The Lawnmower Man (Including Some Comments on Public Education)

 

By Robin Ford Wallace

            I submitted this to the Dade County Sentinel as a “Radio-Free Robin” – which is to say a political sort of opinion piece.  I don’t know if they’ll print it or not.  I specifically didn’t ask.  It’s a little meaner and nastier than the Sentinel usually gets on public officials  You want to know, it’s a little meaner and nastier than I usually get my own self.  But anyway ...        

Last spring I took my lawnmower to a man who said he could fix it.  He didn’t own a shop, you just went to his house, but down in his carport he had all these other lawnmowers of every age and model, which for some reason made me think he knew what he was doing.  It was only later that I thought to ask myself:  But did any of them work?

A week later I checked with the man and he said the lawnmower wasn’t ready; he had had to order a part.  The next week he said the part had been out of stock.  The week after that he said it had come but it was the wrong part.

It went on like that week after week until he stopped answering my phone calls.  Then I would drive over to his house and he’d hide inside and pretend he wasn’t home.

As more weeks passed and the grass grew ever higher, so also mounted my hopelessness and rage.  I began to realize if I ever saw the Lawnmower Man again I would probably have to kill him.  Thus I persuaded my husband to drive over there and confront him as opposed to bringing me cakes in the Big House.

When my husband came home he didn’t have our machine but the Lawnmower Man had given him a loaner from his supply in the carport.  This one looked as if it came from the early days of mechanization.  It had big metal plates and levers that didn’t control anything, and rods and wires coming off it at random.  My husband, an animation artist by trade, speculated it was powered by mice running in circles inside the engine, moving the rotors with their little feet.

But he said this was not the oldest nor the weirdest machine in the carport.  He’d seen a James-Bond-movie lawnmower down there from the 1960s, with no wheels because it was a hovercraft meant to float a few inches above the grass on an air pocket.

It couldn’t possibly have worked but neither did the mouse-powered model.  It did crank up after a fashion and I followed it down the hill while it took a few sickly bites of grass, then gave a sad little cough and died underneath the willow tree where our old dogs are buried.

After that I think there was another loaner before we finally got our lawnmower back, and then I believe there was some difficulty about the bill; but even I get sick of hearing myself complain so I’ll cut to the chase:

Somewhere in there I started feeling less bitter toward the Lawnmower Man because I realized he had performed a useful function:  He had made me happier in my marriage.

My husband has piles of rotting lumber and scrap metal scattered here and there that would get us condemned if we lived within the city limits of any municipality with a speck of self-respect.  For 10 years he had a set of dismembered monkey bars rusting in our front yard.  Two men with a truck came and asked if they could have it.  I said yes, I thought God had sent them, but my husband chased them down shouting, “No!  No!  No!”

And forcing him to take things to the dump is a case of the rabbit and the briar patch.  He only brings home more.  

On the other hand, he doesn’t have a carport full of old hovercraft. 

Furthermore, my husband’s motto about procrastination is, “Never put off until tomorrow what can be put off indefinitely,” but he really will empty the kitchen trash the seventh or eighth time you ask him.  So the Lawnmower Man made him look good and I felt happy and blessed.

Why am I telling you this?  Not to beat up on the Lawnmower Man, whom I never saw again, but to draw a parallel between him and current leadership of the Dade County school system.  I was thinking that, like the Lawnmower Man, this administration makes me feel warm and fuzzy about every administration that came before.

The first time I saw Dade’s new superintendent of schools was last fall when he was menacing English teachers at a book-banning he’d arranged for a New York Times bestseller that had won the National Book Award.  The superintendent had triumphantly notated “bad” words and “offensive” parts that he thought proved the book was without merit.  He seemed genuinely puzzled anyone would anyone want to read a book like that.   

Now this same new superintendent is trying to make a name for himself as the man who killed the Dade County Public Library.  For decades, the B of E has funded the library jointly with the county and the city of Trenton.  Now times are tough, so the super is recommending not reducing library funding but dumping it altogether – and he fields public outrage with the same seeming blank incomprehension:  Libraries?  What do libraries have to do with education?

Does anybody else see a connection here?

I’ve heard this administration accused of nepotism, cronyism, bullying and incompetence.  My beef is more basic: that it has no reverence or respect for books and learning.

There’s a saying that chefs eat their mistakes and doctors bury them.  What boards of education seem to do is sit picking their noses as they watch theirs destroying civilization as we know it.  Try questioning board members about the super’s funding decision and they dive for cover like timid woodland creatures fleeing a forest fire. 

Or they do when I ask.  Ask them yourselves, Dade County!  And ask hard.  Do you really want education in Dade County in the hands of the Lawnmower Man?

           Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.  For the most part.