At age 12, our daughter has discovered that a front yard’s more than a soft, green place to turn cartwheels. It’s also a renewable source of income. I hate to mow, and I’ll gladly pay her since it leaves me free to garden, fish, pick berries and generally indulge the fleeting pleasures of summer.
There’s just one problem: she can’t the start mower without me. It’s a second-hand push model that takes three or four Dad-sized yanks before the engine smokes and sputters to life.
“Dad,” she says, with a girlish, pony tailed sincerity that will soon enough break hearts other than my own. “What’s up with this thing?”
I suppose it could be a rusty spark plug, clogged fuel filter or fractured electron transducer shield for all I know. But there’s another answer that I won’t burden her with just yet. The mower won’t start because it’s a machine – a soulless, unreliable, infuriating and deceptively time-consuming piece of mechanical enslavement.
Own a house, especially in the country, and you’ll feel obligated to own plenty of labor-saving devices. Chainsaws, snow blowers, rototillers, weed-whackers and leaf blowers are the usual suspects. All useful in their own right, yet all encumbered with hidden costs of maintenance, storage and repair. You can quickly end up as a small-engine wet nurse to a fleet of internal combustion ingrates. Here’s three of the biggest offenders:
The Chainsaw: I’ve got a small one that won’t run for any longer than 90 seconds. It cost $120 new, and last week, a mechanic said he’d charge me $100 to fix it. Yet here’s the subversive truth: if all you need is a few cords of wood to burn in a fireplace, then you don’t need a chainsaw. You need to know somebody with a chainsaw and volunteer to help them. That’s because guys who love to cut wood are far less eager to lug and load it onto a truck or trailer. It’s unglamorous work and if you pitch in, they’ll give you some. Especially the crooked pieces.
The Rototiller: The deluxe hydraulic model that I like cost $5,000. So every year, I rent one for $40 to till my garden. And every year, something breaks. This spring, the pull cord snapped off on the first try. It took a 40-minute round trip to the rental store to get a new one. All that aggravation for a single day: can you imagine the headaches if I owned it for the other 364?
The Leaf Blower: I’ve never had a leaf blower, but God does so I use his. He fires it up in late October, when an exuberant, 30 mile an hour gale blows in from the Great Plains. It sweeps the yard clean and deposits 90 percent of our leaves into the vacant field next door. Best of all, the Big Guy handles all the oil changes.
I’ve always assumed that my daughter would share my aversion toward steel creatures with a crank case heart. This summer, I even begged her to try my beloved hand clippers – the ones that make a musical snip-snip when I trim grass from around a tree. But she just asked why we don’t own a weed whacker.
Then, when I returned from a business trip in July, my daughter dropped this bomb: “Dad, guess what? I started the mower without you!”
Like last year’s MP-3 player, my services had been rendered obsolete. Yet isn’t that the whole point of parenthood? We give kids the tools and let them make of the world what they will. They can hardly do worse than we did. Still, I hope that my daughter will always rely more on her own muscle, and the occasional divine wind, than on the over-hyped promises - and treacherous pull cords -- of mechanical salvation.
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