I’m seventy-six years old standing under a bright, white sun in a battered straw hat holding a tool I have not held in my hands for sixty years called a sickle. It is 97 degrees Fahrenheit in July in central Georgia. The borders around my lawn surround me with an army composed of Oxtail, Lespedeza, Nutsedge, Bittercress, and Wild Onions, among other rapscallions enlisted by an enemy government called Weeds. The battle will soon begin, reluctantly on my part because I know it’s a war that cannot be won. Nevertheless, my wife has drafted me into this fight with no regard for the sacrifice required by my body, broken and bent by decades of misuse and abuse from the pleasures of living with what she calls vices. Such is the struggle of retirement. Without a job, I can no longer rely on the plaintive cry of “I’ve got work to do and don’t have time, Dear.”
Before the initial engagement and through the heat, sweat, and anxiety of worry about heatstroke, and heart attack, a memory sneaks into my consciousness. I’m in high school, trying to keep gasoline in the tank of my beautiful ’57 Chevy Belair. Even though fuel for cruising a circle around two drive-in soda shops—one Called Dick Clark’s and the other called Winkler’s—always populated in the humid evenings by the loveliest car hops and classmates in my hometown cost a mere twenty cents a gallon, that price was above my insignificant amount of earning power. The struggle for cash was constant
My father owned an automobile dealership that could be called successful by economic standards in the 1960’s. However, part of his success relied on the belief that money should be earned, not given. Consequently, I was forced by circumstance to beg him for some summer employment that would augment the pitiful allowance he afforded me based on something he called principles. He agreed to my begging with a satirical smile. My dad knew the thing I most despised as a teenager was lawn work. It interfered with American Legion baseball, stealing beer off the neighbor’s back porch, and swimming most days in the old coal-mining strip pits that had been reclaimed and that dotted Gibson County, Indiana. Consequently, and with devilish glee I believe, my first task was to trim weeds from the borders of his office building. He handed me a long wooden stick with a curved metal blade.
“This is called a sickle. It’s the best tool for removing unwanted weeds.”
“How does it work?”
“Swing it like you do your Louisville Slugger, son. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. It belonged to your grandmother, and she taught me and your Uncle Ding to use it well when we were much younger than you.”
I looked skeptical. There was no motor like the one on our new power lawn mower from Sears & Robuck bought recently to help eliminate violent arguments when I was forced to cut our lawn at home once a week. Also, when I surveyed the assigned area, it grew to the size of the football field at Lowell school in my mind, a place of torture where I would soon begin bruising my body with autumn practice.
We argued. I reminded him that Indiana had several laws forbidding child labor. He responded.
“You haven’t been a child since your first nocturnal emission.”
“I’m still the smallest guy in my class, except for you know who.” You Know Who being a friend and very nice fellow who had lost a testicle early in life by falling on the cross bar of his bicycle. At least he had an excuse for being small. All I had was a chip on my shoulder the size of a boulder, but that’s another story entirely.
“Whatever you do watch out for wiring on the new air conditioning unit and anything else that could possibly be damaged. You could tear up a blacksmith’s anvil.”
My father felt especially proud of the air conditioning. In those days, sweltering summer heat and humidity did not guarantee that every home and every business would be an oasis of cool comfort. It was still an expensive appliance and in its relative infancy.
So, it began. The travail of a teenaged Don Quixote. I looked at the green growing from the foundation around his bright, whitewashed stone building. The north side stretched some twenty-five yards along the gravel on the Main Street lot to an intersection where it turned east for fifteen yards to the other corner and then back along Prince Street to the other corner creating a rectangle of agony of sweat and monotony. My tee-shirt was soaked before I ever took the first swing. Anyone who has survived the ninety-plus degrees of “dog days” in Southern Indiana will relate to the external steam room I’m describing.
In a fit of rage and hatred for all things green, I tore along the building with sparks jumping from the sickle each time the metal blade scraped the stone foundation and with chopped weeds raining from the sky at the apex of every slice, with itchy chaff sticking to arms and face, with every curse word I knew streaming from my chapped lips. In two years, I would be at Parris Island in July at Marine Corps boot camp where this exertion of adolescent angst would seem like a vacation. But I did not know that at the time. In thirty minutes I reached the first corner, took a few deep breaths, turned east, and picked up my rhythm again.
Halfway down the east side my father’s air conditioning compressor squirted out from the building. It stood on the ground, a square metal box of black rubber hoses and copper tubing partially obscured by a tall stand of mixed weeds. I swung away like a wild man staying as close to the unit as possible until I heard a snake-like hissing. A cloud of freon spurted upward, a gaseous geyser of catastrophic proportions that I knew my father would see as dollar signs escaping. And, he did. I won’t go into much detail of the aftermath because it was only one of the many argumentative claims my father would be able to hold against me during my youth, and they all were basically the same. I was a careless, impulsive, reckless, teenager without something he called common sense. My restless and selfish behavior plagued him for years, but he was a good and generous man who forgave my erratic behavior on every occasion.
I’m not proud of my youthful indiscretions, or the discomfort those actions may have cost my family over the years. However, I suspect that most teenagers acted in a similar manner. It’s been labeled many things by psychologists over centuries, but I can honestly relegate it to one very complicated process most of us live through called “growing up” full of too much testosterone. It’s a condition that is hard to avoid.
What comes to me now after raising children of my own, after living a life full of all the joys and travails of being an enthusiastic, but often rash and thoughtless, human is an idea that we act without conscious bad intent sometimes based on unconscious desires, and it should cause us to question whether a bad result is an accident, or an unwillingness to examine our motives before we engage in questionable behavior. The idea that the swing of a sickle might be directed by an unconscious desire to fail spectacularly at this task did not cross my limited adolescent thinking ability. Certainly, it’s more pleasant not to fully consider all aspects of actions before we act and easier to excuse some of our actions if we don’t. But, is it better? I may never understand the answer to this question or know whether I was just a stupid boy or a mean-spirited boy. But considering these factors, even now, could make me a better human. That’s a goal worth striving for.
Jim McGarrah, Author 