My lawn wingman – A Wee Bleether

‘Know what you never see any more?” my friend Jeff Opdyke asked me over lunch last spring. “Kids mowing the grass.”

My observant fellow journalist noted that lawns, for the most part, have become the turf of professional yardmen and dads who just want the exercise, but no teenagers.

For the rest of the summer, I kept an eye out for kids mowing the grass. I didn’t spot one of them.

Mowing the grass used to be a required right-of-passage, that time-honored chore that kept boys from watching great ballgames and playing with friends.

Once my dad had become confident I’d matured enough not to hack my own foot off in a grisly accident—an accident he apparently visualized quite vividly—I was let loose on our yard.

We lived in Thibodaux at the time, where our small, cookie-cutter yard was easy pickings, requiring no real skill. On a whim, a neighbor who worked offshore offered me ten bucks to mow his overgrown lawn. I zipped through it in no time and thought, “Easy money.”

I remember his bewildered gaze over his yard as he handed me the tener. Later that afternoon, I peeked over the fence and saw why: It was a massacre—row upon row of clippings sitting atop unmown strips of grass, like a farmer’s hay field. He never hired me again.

But my mowing eventually improved. I learned to mow counter-clockwise to keep clippings from piling up where I had yet to mow. I learned not to worry about mowing through fire ant piles since they were too worried about what the hell just happened to their world to bother with biting me. I learned if the mower instructions say to press the choke five times, you press it 10 times. As a self-absorbed high school kid, I learned to evaporate into thin air when my dad came looking for me to mow.

When my family moved to a larger property on the outskirts of town, I became an aficionado of the riding lawnmower. The Snapper was my ride of choice, while I found the fancy Ariens model my dad bought later to be no match for Lafourche Parish flora.

Today, I live the Dad Life in the burbs with simple wants. I fertilize every spring, even though by mid-summer I always swear I won’t next year. But I always do.

And I sweat the details. “You gotta edge,” my friend Ken Duhe advised me years ago. His sage words rang in my ears when I bought my first combination edger-and-weed whacker at Sears. “You’ve just got to, man.”

My mom taught me that, no matter how much yard work you have to do, save some time in the evening to simply walk around and enjoy it.

My son is nearing his 3rd birthday, and he’s become my unwavering mowing apprentice. Timothy rocks a Fisher Price Bubble Mower with the 7-inch cutting platform. My lawn wingman, he parallels me, eyeing my roaring mower with a sparkle in his eye. Every now and again he rolls up close to me, so I extend my hand and holler over the din, “Give me five!”

He slaps my hand just right—enthusiastically, but not too hard—like a guy just helping another guy take care of some business. It’s as though he knows that, one day, this could all be his.