 wdevoe, Fri, October 3rd, 2008 Sometimes you just want to mow the lawn. But when you have kids, you can no longer “just” do anything. You no longer “just” go out to dinner. You no longer “just” run right down to the store. Things that you “just” used to do become ordeals that involve hours-long preparation, the stocking of diaper bags and the changing of diapers, the wrestling of clothes on and back on squirmy little kids as they do just about anything they can to delay the process of “just” doing something that used to take no time at all. When I do get a chance to “just’ do something, I like to spend my time in the garden or doing yard work. I have a ritual: I put some good music on my iPod, get a halfway decent cigar and plan on spending an hour-and-a-half mowing a lawn so small I could probably be done in a matter of minutes. This is only halfway by design. Sure, I like to take my time with the lawn, particularly if the weather and the cigar are good, but I also have to account for the many interruptions that will begin as soon as I start the mower. About 30 seconds into mowing the lawn, my 5-year-old, Kevin, comes running out on the deck. He knows I can’t hear him over the lawnmower’s engine, so he begins jumping up and down and flailing his arms like he’s a shipwrecked sailor trying to get the attention of a passing airplane. “Daddy!” I hear after turn off the mower. I don’t like turning off the mower once I get started. I don’t know what it is. Once it gets going, I just want to zone out to the drone of the engine and get the whole lawn done in one lazy shot. But a jumping, screaming child is nothing to ignore, if only for the benefit of my neighbors. “What is it, Kev, is everything OK?” “Can you make me a peanut-butter and jelly?” “Can’t mommy make it, Kev, I’m mowing the lawn.” His mother, I know, is in the living room, all of 20 feet from the kitchen. “Mommy’s reading,” he says, and he’s sincere. “Reading is important.” How do you argue with that? Do you tell him that mowing the lawn is more important than reading? “All right, let’s make you a sandwich.” Back to the lawn again. Cigar. iPod. Start the mower and I’m off. I get two good full circles around the inside of the fence before I see Kevin once more, PB and J residue on his face, doing the stranded sailor dance on the deck. Kevin starts talking before the mower’s engine dies down completely. I hear what I believe to be the words “shredder,” “little brother” and “broken.” In the background I can hear our 11-month-old, Nathan, crying in the house. Fearing the worst, I sprint past Kevin, through the back door and into the house. There I see my wife, dancing with Nathan to something blaring from the television. “What’s going on?” I ask, out of breath. “Kevin just came out and said something about Nathan and the paper shredder and someone was dropped and something is broken…” “You worry too much,” my wife tells me. “Kevin was doing some shredding for me, when Nathan woke up crying because he was hungry. It surprised Kevin and he tipped over the shredder.” “Mommy pays me to shred things,” says Kevin, who magically appeared at my hip. “Time out,” I say to my son. “You can work the shredder but you can’t make your own peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches?” Back to the lawn. Cigar. iPod. Start the mower and — “Honey!” my wife yells over the buzz of the lawnmower. I see her standing on the top step to our deck, leaning forward somewhat with her hands cupped around her mouth. She looks like she’s yodeling. I cut the mower off. “What’s the matter?” “Who sings that song at the end of the ‘Shrek’ movie? ‘Then I saw her face’ and all that? Kevin wants to listen to it in the car.” I married young. That is to say, I married a woman who is a few years younger than me. When Neil Diamond wrote “I’m a believer,” the song to which she’s referring, in 1966, my wife wouldn’t be born for another 17 years. She grew up on bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Dashboard Confessional and Pearl Jam. For the most part, my wife’s youthful exuberance — coupled with a maturity that is beyond her years — keeps me young yet grounded. In this case, where all I’d like to do is mow the lawn, it was doing neither. I decided that if I was going to be interrupted for what I thought was trivial matter, I’d try to show off my trivial knowledge as best as I could: “The song was written by Neil Diamond, made famous by the Monkees, and later recorded by bands like the The Four Tops and The Fifth Estate,” I say to her. “Wow,” she says placatingly. “That’s great. What’s the name of the song and is it on our computer?” She would have been more impressed if Pearl Jam covered it, I’m sure. Back to the lawn. Cigar. iPod. And a surprisingly long, uninterrupted run until I spot my elderly next door neighbor leaning on my fence. I stop the mower. “It’s taking you an awful long time to mow this small patch of grass,” he says. The old man who lives next door to us has provided running commentary on my family’s yard work for the past decade or so. A number of years ago, when I was still a bachelor and me and my brother and his wife lived in the house that my wife and I live in now, we used to mow the lawn with one of those old push manual reel mowers with the spinning blades out in front. My brother and I would sit outside with a few drinks and take turns pushing the thing up and down the small patch of grass that is the backyard. The old man — Tom is his name — used to watch us every weekend. I always thought it was because we were using a mower that was more in line with the equipment of his generation than with ours, until one day he commented that we had the only lawnmower he ever saw that ran on beer. “It certainly is,” I say to him. He turns to go inside his house and says over his shoulder, “You’d probably be farther along if you weren’t startin’ and stoppin’ all the time.” CATEGORY: General Society
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