Lawn Boy

My grandmother is the kind of person who always thinks that no matter how bad things might seem, everything will always come out all right. Her hair could be on fire and she'd probably say, “Well, at least we have light to read by.”

She's the most positive person in the world, and amazing and fun to be around, but in a strange and happy way sometimes she seems to be about nine bricks shy of a full load.

You can say, “You know, I think the Yankees will win the World Series again.”

And she'll answer, “Yes, but it's still nice to put carrots in stew for the flavor.”

And you think that somewhere inside that brain maybe a screw came loose. Then you find out that the last time the Yankees won the World Series she made a stew and forgot to put carrots in, and blamed the Yankees (she'd never liked them anyway) when the stew tasted funny. She still doesn't like the Yankees.

“It all makes sense if you wait long enough,” she says.

So when I turned twelve she came to the house with an old riding mower in the back of her Toyota pickup.

“Happy birthday,” she said. “It used to belong to your grandfather. He was always working on it. I thought you might like it.”

“A mower?” Though we lived on the edge of what was termed an upper-middle-class neighborhood— Eden Prairie, Minnesota—our house was small, a “fixer-upper” when my folks bought it four years ago. It had a yard the size of a postage stamp and the grass never seemed to grow enough to need mowing. It just sprouted, stopped, gave up and died. Over and over.

My father and I lifted the mower down from the truck bed. “A lawn mower?” I looked at Grandma. “Thanks.”

“My bridge club is meeting on Thursday night,” she said, getting back into her truck, “which makes it hard to watch
CSI
since it's on Thursday too. Did you know that?”

And she drove away before I could answer her, much less wait for the part where it made sense.

“It appears you now have a lawn mower,” my father said, smiling, as he walked back into the house. “I don't know the connection with her bridge club either, although I'm sure there is one. She's your mom's mother, maybe your mom will know what that meant.”

I looked at the mower. Very old, low, small. It looked like it only cut about a two-foot-wide area, and it was nothing like the fancy new machines. The seat was steel, without a pad, and the driver's feet went over the top of the motor to rest on two foot pedals. One was a brake, the other a clutch that you had to push down to get the mower moving. It steered with two levers, like a very small bulldozer, and looked more like a toy than a mower.

Okay. Since I was twelve, I didn't have much
experience with motors. I've never even had a dirt bike or four-wheeler. I'm just not machine oriented.

My birthday present sat there. I tried pushing it toward our garage, but it didn't seem to want to move. Even turning around to put my back against it and push with my legs—which I thought might give me better leverage—didn't help; it still sat there.

So I studied it. On the left side of the motor was a small gas tank, and I unscrewed the top and looked in. Yep, gas. On top of the tank were two levers; the first was next to pictures of a rabbit and a turtle. Even though I'm not good with machines, I figured out that was the throttle and the pictures meant fast and slow. The other lever said ON-OFF. I pushed ON.

Nothing happened, of course. On the very top of the motor was a starting pull-rope. What the heck, why not? I gave it a jerk and the motor sputtered a little, popped once, then died. I pulled the rope again and the motor hesitated, popped, and then roared to life. I jumped back. No muffler.

Once when I was little, my grandmother, in her usual logic-defying fashion, answered my request for another cookie by saying that my grandfather had
been a tinkerer. “He was always puttering with things, taking them apart, putting them back together. When he was around nothing ever broke. Nothing ever
dared
to break.”

Loud as the mower was, it still wasn't moving and the blade wasn't going around. I stood looking down at it.

This strange thing happened.

It spoke to me.

Well, not really. I'm not one of those woo-woo people or a wack job. At least I don't think I was. Maybe I am now.

Anyway, there was some message that came from the mower through the air and into my brain. A kind of warm, or maybe a settled feeling. Like I was supposed to be there and so was the mower. The two of us.

Like it was a friend. So all right, I know how
that
sounds too: We'll sit under a tree and talk to each other. Read poems about mowing. Totally wack.

But the feeling was there.

Next I found myself sitting on the mower, my feet on the pedals. I moved the throttle to the rabbit position—it had been on turtle—and pushed the left pedal down, and the blade started whirring.
The mower seemed to give a happy leap forward off the sidewalk and I was mowing the lawn.

Or dirt. As I said, we didn't really have much of a lawn. Dust and bits of dead grass flew everywhere and until I figured out the steering, the mailbox, my mother's flowers near the front step and a small bush were in danger.

But in a few minutes I got control of the thing and I sheared off what little grass there was.

The front lawn didn't take long, but before I was done the next-door neighbor came to the fence, attracted by the dust cloud. He waved me over.

I stopped in front of him, pulled the throttle back and killed the engine. The sudden silence was almost deafening. I stood up away from the mower, my ears humming, so I could hear him.

“You mow lawns?” he asked. “How much?”

And that was how it started.

When it all began, it was simple.

Our neighbor's house had a larger yard than ours, with what looked like good grass. No difficult corners, just a big square with a large elm tree in the center.

I mowed it, and he gave me money.

Twenty dollars.

Figuring that I used almost all the gas in the tank, about a gallon, which cost three dollars, and not counting the wear and tear on the mower (I didn't know how to figure that out), I made seventeen
dollars for my work. It took two hours so I made eight dollars and fifty cents an hour.

That, I was to learn later, was called capitalism.

While I was finishing up that lawn the next neighbor up the block came by and said:

“How much to mow my lawn?”

Wow. Another job, just like that.

I poked around in our garage and found an old three-gallon gas can. I walked to the station on the corner, bought gas, brought it back, filled the tank and mowed the second guy's yard.

And while I was doing that a third man came and asked me to mow his lawn. The lawns kept getting bigger, and soon it was dinnertime and I had done three lawns and had made sixty dollars and I had a small piece of scrap paper with phone numbers and addresses for six
more
lawns. …

Turns out the man who owned the lawn service that had done all the yards in our neighborhood had run off with the wife of one of his customers and all the husbands were worried about hiring a new company after what had happened. A kid like me mowing their lawns wouldn't be much of a threat, I suppose. Plus, I was cheap.

Later I would learn that I had tapped into something called an expanding market economy.

All I knew was that it felt good to have all that money in my pockets.

That evening I took a rag and wiped the mower down, parked it in a corner of the garage and—a little admission here—patted it on the top of the gas tank. As I bent over, the wads of bills cracked in my pockets. Thanks, Grandpa. I never really knew my grandfather but the mower seemed tough and friendly. Maybe it was like him. He had worked on it and used it and it was nice to think of him as part of it.

Then I went inside. A strange thing happened.

My parents were getting food on the table and as we sat down to eat my dad said:

“That new film about astronomy is on at the IMAX. It would be great to see it.” He sighed and I knew he was thinking about our budget.

And there I sat. My pockets full of money. And I could have said no problem, I've got money, and I'll earn more money tomorrow and more money the day after that….

But I kept my mouth shut.

I could have said all those things but nothing came. Somehow it didn't feel right for me to be the one offering to take us all to the movies. If I did that, wouldn't Dad feel worse? Wouldn't it sound like I was bragging?

I ate my meat loaf and green beans and then went into the living room and watched a little television. Or tried to. I still had the sound of the mower in my ears so I couldn't hear the set. And my whole body was still vibrating from sitting on the mower all day. After a few minutes, I couldn't keep my eyes open. By eight o'clock I was sitting on the couch with my head hanging forward, drool dripping onto my T-shirt, sound asleep.