[Note: This bit is a few years old, but it's still got some legs on it.]
I learned manhood from my father and other men he despised. Each Saturday morning he allowed himself the reward of sleeping in an extra hour and a half. Waking at six, he read the morning paper, and drank his coffee black. Just as I woke up for Saturday morning cartoons, and my brother left his room long enough to piss and grab a bowl of corn Chex, Dad stood and walked with purpose into the garage, where he would prepare to mow the grass. Sitting a top the bright red machine, he methodically cut even squares around our half-acre lot. Smaller and smaller and smaller until the house made it impossible to continue.
Wives ran out every few hours with lemonade, iced tea, or cold beer. Old Lady Callahan sat on her front porch and watched the neighborhood men each Saturday cutting their yards on red, orange, or green lawn tractors that looked nothing like the rusted heap behind the collapsing hay barn, from mid-morning until the evening time, when the men stopped their work in time for the evening news. Our house was in the middle of what was once her husband’s farm. Mr. Callahan died from a stroke not long after they sold the property and the houses began appearing. All the houses were built around the same time and in the same style: rectangular ranch style homes with a car porch. Before the doctors told my parents I was sick, I spent the summers riding my big wheel in circles on the cracked cement –around and around until I was too dizzy to finish. Mrs. Callahan walked stiffly, like her hips and knees hurt. Her face was pitted and wrinkled, accentuated by the pearl white curly perm and floral print dress and heavy black shoes. The neighborhood boys called her crazy and tossed rolls of toilet paper into the tall pine and oak trees in front of her house. It remained there until the wind or rain blew it away.
The summer after my tenth birthday, the rain stopped in mid-March. From my bedroom window, I watched Old Lady Callahan’s garden across the street. It was full of tomatoes and green beans and corn, drying up into wrinkled and rotten husks. Mom told me that as long as no one cut their grass I could go outside and play.
But the drought didn’t stop Dad. He still woke up every Saturday and went outside. Mom didn’t say anything at first. She went through her own habit of housecleaning, laundry, mopping down the walls and ceilings for fear the dust might kill me. The grass stopped growing. The other neighborhood men gradually gave up and went inside. Dad kept at it, kicking up a steady trail of dust. Mom stopped cleaning and stood by the large window facing the road watching him make his turns in the front yard. With each concise pass she grew more and more silent. We learned through the years of living with Dad that was better for everyone if he played it out. Mom still said nothing, Saturday after Saturday when the trail of dust became a large cloud of dirt and dead grass. She stopped bringing him lemonade on the front porch when he billows started turning the outside of the windows brown and house was consumed.
On a Friday afternoon in late May, Mom said to my older brother, “Do something to the mower.”
“Huh?”
“Do something to the mower.”
Dad went out to the garage the following morning and discovered that the lawn tractor wouldn’t start. He checked all the wires. Tested the battery. Changed the oil. Nothing. Not even a choke, click or cough. Frustrated, he kicked a can of white latex house paint, causing it to splatter. It covered his clothes, the mower, the workbench, the walls, the floors. He walked back in the house, changed clothes, and sat in his recliner while I watched Bugs Bunny. Mom cleaned around him. Then she suggested they go to the mall or see a movie.
The next day, instead of going to church, Dad stayed home and cleaned the garage. When we returned from service, it smelled of turpentine. But there wasn’t a drop of paint left anywhere. The mower wasn’t repaired for the rest of the summer. He still woke up at six, but he and Mom went out for breakfast instead. Sometimes, they went shopping. When they returned in the afternoon, Dad always looked a little lost.
Mrs. Callahan died during the winter. Her house sold in the spring to a couple of young men who sat on the front porch every evening and held hands. When the tractor worked again, Dad didn’t say anything. He only went out and began mowing the grass again.
