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.

A Thanksgiving Message: We’re Grateful for the Grocery, But Where is the Ench?

     Regular blog visitors, if any, will recognize this ‘un from previous postings.  I had been working on a vitriolic Radio-Free Robin on the Dade Board of Education’s book-bannin’ ways.  But I couldn’t get the tone just right – it’s hard to be amusin’ when you are talking about a war on books waged by people in charge of for crying out loud education!  Plus I thought maybe they’d reverse their decision at Monday night’s board meeting, and I’d have to say, “Never mind!”

     (Actually I went to the B of E meeting last night and the book banning was never even mentioned!  Despite the fact there has been nothing but media hype since I covered the ish Nov. 7 – the Times Free Press in Chattanooga picked it up and splashed their own story about it  across the front page of their Sunday edish, then they had an editorial about it the following Tuesday.  Most recently there were two letters in the Freep this Sunday as well as one last week in our rag. Anyway I wasted a couple of hours on our most tragically busy day of the week, leading me to create the adage:  “Some days you get the elephant in the room; some days the elephant in the room gets you.” )

     In any case, with the Thanksgiving holiday coming up I decided something light and cheerful was more appropriate nohow.  So I cobbled this together for this week’s print edition by adding a little new stuff to that piece about the Ench I had posted here as a Boblet back in maybe September.     

A Thanksgiving Message:  We’re Grateful for the Grocery, but Where is the Ench?

By Robin Ford Wallace

            When my friend Madelyn married her longtime boyfriend they did the thing quietly in a government

building.  But this was California, San Francisco in fact, so even the no-frills civil ceremony took on a certain

sparkle. 

Mad’s brother happened to be in town so they had the family element, and just when she started to wonder if they shouldn’t have added a religious component as well, who should march in but some Buddhist monks?  Perhaps they were applying for a permit of some kind, but this being San Francisco maybe they had just sensed from the air they were needed.

            Anyway I have digressed from my point, which is how happy my friend was.  In her email she wrote:  “And suddenly there we were, in San Francisco getting married, both of us grinning like idiots.”

            Years later another couple of friends got married, this time with a big sloppy wedding in a pasture so everybody could watch, and as the vows were spoken I could see the same uncontrollable happiness shining from the same moronic grins.  I was so happy for them I cried a little.

            But it was only this past September that I experienced that same unstoppable, uncontainable, stupid-making joy for myself.  I was so thrilled to be living in that particular minute in that particular place that I realized I, too, was grinning like an idiot.  I was exalted and exhilarated and ecstatic and –

            – walking into the Ingle’s Market, which had recently reopened after four months’ closure following the tornados.

            Did you think I was going to tell you about my own wedding?  That was roughly 100 years ago, and though I was of course very happy to have been vouchsafed a husband against all odds, what I remember about the Big Day is mostly social angst and bursting out of my (size 8) wedding dress during the reception.  I expect it was the canapés.

            Anyway, back to the Ingle’s.  It was the day after the torrential rains of Labor Day, which had turned the air so unseasonably cool you had to wear a jacket.  I had just trotted around Cloudland Canyon with my dogs for the first time since the summer got so hot.  The leaves had already turned color from the drought, so it was like finding the door into autumn.  I felt that I was living at the throbbing heart of the universe.

            Then on the way home, I was able – finally! – to pop into the Ingle’s at the foot of the mountain to pick up what I needed for supper.  During those months after the tornado I’d had to detour to one of the other grocery stores in town, and though I knew I was lucky not to have lost anything worse in the storm – my house, say, or someone I loved – the hole left where my pet grocery store was supposed to be was like a nagging sore that wouldn’t heal.

            Now, finally the lights were back on, the parking lot was repaved, and when I approached the doors swung wide automatically, opened either by an electric eye or friendly invisible servants – I should care which? – to welcome me back.  Ingle’s was open, God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

            I’ll admit, the new self-checkout stations they put in during the renovation worried me a little at first.  I heard customers grumbling:  “They’re not opening the real registers to encourage us to use the self-checkouts.”

“What that encourages me to do is go back to Wal-Mart, hon.”

So I fretted a little, and made tentative plans for an Ingle’s grand opening follow-up article called “The Agony and the Ecstasy:  Is Dade Ready for the Challenge of Self-Checkout?”

            But that was a minor concern, one that was swept away in the tide of joy, welcome and store-brand ration-style dog food I had found no substitute for anywhere else.  It’s embarrassing to be so happy about a grocery store but I’m old enough by now to understand you take your happiness where you find it.  Plus did you see what they did with the produce department?

It don’t get no better than this, I thought.  And that’s when I noticed all was not perfect in paradise:  The “Ench” was gone!

There used to be a bench on the sidewalk beside the newspaper boxes.  Somebody must have sold advertising on it because it was festooned with the names of local businesses.  But somebody else had very carefully, very meticulously, removed the first letter of every word, so what you read was:  ENEVA’S ESTAURANT,  I think maybe OORE’S UNERAL OME, but the one I particularly remember was ONY AND ELLY EATHERS OOFING. 

I expect maybe my sense of humor is fairly basic but that always killed me.  I can remember dozens of time I’d stop by the Ingle’s on the way home from some awful meeting where somebody had hurt my feelings, or from some dreary day that had demonstrated to me the utter futility of going on, and I’d pass the “Ench” and see ONY AND ELLY EATHERS OOFING and practically pee myself all over again.  There is nothing like ONY AND ELLY EATHERS OOFING to cheer a girl up.

Am I the only one who misses it?  If not, I urge fellow concerned citizens to join me in persuading Ingle’s to BRING BACK THE ENCH!

As Thanksgiving approaches I realize how profoundly grateful I am for all I still have, my life, my loved ones, the friendly little town I live in, the raw almonds in Ingle’s new bulk goods section.  

But I would be ust a ittle appier f Ngle’s ould ive ack the Ench!

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