Am I the Mr. Miyagi of mowing lawn?
Do we ever really know anyone? It is a deep, philosophical question, worth pondering its many aspects. It is also a question that I was recently confronted with. Because, you see, as winter has slowly but surely given way to spring and now perhaps finally summer, considerations to lawn care were suddenly sprung upon my wife and myself. It was something that we had not really had to consider up until this point, with layers and layers of snow putting it far from our minds. But after the melting of that snow and the reveal of what lay hidden underneath, the realization that we were now in charge of making sure that it did not get too out of hand set in. And with that realization came the further realizations that we lacked the tools necessary for such maintenance, which sent us on a journey to try and find a lawnmower. A process that, to my surprise, Mikaela largely left in my hands (an atypically poor decision). It was when the reasoning behind her hands-off approach to the lawnmower purchase was revealed that I was forced to consider the deep, philosophical question I mentioned earlier.
When I looked for her opinion on some of the options I was considering, she was fairly noncommittal, a very non-Mikaela response. When pressed slightly, she stated that she trusted my knowledge on the matter (again, poor decision) because she had never mowed a lawn herself.
My surprise at this new knowledge was probably plain to see, and even if it wasn’t, my incredulous follow-up questions made it quite plain that this information was wholly new to me and I was quite taken aback by such a revelation. Not only did it seem implausible to me that she had somehow lived 28 years of life without ever having once operated any sort of grass-shortening motorized machinery, but also that we had spent a fairly significant portion of that 28 years together without such information coming to light.
My assumptions as to her lawnmowing experience were likely born of my own time spent pushing my way through ungainly grasses and cutting them down to size. Between cutting my parents lawn and the lawns of various neighbors and relatives throughout the years, it was a chore that I had apparently thought universal. Given that we had shared similar experiences with doing various other chores in our childhoods, I had assumed mowing the lawn had been on that list as well. But no, as she explained, it was something that had always fallen to her brothers, and living in apartments in Madison for her entire adult life had also not brought up any such opportunities. I suppose the latter half of that explanation was why I did not know about such an important aspect of her life up until that moment, as I guess mowing the lawn does not really come up unless...well, unless it needs to be done.
Still, after I grappled with this new information and was forced to ponder some deep, philosophical questions, I realized that this was a unique opportunity of sorts. Mikaela is usually far more competent at most things than I, but perhaps now I could finally impart some knowledge to her.
I was strangely excited to share my great mastery over the art and, once we had finally procured a lawnmower of our own, I set her up with it and walked her through the ins and outs.
What I quickly realized, however, was that there are very few “ins and outs” of mowing the lawn. It is, I found, actually a fairly simple process, easy enough that any child over a certain age can grasp it and do an okay enough job. I don’t know if I was expecting some sort of “Karate Kid”-esque training montage or what, but she had the general gist of things in just a few sentences. Slightly shocked and weirdly put out that there was not really much more to say, I let her loose and she predictably did a good job. The only pointer I really had was that she shouldn’t wave at me every time our paths somewhat crossed while we were mowing because it would often leave her to miss a spot here or there as her attention was elsewhere. Is mowing the lawn really just that easy, or am I merely a master of unparalleled skill that can teach anyone? Unfortunately, the sample size is too small right now to make an accurate claim one way or the other. Only time will tell, though, I’ve got some suspicions it may be the former.
A C ertain Point of V iew
