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On one dire day I was delegated family lawnmower. By one of those sly tricks of synecdoche, this means as family lawnmower, mower-of-the-lawns, I was designated and required to push the family lawnmower, machine-for-chewing-grass. Getting lumbered with this important grown-up chore was like the end of youth, the first indentured servitude to an uncaring world, a preemptory bugle-blast foreshadowing miseries to come in years of my age double-digited.
Ten years old, short, underweight and scrawny. The only word, though my tender-hearted sister preferred “slight” or “small” or other euphemism. I thought I looked like the wretched victim in the Charles Atlas ads on the backs of comic books—the emaciated stick-figure with arms of wire, a hollow chest and (even) flaccid hair, kicked about in front of his girl friend by the Big Beach Bum. I dreamt vaguely of mastering Atlas’s patented Dynamic Tension method (only 90 days!) but never bothered to send a coupon. I was too young, too little, too feckless and idle. Future muscles meant nothing to me. Later I identified myself with Alfred E. Neuman in Mad comics (“What, Me Worry?”). Nowadays I would be sentenced to obligatory sessions with some 12-step group for enhancing self-image.
Being the official and only family lawnmower meant I inherited charge of the lawnmowers, all three my father had acquired in his quest for more, better and newer tools and gadgets. When you think of “lawnmower,” your mind’s eye pictures a low steel tray with four wheels and a 1-horse motor bolted atop to whirl a dangerous scythe below, while emitting noxious noise and stink. In those days, “lawnmower” denominated a machine with two biggish wheels, a horizontal reel of sharpened helical blades and a roller behind. It sported a T-handle to engage the motive power—me.
We owned a pre-war F & N monster of wood and cast iron that weighed a ton and was virtually immovable in grass of any discernible length. We had a newer L & N of all-steel construction—tubular handle, bicycle handgrips, a hard rubber roller. It was painted green and was ostentatiously Streamlined, like a Chrysler Airflow, a Budd Pullman car or a deco-moderne-style stucco studio house. Once it had been the Lawnmower of the Future. We also had my father’s latest pride and joy—a humongous gas-powered motorized model, a heavy and wide reel mower with a tall Briggs & Stratton one-lung gasoline motor fotched on top. It weighed far more than anything I had tried to push but was theoretically self-propelled.
I had my choice of these machines to mow our quarter-acre lawn, including three long, steep banks of varying pitch. This was in the halcyon days just after The War ended and we crawled out from under the perpetual delay of For the Duration. The waiting was gone, we were told, and the world of the future, like the kingdom of heaven, was here with us. I looked impatiently for Plexiglas dome houses, cars shaped like teardrops, our own autogyro, moving sidewalks all over town, food that came in tiny pills like the cod liver oil forced down me in wintertime. Where were television, videophone, airship travel, plastic clothing, bubble-covered cities for year-round Riviera weather? Where was my personal robot slave to do all evil chores—like lawnmowing?
That spring, grass grew zealously as I watched in dread. One warmish day I dragged the two pushmowers from the garage and looked at them. The old, iron-shod F & N cut better, I knew, if you could make it cut at all. I oiled it and the green L & N with a big brakeman’s squirt can, sloshing the stuff onto whatever looked like a bearing surface.
I dragged the F & N to the lawn by the garage and tried to mow a swath. The machine rolled into the grass, grabbed a mouthful with its reel and abruptly stopped. I fell against the handle, the big brass retaining screw smacking me in my chicken breast, right in the keel. I fell over and moaned. Finally I tried again, with the same result. The iron juggernaut wanted to grip the grass and uproot it violently from the earth, not cut it off.
I tried the L & N. It was lighter, easier to push. It had a look as if it wanted to cut grass. Its greenness alone was encouraging. I gave it a huge shove, and the little machine skated merrily atop the grass, flattening it and whirring its reel like a rachet, a festive but futile rhythm-band sound. A few shreds of grass were cut by accident. I shoved again, and again the lightweight skidded harmlessly over the grass.
I tried different speeds and angles with both machines. The F & N mower balefully bruised and buffeted me, trying to throw me over its handles. The coy L & N simply wanted to run away with me. After an hour I had cut—or rather shredded and gouged—a small square of lawn by the garage. It looked as if someone, maybe a small goat, was tormenting the grass out of sheer sadism.
So I dragged forth the ultimate weapon—our A-bomb of mowers, the gas-powered behemoth. With only a vague knowledge of internal combustion engines, I worked out how to put gasoline into the tank, trusted there was oil in the oil pan, found the choke and throttle and clutch and eyed the starter rope, which coiled on top of the motor. I gripped the wooden handle at the end of the rope and pulled mightily on it. The mower slowly rolled over on its side. I righted it thoughtfully. I put a foot on the mower and pulled at the rope, about three feet of it, perhaps.
After some time, the mower made a sound like a suppressed belch. Encouraged, I pulled over and again until the motor expelled a small cloud of gunmetal smoke and started with the sound of marbles in a meat grinder. I throttled it, and it roared then settled into a manly growl. The whole mower shuddered. It looked very dangerous. I thought it yearned to lurch forward and eat my foot inside its flimsy P-F Flyer.
Cautiously, I engaged the clutch. The mower rolled smoothly ahead toward the open garage doorway. I steered around the corner and onto my test patch of grass. The mower slowed, buckled down slightly and ate the grass, sending back a merry green fountain of teeny shreds. Jubilant, I gave it more gas, and we started on a long strip, next to the sidewalk, all the way to the back door of the house. Bluish smoke puffed from the stub of exhaust pipe, the motor snarled like a bobcat in a bag, its drive chain clattered, the reels clacked around briskly like Cyrus McCormick’s patented reaper, and a comet’s tail of green, green clippings enunciated our progress.
Halfway to the back door, the mower suddenly pitched forward and stopped dead, engine silenced. Again, I struck the handle a blow with my tender breast keel and staggered backward. I saw that the mighty reels had attempted to eat a small branch about an inch in diameter and a foot long. Gingerly (the beast might wake), I removed the stick and tried to restart the motor. After many shoulder-dislocating yanks, it responded, and we cut several whole swathes up and down the yard. I enjoyed the smell of burning gas and oil mingled with the zest of new-mown bluegrass (substantially crabgrass, I suspect) and the general ambience of springtime, that merry ring-a-ding time, etc. Nonetheless, I was exhausted by the regular interruptions of mowing by sticks, rocks, lost baseballs and other objects the demon tried to ingest. Every bout of starter-rope flagellation seemed longer than the last, while dusk descended.
I had cut about a fourth of the lawn. I cursed the grass. I hated its rubbery resilience, its tireless growth. Why didn’t it just stay the length you cut it for a decent time? Say, all summer. Who wanted or needed it cut? I didn’t! It was inane futility, cutting it. My father said mowing encouraged grass to grow. Exactly what I didn’t want! The work felt like fiendish masochism, penal servitude, a hamster’s marathon on a moebius strip. I looked at the neighbors’ grass.
On our left, Mr. Olmsted was a fastidious grass-cutter. He even crawled about with hand clippers and a weed prong after he mowed. He collected clippings in a basket behind his mower and burnt them green and stinking in an oil drum by the alley. On the right, Mr. Stafford was old, shrunken and feeble but even he got out and mowed and clipped and trimmed around the finicky flowerbeds dotting his lawn, under the baleful direction of his wife, who closely resembled their Boston bulldog Tinky. I hated any such exemplars of industry and competence.
As the streetlights glowed green and slowly brightened, I sat on the half-cut lawn behind the burned-smelling bulk of the mower and realized that adulthood stretched before me. I knew with part of my brain that I could mow the whole lawn, with Herculean effort, that it would tire me to the bone and leave me unsatisfied with my work. I knew I would continue mowing it and get, at least marginally, better at it. But the job would never be done and gone. There would always be grass. I had fallen out of Eden and had to work and sweat and strain and doubt its efficacy.
Still, it was my job and my identity for this summer and all forthcoming summers in my ken. An unearned promotion in the mighty army of proper, middle-class diligence and zeal into which I had been conscripted. I had no new blue cloak, no fields and pastures new to address—just the lawn, the permanent, unavoidable thing, my chore, my provenance, my demesne. I dragged the mowers to the garage, shut the big doors and trudged to the house for supper.
Tomorrow had a name and purpose, unlike childhood days before. I was the family’s lawnmower. The sharp scent of cut grass followed me into the house. My P-F Flyers were tinted pale green with stains, a faint scutcheon of fatigue, honor and unsought servitude. ###
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