A Man Mows a Lawn

I am sitting, resting actually, on an old teak bench at the back of our property. I have just finished mowing half of our very large lawn and I am feeling a bit wiped. Behind me I hear the sound of our 96-year-old neighbour firing up his sit-down mower. My mind whirls.

For the past few days, when I haven't been mowing or listening to neighbours mow, then I have been reading about mowing, thinking about mowing, planing to mow or examining mown lawns for tips, lessons or warnings.

For nearly 20 years, I have not mown lawns and  have not missed the activity. Then we moved and mowing a lawn became a necessity and strangely a bit of a blessing. I have written before of my odd way of mowing lawns and I have come to understand that mowing is strangely a guy thing, one that I have started to wrestle with in the Third Phase of my life. Everyone on my street who mows a lawn is a guy and if there is no guy in the house to mow the lawn, the rule seems to be, hire a service and a guy will come and mow the lawn. And we are judged by our lawns and once you start mowing and start feeling judged you find yourself judging other lawns. Like why has one of my neighbours let his lawn literally go to seed. Is it because he rents and doesn't own? Is he lazy, lacking in initiative, ill, away? Is it possible he has simply decided to drop out of the lawn mowing competition all together?
It intensifies. Especially if you have a big yard and an electric rechargeable mower that lacks sufficient battery power to do the whole job in one day. You start planning your assault and weather and the daily schedule starts to play a role. Soon you feel like the old guys at the community centre who talk and talk incessantly about their lawns.

My friend, the excellent writer and curmudgeon Parker Donham, has summarized the history of lawn mowing quite succinctly on his blog, and then acknowledges that his need to mow has been made easier with the purchase of a Husqvarna mower or a sit-down mower. And sit-down mowers haunt me. Is getting one a cop-out, is there some virtue in sweating through a hot day in order to lower the height of the average grass blade of our yawn? Will I feel or look foolish sitting down on a mover? Is there a mower small enough to move between our front and back yard but large enough to make having one reasonable? The questions...the questions...see what I mean about this lawn mowing stuff getting obsessive?

Roger Cohen at the New York Times places mowing the lawn at the centre of the pursuit of happiness project, the joy to be found in the repetitive tasks that make up the day-to-day of a good life, our life. I identify with that. When I was recovering from surgery, the mark for me that I was healing was when I could empty the dishwasher. There is a value in the quotidian. There is joy and meaning to be discovered in patching together all the moments that congeal together in the fashioning of a day.

That's what is really different today when it comes to mowing a lawn. In past years. when being at the office was a full-time job, mowing the lawn, doing the everyday necessary seemed to be one task too many, one straw too onerous. In this phase, where life is more malleable, more under my control, making sense of my day is my job and part of making sense of my day means stitching the repetitive into the grand scheme of things.

I am still sitting on the bench but for the moment I am now longer thinking about mowing or not directly. I am thinking about music. When I was young, in my teens, I loved Carole King's Tapestry. Still do actually. I doubt she had lawn mowing in mind when capturing the sense of life as a deeply woven tapestry, but that's okay because I do as I remember the song and contemplate the remaining half of the lawn to be mowed.

Gardens of The Third Phase

I have a wonderful new garden that is totally preoccupying me. For the past few weeks, I have been out there whenever I can, sometimes for five hours at a time.

The garden was established by the people who owned the house before we bought it last fall. They had spent 16 years turning a large barren lot into a multiple-garden bed wonder. I thought my job - daunting enough - would be to maintain their efforts.

When we made the decision to move away from Toronto to our small town and our huge garden, friends said things like, "why don't you just move to a condo?" "you're going to miss the city," "how will you ever maintain such a garden?" They knew I would care for the garden largely on my own and their comments nipped at my confidence.

So this spring I set out to face the challenge and soon discovered that the fun came not in trying to keep the garden as it was  - an impossibility anyway - but in learning each section and rebuilding it to keep it going forward, to reflect our tastes, and to add some edibles.

As I work, I'm reminded that gardening let's me know where I am at and who I am. Sometimes, I am impatient to get the jobs done. Sometimes, I want perfection, Sometimes, I lose myself in the quiet contemplation of the land. Sometimes, I channel my father as I create a vegetable patch. Sometimes, I channel my mother as I clip flowers for the house. Sometimes, I channel my original self, the one who loved to play in the dirt as a child.

But I've discovered that gardening in the third phase is a different proposition. In the past, I have planted trees and perennials - buying the cheaper, smaller pots - knowing they would grow eventually. But now, I think a lot about what a tree will look like in five years, how high a perennial will be in two. Because, just like plants, life is fragile. And as I plant a cedar or a stick of a pear tree, I hope they will survive the harder winters and I wonder how long I will be able to be around them. I plant nonetheless because life is a gamble at the best of times.

The strongest reminder of this is the paw-paw trees I recently planted. The paw-paw is a native fruit tree I'd never heard of until I moved to the Niagara region - a tree that produces a papaya-looking fruit. But I can't expect to see any fruit for at least three years, have to keep the trees wrapped for the first year and a half. In some ways, planting the paw-paw trees is a leap of faith, an incentive to keep active. If nothing else, they are a legacy. Native trees I'll leave behind. D

Let An "Old Geezer" Rant

Sometimes, if we aren't careful, we let slip our prejudices and when we realize what we have done, we are chagrined. But if we think our prejudices aren't prejudices or are sufficiently widely shared that we don't think of them as prejudices at all then putting them into play becomes simply normal. Let's be clear, a prejudice is an irrational labeling and libeling of an entire group. Examples always help so let's meet Tim Fernholz and his wholesale beat down of 'geezers'.

Fernholz writes for publications in the Atlantic network of magazines, newsletters and blogs. In the May Saturday edition of Quartz he writes:"Good morning, Quartz readers! How did we let a bunch of geezers swindle global soccer for this long? Of the 14 top soccer officials and businessmen arrested on FIFA-related corruption charges this week, all but five were over the age of 60." 

Reading that, the only thing one can conclude is that corruption is an age thing. You know, all round moral individuals acting in the best interest of sport and then the guy turns 60 and wham, he is a sleaze bucket and corrupt to boot. And I guess the brilliant analyst that is Fernholz must assume that the 5 folks under 60 who were charged were corrupted by the geezers. What's not clear to me is whether the charges the 14 are facing relate to events that occurred before they turned 60 or after. And if the charges were from a pre-geezer state, how will the authorities, let alone the public cope?

Geezer is a word that originated in England in the 1800s and originally meant an eccentric or cranky male, and often carries the adjective old in front of it, except in America where geezer seems to mean old and male. I am not sure how geezer became associated with corruption so I asked Fernholz and Quartz the following: "What is the link between age and corruption, and can you cite some research that establishes that link? Are just males susceptible or inclined this way? Is it just white males? Is corruption a universal marker of people who turned 60? There is so much here that if you had only shared the full extent of your understanding I might have been able to describe it as something I read elsewhere that made me smarter." 


Fernholz and his colleagues chose not to answer, I am assuming because they believe those over 60 wouldn't get it and those under sixty just accept that those over sixty have lost their smarts, their morals, their integrity and their sense of what is acceptable. Or they didn't bother answering because they realized that what Tim Fernholz was blathering on about was simply a moment of spouting off an irrational and a hateful generalization without a basis in fact...wait there is is a word for that...what's the word...am I having a senior moment....no there it is....prejudice.  

Ironically for Mr. Fernholz, the whole FIFA scandal is only public knowledge because a 71-year-old journalist broke the story 9 years ago when he was 62....my God, how did that happen? How did an old Geezer do something that should have been the work of some guy in his 30s? I am waiting for Mr. Fernholz to explain it. 

Brain or Body? If I Had to Choose.

I can't help being enticed by books like Two Weeks to a Younger Brain. Who wouldn't want to learn tricks to stave off Alzheimer's? And every time hacks for a longer life jump out at me on Facebook I have to open them. I like my life. I like the fact that my body still allows me to do many of the things I love and my brain works pretty well although I forget names fast and worry about that.

With good fortune I still have a couple of productive decades ahead of me. But there is a question nagging me, one left by the women who preceded me. If I had to choose which would go first - the body or the mind - which would it be? For most of my life, I never thought seriously about the question because who at 20, 30, or even 40 does? But I suppose it's been at the back of my mind for a while.

When I was young and leaving home for university, I had to go and say goodbye to my grandmother who had lived in the same town as my family my whole life. By then Ga-Ga, as we called her, had become what everybody described as "senile." That day, my grandmother told me a rambling story that ended with the stricture not to go beyond the schoolyard walls in order to keep safe, drawing on some long-ago memory, confused by why I was saying goodbye.

As a teenager I found some of my grandmother's eccentricities amusing in the unaware invincibility of youth. I laughed when her cat walked all over the dining room table and stuck his paw in her teacup and when, even after we'd told her not to drink the tea, she forgot and drank it anyway.

But there was really nothing funny about my grandmother's decline. She had always been a smart woman, a woman who may have been limited by her time but ahead of  it nonetheless. She never traveled off the continent but she understood the sorrows of others oceans away. After World War II she housed Eastern European refugees in her home until they learned English and could get jobs in nearby Hamilton. In the '60s she sponsored a young girl from Hong Kong who wanted to come to Canada. She was a business woman at heart, mind you. The young girl had to read to her each day; the Estonians who lived in her house or our house helped on the farm until they could set out on their own.

And even though she never went to university, she taught herself about the stock market and turned the meagre earnings of a fruit farm into a handsome profit, able to care for herself financially after her husband died.

And yet what I remember of her at the end is a woman who allowed a farm manager to steal from her constantly, who wouldn't trust her own children, who grew more and more paranoid all the time. On one of my last visits to her when she was in hospital she told me the staff came into her room at night and cut off the skin from her finger tips. They boiled it, she told me, and made the curtain that hung in her room.

She was never diagnosed with Alzheimer's although it was clear she suffered from some form of dementia. I saw the toll this took on my mother, her caregiver, who tried her best to help but was rewarded with mistrust and abuse. One day when she came back from my grandmother's, exhausted, my mother told me she hoped that when she grew old, her body would go before her mind, partly because she didn't want her children to have to face the same situation.

Unfortunately, she got her wish. Childhood polio, post-polio and the effects of five pregnancies on a back with weakened muscles made my mother completely immobile by her eighties. She had the wherewithal to handle her own arrangements and insisted in the end on staying in her retirement home but moving to the only floor where there were nurses who could care for her - the Alzheimer's floor. Night and day, people wandered into her room scaring her. And frustrated with her inability to manage even the simplest physical tasks, my mother said she wished her mind had gone so she didn't have to be aware of what was happening to her. I reminded her of our conversation from years earlier. But by that point she was suffering too much to engage in a discussion.

When we see our grandmothers and our mothers in their final days they are others with a fate that is foreign to us. We are the young who will go on and on. But in the third phase, that question of how our lives will end has a way of catching up to us as we face the spectre of illnesses and the death of contemporaries. But if I had to choose the how and the when, I don't know what I'd want those to be. To end up like my grandmother or be as helpless as my mother. Both seems so unfair.

So I will read hacks to keep my health and I will try to exercise my brain. Luckily, the science shows many of the same good habits will protect both. And in the meantime, I'll try to put the question aside and enjoy each day as it comes. D