This past week I let vanity grab me by the ankle and posted a picture of my lawn on social media. I laughed about the water bill that was forthcoming. Knowing that it was going to be exorbitant, I gasped when the notice of just how much water I had put on this patch of grass arrived. I called our lawn care folks (who are authorities on irrigation) and they dispatched their water witch doctor who broke the news to us. We had been watering the lawn twice a day, at 2 and 4 AM. The 2AM spritz was a shocker, and set me to thinking about how the masculine form of my species has evolved.
When you were 17 years old, sitting on the bench in a High School locker room, you could pretty well put even money on the topics of conversation. Girls, fast cars and baseball was a certainty in the banter. My group would venture into hunting rifles, shotguns and fishing rods. Strangely, or not, pistols didn’t come up. We liked our teachers, didn’t know a Republican from a Presbyterian, and remained wary of this thing called Vietnam. Your selective service number caused you to think about the future, a concern unique to graduating seniors. Your focus shifts as you age, with the lustful pursuit of women morphing into strategies to deal with the ones in your life who are smarter, more intuitive and oh so capable of subtle manipulation. We still love motor cars, but have long since ceased lining them up for a brisk quarter mile contest upon a public highway and we would kill our selves on a baseball diamond, probably in the struggle to make it to first base should we somehow manage to put wood on a ball. Our focus shifts to politics, cuisine instead of junk food, and reliable motor cars or pickup trucks. Those of us who made a career in the world of automobiles, whether selling, fixing or regulating still cling to a vintage muscle car or a convertible. When we talk cars, it is the universal disdain we share at the demise of internal combustion engines. Now back to the lawn.
The last four or five conversations with my male counterparts in our corner of the neighborhood has revolved around our yards. Not once has an automobile come up and if women surface in the conversation it was about their willingness to cut grass. We are so obsessed with landscaping that I have borrowed from the world of golf, naming our corner lawns the “Amen Corner”. Yesterday, the water witch doctor sold me on a new way to water my grass via blue tooth technology. The water needs are controlled by a piece of gadgetry that uses the National Weather Service to establish a water schedule, the amount of water, and even when not to water in case of rain. It uses the previously established zones to keep everything the same color and is controlled from this tablet or our cell phones. Tazzy’s proclivity to pee in the same place is offset by my ability to turn on the irrigation for a minute or two to dilute his attempts at self watering and thus preclude brown spots. In times of drouth, this system automatically increases the time the sprinklers are on to offset the dryness. This technology wasn’t cheap, about the cost of two months water at twice the daily dosage necessary to produce a show lawn. I am teachable.
What have we learned here? Watering grass and landscaping is a hell of a lot safer than the lustful pursuit of women. That having the fastest car on the block has been replaced by the greenest lawn and that we recognize why we don’t make fools of ourselves on a baseball diamond. It’s easy really and I wouldn’t change a thing. Next week Taz, Sharon and I are off to Pennsylvania to pick up a custom kayak trailer, leaving the lawn in the care of a cigar box sized bundle of electronics that we have named simply, “Wizard”. The Amen Corner is in good hands.
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