A Christmas Gift For You Continued.....

My parent's home was a standard four bedroom, two bath ranch style that was extremely popular in the late 1960's and early 1970's. The neighborhood was situated on rolling slopes that had once been an olive orchard. Each home in the development had it's own olive tree in the front yard. During the Spring the branches of these trees would explode with blossoms laden with enough pollen to put the average person into an allergy induced coma. If you were cursed with any type of hay fever allergies like my brother is just the sight of that tree covered in a blanket of off-white blossoms, and the choking heavy smell of the pollen in the late afternoon heat of the San Joaquin valley would cause your eyes to water and your throat to start to constrict. Our tree was located directly out the front door of the house causing a daily dilemma for my brother. From Spring until mid Summer when the blossoms on the tree were replaced by tiny green olives my brother would have to enter and exit through the garage door located at the other end of the house. Our front lawn was basically a thirty foot slope from the front door to the sidewalk that bordered the street. When we were kids we would try to play football , a game normally played on a vast flat surface, on that treacherous slope to no avail. Someone would always end up on the sidewalk rolling around in pain. You might be compelled to ask why then didn't we play on someone else's yard better suited for the game ? The answer is very simple; my dad was the only one in the neighborhood who didn't care what his lawn looked like. It was always a source of frustration to have the only yard that nobody wanted to play on, yet the only one that we didn't get chased off of by some one's dad. The irony of it was that our yard was probably tougher than most of the other yards in the neighborhood due to the fact that ours was ninety percent crabgrass. While all the other dads in the neighborhood were out every weekend busily grooming, fertilizing and watering their yards my dad would be reclining on the couch watching the Major League game of the week with Joe Gargiola and Tony Kuebeck on the TV. My dads theory was that if he kept it mowed short and watered every so often that from a distance you couldn't tell the difference between Kentucky Bluegrass and Northern California Crabgrass. So every other weekend dad would go out with his thirty-five dollar Kmart special push mower and give the yard a cut so short it would have made a Marine Corps barber envious. Then he would turn on the sprinkler and go back inside to watch the baseball game until one of the neighbors would knock on the door and tell him his water was running across the sidewalk and into the gutter. Of course it was running across the sidewalk we lived on the side of the Matterhorn for Gods sake it had no other place to run but across the sidewalk ! Most of the other dads in our neighborhood had expensive self propelled, rear bag mowers made by Snapper or Torro, but not my dad. Every Spring dad would go out and attempt to start his Kmart special that had been sitting in the garage since last Fall. The mower never started on the first try, or the second try, or on any of the subsequent attempts that my dad stretched out over most of a Saturday. The mower still had the old spark plug, the same gas, and a dirty air filter from last Summer when he had mowed the yards for the last time and parked it in the corner of the garage. I don't think we ever owned a mower that had the air filter, or the oil changed as a matter of fact I'm pretty sure my dad didn't even know that the mower had oil in it. When one of the neighbors would eventually come over after watching him struggle in vain in the garage, and ask him the basic questions concerning the maintenance of a gasoline combustion engine dad would just stand there and nod his head confirming that he had followed all the proper Spring tune up proceedures. They might as well have been talking about the inter workings of the space shuttle. Since the level of my fathers mechanical ineptness was never a point of debate around our house we all new it was only a matter of time before he would declare that all mowers were poorly built and thus not designed to last more than one season. That was why he just couldn't see paying two or three hundred dollars for one.This speech was usually given as he was putting his wallet in his pocket, grabbing the keys, and heading for good old Kmart and another thirty-five dollar mower. The only question that has never been answered to this day is what happened to all the old mowers ? Did he bury them somewhere in the yard ? Did he just put them out by he curb and wait to see if someone would take it ? Was there a place like a car junkyard for mowers ? By the end of football season all those other yards that had been so painstakingly manicured all Summer long looked like a herd of cattle had stampeded through them as the one by one capitulated and let us play one game on their yard. There sat our sloping hill of a yard not looking any different than it did at the height of the Summer lawn care season. You couldn't tear that crabgass with a John Deer tractor. Little did I know that on this Christmas Eve all the pain and scars that being rolled off that slope and onto the sidewalk had caused would be erased in just a matter of moments.