Mowing

   Pappy was my mom’s dad. He and my Gramma lived in a little Levittown-sort-of house, in a Levittown-sort-of neighborhood, in what was, until the early eighties or so, a thriving factory town, way up North. We’d get up there a couple times each year to visit.
 
   I always enjoyed spending time with Pappy. I thought he was a real hoot. My parents thought otherwise. Each of them had their reasons.
 
   The process of getting up there was, according to Dad, a shit-drive. Number one: Dad had no desire to go up there and sit under Pappy’s interrogation bulb. Pappy would usually put the screws to him until he snapped. Number two: Dad loathed that I-81 stretch that ran diagonally, all the way up through Virginia.

   “This sonuvabitchin road just never ends,” Dad would mutter to himself, rolling up I-81, chain-smoking his Salems, squinting up ahead for potential traffic jams. He was always on the lookout for traffic jams and other conspiracies that were set up to thwart his progress. For him, driving was not about the journey. It was about The Clock.
 
   Since my dad didn’t enjoy spending time with Pappy, I always had to wonder: What was the big hurry?

*          *          *

   Winter visits up to Pappy’s were different than summer visits.
 
   In the winter, with the bitter cold deterring all but the bravest from venturing outside, Pappy was a caged gorilla. With no baseball games on the tube, his only option was to wolf down red-dyed pistachios and preach politics. He’d point his red-stained, recently-retired-from-the-plant fingertips right into my dad’s face, puncturing the bubble, and poke away with kitchen table variants of New Deal ideology.
 
   “You’ve got to look after the Workers, Number One,” Pappy would say. “Workers are the goddam Life Force of this goddam Country, goddam it.”
 
   My dad, purple in the face, forehead veins bulging, from this Pappy-ism and whatever preamble that lead up to it, would attempt to reply, “But labor unions are going to ruin everything if we…”
 
   There was no way for my dad to finish. Pappy would just rip right on ahead into the next thing, leaving my poor dad’s thoughts stalled on take-off, neutered in the shed.
 
   I would get to observe all this from one of the spin-top barstools by the little island near the door, whilst sipping hot chocolate and nibbling a leftover pierogi. My kid mind reeled. Here was my dad, as wrong-minded and domineering a person as I’d ever known, on the correct side of an argument for once, but getting his ass handed to him by his father-in-law.
 
   Summertime visits were a little less confrontational. Pappy would mostly be outside, so my dad’s bubble could stay intact. There was tending the garden for one thing. And mowing the yard. There was talking to Payne and Woods (his next-door neighbors) for hours on end, finding out what the hell they were up to, and then reporting it back to Gramma for post-processing. There was really no time for pistachios or politics.
 
   “Woods has a brand-new grill over there. And get this: It doesn’t use charcoal,” Pappy would report.
 
   “What? Does it use wood or something?” Gramma would ask.
 
   “No, nothing like that. It uses propane,” Pappy would answer, with a twinkle in his eye, proud to reveal the secret of Woods’ new gadget, which to him represented everything that was holy and good about the United States of America.
 
   “Propane? You mean gas?” Gramma would ask in surprise.
 
   “That’s right. Propane. The goddam gas,” Pappy would state matter-of-factly. “Ain’t that somethin’, Toots?” Pappy would blink a couple times after asking that, but he wouldn’t wait long enough for a response. Instead, he’d carry on. “It’s got this little tank of propane. And I mean a little one. When it runs out, Woods can go get it refilled over at McBride’s [the local hardware store].” Thinking hard about that whole process, Pappy’s eyes would gleam. He was imagining taking a little propane tank of his own over to McBride’s and getting it refilled. While that was happening, he’d sit around and shoot the shit with whomever happened to be in the store. He’d tell them all about the plight of Workers everywhere and about his new propane grill and how he was in there to get his tank refilled and all. “What’ll they think of next, Toots? I mean it. I really mean it. You hear me?”
 
   “Huh?” Gramma would ask.
 
   “What’ll they think of next?”
 
   “I wouldn’t trust it,” Gramma would say flatly.
 
   “Whaddya mean you wouldn’t trust it?” Pappy would ask, as if he’d been punched hard, right in the gut.
 
   “The food off it probably tastes all gassy,” Gramma would say.

*          *          *

   Pappy mowed his postage-stamp, Levittown yard with an old-fashioned reel mower, and he edged all along his front sidewalk and driveway by hand with an old-fashioned rotary edger. This took plenty of time, as you might imagine. But his yard was immaculate. A postcard.
 
   Pappy was a soldier in WWII, the Big One. He was is the Navy. He was at Pearl on the USS West Virginia when the shit hit the fan.
 
   On that day that we’re all taught to remember, Pappy saw his bunk mate, Cap, get machine-gunned in half whilst attempting to man up to a deck gun. Pappy said it was a damn fool move for Cap to try to go for that gun in hopes of shooting at any Jap Zeros, on account of everyone knowing that that particular gun was all jammed up and out of commission. “I guess old Cap must’ve had some sort of death wish,” Pappy would say when recounting the tale.

*          *          *

   My dad would say this about Pappy and his reel mower: “That stubborn sonuvabitch would get just as good a cut with a gas mower, and it would take him a quarter of the time. Hell, a tenth of the time.”  This wasn’t a dig on Pappy’s picture-perfect lawn, which was beyond reproach. It was a dig on Pappy’s bombastic, wintertime, political rants. And it was an expression of my dad’s bewilderment about how anyone could disobey The Clock and get away with it.
 
   My dad was a soldier in Vietnam. He was in the Army, 1st Infantry. He was a part of Operation Toan Thang, which meant Operation Complete Victory. So much for that.
 
   My dad, somewhere in some jungle down in South Vietnam saw his bunk mate, Rick, get machine-gunned in half whilst attempting to defend a little mud cave that he and my dad had dug into the side of a hill. My dad said it was a damn fool move for Rick to try to body-block the entrance to that little cave, on account of everyone knowing that an air strike had already been called, and Charlie was only about five minutes away from getting Cobra-mowed into minced meat. “I guess old Rick must’ve had some sort of death wish,” Dad would say when recounting the tale.

*          *         *

   “He’s gonna be out there all day. Look how slow he’s going,” my dad would comment, while peeking out through my Gramma’s Venetian blinds at Pappy and his old-fashioned reel mower. A wet spot would be expanding, by the second, further outward from the center of the back of Dad’s shirt. “It’s like he doesn’t even care that we drove a thousand goddam hours to get up here to come visit. Look at him. Just look at him.” It would just eat my dad right up.
 
   Pappy would be out there, doing his thing, pushing his mower along slowly, methodically, meditatively, with a shit-eating grin on his face and nary a drop of sweat on his brow.

*          *          *

   Growing up, I never really got the chance to mow, even though I desperately wanted to. Allow me to explain.
 
   Mowing the yard was my dad’s thing, and there was no way he was going to pass the baton to anyone else. Especially some kid who wouldn’t be able to keep the mow lines dead-nuts straight such that it would pass muster with Christ Almighty. So, on Saturday mornings when all the other kids in the neighborhood were out mowing their yards, there would be my dad out in our yard, huffing and puffing and sweating like a sonuvabitch.
 
   The best my buddies could figure was that I must be some kind of spoiled kid who didn’t have to do any yard work chores on Saturday mornings. “So how are things over on Easy Street?” Dave Dillon would ask me each and every Saturday afternoon when everybody made it out to the ballfield. He’d ask me real loud, so everybody else could hear. “I saw your old man out there sweating his balls off again this morning. Geez Louise, it must be pretty damn easy, livin’ over there on Easy Street. I bet you were inside in the A/C, eatin’ a goddam ice cream sandwich or sumthin.’ Am I right?”  Old Dave would go at me for a while.
 
   What could I say? I knew there was no point in engaging old Dave, in me trying to explain.  There was no way to communicate to Dave Dillon, of all people, that it felt really crumby to have my dad out there pushing that mower every Saturday morning in front of everyone, struggling at it like a real heart attack case. There was no way to tell Dave that that my dad struggled at everything like a real heart attack case, not just mowing, that my dad would break a sweat just looking out a window through Venetian blinds, that it was Salem cigarettes that made my dad cough and hack and suffer out there, not the hardship of having to do the prince’s work. There was no way to tell Dave that I didn’t live on Easy Street, that I lived with a perfectionist who actually did begrudgingly ask me to mow the yard one time – one time – at my naive mother’s request, but then went and re-mowed the whole damn thing right after I was finished in order to make it look the way he wanted. There was no way to explain to Dave what it feels like to be denied a rite of passage.

*          *          *

   Nowadays I get to do lots and lots of mowing. The whole shebang takes me around half a day, all in. And in the summertime, it’s happening five or six times a month. Judging by those numbers, it would be easy to assume I’m trying to make up for lost time, trying to reclaim my youth or some such nonsense. But the truth is, I just kind of fell into it. Honest. I’m not out there lollygagging, barking at memories like a senile old hound dog. I just happen to be dealing with a big yard and big fields, and they just happen to take a while to cut.
 
   The nicest part about mowing, I think, – other than the smell of freshly cut grass and the satisfaction that comes with creating a little beauty in the world – is having some time outdoors to think, out in the sunshine.
 
   Sometimes I think about Pappy when I’m mowing. And sometimes I think about my dad too. I think they’d both be somewhat interested to see me in action. But I bet neither one of them would approve of my approach. To wit: Although he’d be smitten by the Yankee Ingenuity of my zero-turn mower, at the end of the day, I think Pappy would reckon a zero-turn to somehow be a cheat. And although he’d be impressed by the speed at which I can cut grass, at the end of the day, I think my dad would feel betrayed by my swoopy, curvy cutting paths since they clash with his straight-line model of the Universe.
 
   Sometimes when I’m mowing I think this: Boy oh boy, am I ever grateful that I never had to be a soldier or fight in a war or see anyone machine-gunned in half. Maybe I did grow up on Easy Street, after all. Or maybe I’ve recently arrived there.

– O.M. Kelsey