Don't Care for Lawn Care

And, of course, there are many reasons not to care for lawn care. To be blunt and manipulative about it, there are people in the world who could eat for a week for the money it takes to put gas in a lawn mower for one mow. Also, it's often too hot.

This year, however, Amanda decided that it was time to get our lawn in shape. We've only been here a year, and I think we have a three-year grace period to get our house in order before we start working on the lawn (the number of boxes we've left un-unpacked is embarrassing!), but she's right that the neighbors don't see our basement but that they do see our pathetic lawn.

The trouble is that we've made friends who have put their faith entirely in Bob, the Lawn Genius. Bob is, apparently, to a lawn what Albert Einstein was to the Theory of Relativity. He knows much more than you'll ever even guess there is to know about the subject, and he'll just be able to communicate the rudiments to a lawn moron like me.

He's also a little like the Soup Nazi of Seignfeld (and, before that, of New Yorker) fame--what he says goes, and he doesn't have time to waste with those who don't obey his every command.

The command I had the most trouble with was the vacuuming command. Because they salt and sand the roads where we live, we need to spend a few hours using a shop vac to vacuum the two feet of our lawn nearest the curb. Since we live on a corner, that amounts to a fairly large number of square feet.

The Lawn Nazi says "Do!" and Amanda says "Go!" and Django goes and does.

Foolishly, however, I decided to seize the time available to me instead of procrastinating. (Just to throw a bit of vocabulary out there, the opposite of procrastinate is hodiate--I decided that hodiation was needed instead of procrastination.) It was about three o'clock in the afternoon--about the time the uber-kewl high school students get dropped off the bus on our corner.

I probably shouldn't have felt as foolish as I did, but all the high school acceptance emotions rose to the top--stylishly-dressed girls and bulky boys marched in waves over the lawn that the nerdy kid with the shop vac was unaccountably vacuuming.

Ah, so much for getting in with the in-crowd.

I imagine that the Lawn Nazi really asks people to vacuum their lawns as a test. If they're willing to do something as ridiculous as that, they'll follow his every command. If they'll endure the humiliation of going back to high school to be once again walked over by those whom the world admires, they'll buy the one-pound bag of fertilizer at $254.99.