has ever been allowed in that chair with me. She always will be.

Printed on a Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed heavyweight tee with water-based DTG ink — sizing and care details here.