Casual

...And it works quietly, with an understated whirr no louder than a broom sweeping, allowing me to cut the grass while my children nap inside...

...Afterwards, nothing would look out of place, and Queenie, that was his name, would return all of his equipment to the trunk of a beautifully maintained sixties sedan—an old Ford Falcon I think, black with bright red interior—and drive away...

...He rushed down to the curb, his brow wrinkled with concern, his hands pleading for surrender, and implored me to, please, borrow his power mower and be done with it...

...Still their condemnation lingered in the air...

...On a big yard across the street from our house, he’d push a lawn mower almost exactly like mine, and then he’d carefully clip and prune the edges like a barber...

...Last fall, my wife Cynthia and I moved our children and our things into a new house, actually an old, somewhat beat-up house that needed work but offered us more room and a nice-sized yard...

...The fi rst hint that I had gone from unremarkable though odd—my natural state—to publicly pathetic came when two young men, complete strangers, drove by my house and called out to me and laughed...

...Casual TAKE MY MOWER, PLEASE How to know when you’ve made a spectacle of yourself...

...I was soon in a sweaty lather...

...I noted their out-of-town baseball caps, bearing the logo of a team I was pretty sure hadn’t made a serious pennant run in decades, and their generally vulgar demeanor...

...It is the old-fashioned kind without an engine...

...I mean, Who taught these guys to slouch in their car like that...

...Apparently I myself do not present quite the image of stern landscaping dignity that old Queenie did...

...Lugging it hither and yon, I fi nd myself daydreaming about an old man who used to cut lawns in my neighborhood when I was a kid...

...He didn’t think the little mower worked very well...

...DAVID SKINNER...

...Having pushed a Sears gas mower over many neighboring yards as a child, earning maybe eight bucks a pop for what always seemed like the sweatiest two hours of my life, I entertained no illusions about the pleasures of this quintessential suburban chore...

...My choice of mower, in addition to inviting the ridicule of passersby, has caught the attention of the neighbors, a rather friendly and solicitous bunch, and more than one has offered to lend me his own gas-fueled mower...

...This was a reference to the lawn mower I was pushing, an American- brand reel mower...

...I haven’t fi gured how to achieve exactly the crew-cut grass length I prefer, but my friend’s old mower does a fi ne job of slashing the many varieties of grass and weed that cover my long-neglected yard...

...And since reaching the age when it was possible to be a snob, I had come to regard the noise of mowers, weedwackers, and leaf blowers as the great curse of living in the suburbs, well deserving of the kind of goody-twoshoes regulation I usually deplore...

...Aww,” they had said, “you’re really saving gas now, Dude...

...But now his story had changed...

...They don’t seem to believe me when I say I prefer my own machine...

...It was fall, though, when we closed on the property, and the cold weather was coming on faster than any urge to cut grass...

...One man’s garbage, as they say...

...He’d bragged about it at dinner when he fi rst bought it...

...By nice-sized I mean it’s big enough in the back for a game of whiffl e ball and in the front for maybe a round of bocce...

...Watching me from the shady cool of his porch, my neighbor Stewart, who has fast become a family friend, could not take it any longer...

...I am, in fact, becoming a little defensive on this point...

...One recent hot Saturday I went to work on the grass around lunchtime...

...I politely declined, of course, not saying what was really on my mind, that I may be a spectacle, but my neighbor, boy, is he a buttinsky...

...In fact, he said, I could have it if I wanted...

...I asked a friend in the city about the engine-less push mower he’d bought for a postage stamp of grass in front of his townhouse...

...I mean, Where is the pleasure of life with a backyard if every Saturday from breakfast until dinner you have to listen to the revving of machines, the coughing of motor exhaust, and the nasal wawa scream of outdoor electrical appliances designed without the slightest concern for anyone’s peace and quiet...