The Daily Mower

Life lessons from a neighbor

Ken Whalen grew up wondering why his neighbor mowed his lawn every day. Later, as a father, he learned why.

by Ken Whalen

When I was a kid, we had a neighbor who mowed his lawn every day.

I’m not talking about a guy on a riding mower taking care of his acreage to keep snakes from crawling up on the front porch. This was a push mower and a standard lot -- maybe 75X100 feet -- in a suburban neighborhood. 

For the two years of junior high, my friend Theodore and I walked past this guy every morning as he pushed his mower up, down, and all around that little lot. Our friend Doug lived on the same street and he would join us sometimes but he lived further down, past the perfect lawn. Theodore's next-door neighbor, Tina sometimes joined us our eight-grade year but for the most part it was just the two of us.

Naturally, we spent a lot of time wondering about Mr. Oliphant -- his name was on the mailbox -- and his motivations. Who does that? Had a relative once been poisoned by a dandelion and he was determined to keep them out of his lawn? Did he think a mowed lawn was a metaphor for an ordered life? Of course, we never thought to stop and ask him. That would mean actually having to talk to him and, at 12 and 13, it was more fun to speculate and poke fun. 

The lot at my parents' house was about the same size as his and it was my job to mow it. I hated to do it, mainly because of the crappy lawnmowers my Dad made me use. He had never bought a new mower, as far as I knew. He liked to tinker and preferred to buy an old mower and "fix it up." He did that with varying degrees of success until, finally, when I was in high school, he hit the motherlode. He combined a small mower frame with a big engine, bought big, reinforced tires, bought a new sharpened blade that was the biggest that would fit under the frame, and proudly showed it to me one Saturday morning.

I loved that mower. The bigger wheels meant it wouldn't bog down no matter how much I put off mowing. The engine and blade worked together to cut anything in its path -- grass, weeds, the occasional slow-moving toad, everything. I loved that mower so much I would mow the lawn without being told when I came home from college some weekends.

The summer after my college sophomore year, my roommate Jack and I worked for a landscape company one of his professors had started. All of the equipment was new, a first for me, and we had a trailer to put it all in. We mowed, trimmed and edged homes and businesses around San Marcos all summer, mostly with success. Being college students, of course, there were a few mishaps along the way: sprinkler heads run over, creating bald spots in lawns with overzealous weed eater usage, that type of thing. 

The only serious mistake we made all summer was forgetting to secure the trailer to the hitch one day when we finished mowing a house up on Loop Street. There may or may not have been some interim dope smoking involved before we failed to connect the trailer properly. I think that is mostly speculation. I do know that I was driving down a hilly road near downtown when we hit a bump in the road. The next thing I knew, I saw the trailer passing me on the right, gaining speed as it headed toward some parked cars. The sickening sound of a metal-on-metal collision is something you don't forget. The trailer wasn't smashed up too badly but a guy's car sure was. After providing insurance information, hooking the trailer back up and getting the hell out of there, Jack and I couldn't stop marveling about seeing something pass us on the right and taking a minute to snap that it was OUR TRAILER.   

That summer working as a landscaper -- by a very loose definition -- was also the summer I met my lovely wife. We eventually had two sons and, as fathers are wont to do, I occasionally had them help me with yard work when they were growing up. But when my youngest son was in high school, I came face to face with the fact that I had done a poor job passing along any mowing skills I had acquired over the years. I wanted him to mow the yard, but I had never made that request of either one of them before. I had to show him where to add gas, how to start it and explain some basic mowing techniques.

It was then I realize that I never made my kids mow because over the years I had come to love to mow. I had become that which I had mocked all those years before. I was Mr. Oliphant.

Thinking about it, I decided I love to mow because it's one of the few things in life where you get instant results. There's something very gratifying in our hurry-up-and-wait world to be able to make real, definable, physical, visually confirmed progress. I had finally figured out why Mr. Oliphant mowed his lawn every day. 

While I was contemplating this epiphany, I remembered a long-ago phone conversation I had had with my Mom. I was out of college at this point but still in my 20s and living in East Texas. My Mom was giving me the usual rundown -- what high school friends of mine she had seen, who was getting married, what relatives were sick, etc. 

"Oh, do you remember Mr. Oliphant who lived down the street?" she said. "They found him dead in his front yard. He died mowing his lawn." I don't remember my exact response then, but it really hit me thinking about it all these years later.  Good for him. If anyone had ever died doing what they loved, it was Mr. Oliphant. 

We should all be so lucky.

Ken Whalen does communications for a Texas state senator. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here and follow him on Twitter at @kenwhalenatx.

---

What do you think of today's email? I'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback. I might even put ‘em in the newsletter if I don’t steal it outright.

Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Unless of course you were forwarded this email, in which case you should…

Thanks to Noom, I lost 40 pounds and have kept it off for more than a year. Click on the blue box to get 20% off. Seriously, this works. No, this isn’t an ad. Yes, I really lost all that weight with Noom.

We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even tote bags now. Show the world that you’re part of The Experiment. 

We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is some

Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House.