Just Mow Me

Not the tree in question, but
after a few hours it felt that way.

I spent most of Sunday dealing with a large branch — more of a mini-tree than a branch, actually — that landed on an adjacent tree. The rain and wind were particularly nasty on Saturday night, and this branch landed so it was about eight feet high, parallel to the ground, braced by the two trees like a log bridge you'd find in an Indiana Jones movie or the original King Kong.

I enlisted my father's help, because I'm so handy that I require a soon-to-be 75-year-old with sooner-to-have open-heart surgery to assist me with simple horticultural tasks. Dad brought over an assortment of tree-cutting weapons, but fortunately my probably-older-than-my-father neighbor whose house is behind my own took pity on us and offered his electric chain saw.

In the process of digging out an extension cord in great haste, I ending up breaking some items of personal value that shouldn't have been in my booby-trapped garage in the first place — a mere hour earlier I was in the garage and thought to myself, "Hey, I'd better move that crap" — and I cut myself on a splinter of glass. And this was BEFORE we even started.

Unfortunately, cutting this log down, then into pieces, took much more time than I'd planned, so I inadvertently screwed up Mrs. The Anthony Show's schedule. She usually does her freelance and school work on Sundays, and she was forced to make sure our kids didn't wander over near falling branches and spritzes of sawdust.

And then, after that shit...

...I had to mow the lawn. 

LIKE SWIMMING LAPS IN A GREEN POOL ONLY INSTEAD OF CHLORINE YOU SMELL LIKE GASOLINE

Just the sight of it is nauseating
in a behaviorally conditioned
A Clockwork Orange sort of way.

When I play the lottery, I fantasize about what I'd do if I hit the jackpot. My first thoughts aren't about a trip, or a car, or a full-page ads in every newspaper in American telling all of my real and perceived enemies to suck rope, but are dreams of having enough money so I don't have to mow my lawn anymore.

Hiring someone to mow your lawn isn't the greatest extravagance — after all, I do pay someone to spread whatever it is he spreads on my lawn to make it so lush — but right now it falls under that category of "You know what, we're better off not spending the money on that sort of thing right now." Besides, if we had money to spend on chores, we'd hire a cleaning lady. (In our case, because my kids and I are slobs, we'd need a cleaning brigade.)

There actually is a bit of enjoyment I used to get from mowing the lawn: I'd listen to music or lectures-on-tape, or I'd just relish the moments I had with my own thoughts. Unfortunately, because of Mrs. The Anthony Show's tight schedule, it's not that easy to squeeze out the hour or so required to maintain my lawn, and when I'm in the process of trimming, I feel guilty that my wife is being accosted by two hungry thirsty crying needy clingy children while I enjoy my "me time" on a somewhat-self-propelled gas-powered luxury cruise.

(I have to add that Mrs. The Anthony Show never makes me feel guilty, but I suffer from what many married guys probably know of as the condition where you feel responsible for any setback that affects your wife, even if you have nothing to do with it or can't help it, whether it's the furnace crapping out or her car suffering a scratch while at the supermarket or her breaking her favorite shot glass. I call it husbanditis.) 

HOW MUCH IS ASTROTURF BY THE SQUARE YARD?

Not a bad idea.

We have a decent-sized back yard, even if we don't do much with it. The yard was the main selling point when we looked at the house — I know it wasn't the limited space of this tiny hut, where if we invite a neighbor in for coffee, we get an angry call from the fire marshal — but I never considered what I'd have to do to maintain it. We'd been living in an apartment for the first few years of marriage; I'd forgotten that grass, uh, grows.

(A similar surprise hits me every new clothing season, when I don't immediately understand why my kids' heads get stuck in their shirt neck-holes.)

My father ran his house very well — lawns were mowed, leaves were raked, garbage pails were placed at the curb — and all this while he worked nights. Granted, my brother and I were recruited for some of these labors, but the overall efforts were fueled by the pride he had for his home.

Mrs. The Anthony Show and I try to keep things going on the curb-appeal front at our little abode, but it's a constant battle against time, other financial needs, and weeds. 

A LOOSELY RELATED DIGRESSION

Don't bogart that lawn.

I went to one elementary school for six years (kindergarten through fifth grade) before it closed and I went to another school in the district for a single year before entering junior high. My first school was torn down and became a facility I hope I'll never have to enter against my will, so my memories can be summoned only by the thoughts in my head and the intermittently updated Facebook page.

It's a shame that I can't walk around the place anymore to jar additional memories from the recesses of my cortex or wherever. In contrast, just the other day I took my son to a baseball practice on the grounds of the extant elementary school, mere steps from where I had participated in a notable scrum over a girl in sixth grade.

What does all of this have to do with mowing the lawn? Well, let me tell you.

One of my most indelible memories from the old school was from my time in the library. The class would be brought into the library as a group, we'd receive some lecture about reading or the Dewey Decimal System (the 900s are biographies), and then we'd be allowed to roam the shelves for a book or two. There were a couple of books on each set of shelves that were positioned to face forward, and the one book that I remember best was called Please Pass the Grass.

Even by fifth grade, I didn't quite know what smoking marijuana really did to a person, but everyone thought it was funny that a word as harmless as "grass" could stand for something dangerous and illegal. And at that age, we thought "being on drugs" meant "acting crazy" — which I later learned is somewhat true. So a book called Please Pass the Grass, along with the cover image of whatever those whacked-out kids are doing, was quite a funny idea.

No one ever took out that book from its spot, on a rather high part of the shelf — maybe we feared the librarian would think we were doing drugs — so I still have no idea what the it was about. But those kids on the cover, particularly the kid having a catch with no one and the other guy with his head between his legs, seemed to be having such a good time.

If anyone who attended my elementary school ever got high anytime in his or her life, I suspect this book is the reason. At least that's what I'd tell the judge.