re: Name something crazy your dad had you do growing up

He had me bush hogging the pasture when I was still too little to reach to the clutch. He’d get me going in like 2nd gear and hop off. Sometimes I’d be done and just keep driving in circles until he noticed.

Third grade. Late May. We’d just moved back from Charlotte, NC where I’d spent Second grade. Dad decided-and told me he had decided-to pass lawn mowing duty to me. He would pre-edge, trim…”do the fine tuning, so to speak” as he put it.

So he turned me loose with an ancient, heavy, unwieldy iron mechanical push mower whose handle was too high for me to leverage to push and keep blades on the grass simultaneously.
This is close. Metalwork was heavier iron and the wheels were slightly wider with tread like groves
I tried everything, even tying a short rope to it and pulling it like a plow horse. After two hours or so and nothing to show but a varied patchwork of cuts, gouges, and mostly unmowed lawn-I summoned the courage to admit I was having troubles.
“Troubles?” What kind of troubles?” Have you broken my lawnmower?” “Be clear, what is the exact problem?”

I showed him. I wasn’t tall or strong enough.

“We’ll, I see your problem.” “We can fix that!”

So he cut the heavy wooden riser and remounted the handle so that, with Herculean effort, I could manage a nearly straight path and put enough pressure to cut swath with marginally less noticeable gapping and gouging.

“I’m sorry you didn’t tell me sooner. If you had, you wouldn’t have had to cut so much over again. Carry on Trooper.” A favorite nom de guerre given me when he was issuing instructions and orders.

I struggled throughout the Summer and early Fall into October and I know that Summer and Fall he sacrificed pride in being able to show off a more neatly cut lawn in order to mold his son into a champion lawn man.

Not surprisingly, Santa that Christmas mysteriously put a Western Auto power mower with Dad’s name on it under the tree. A mower he never used except to instruct me the following Spring into its proper use and maintenance.

Dad was true to his word. He never mowed his lawn after passing the duty to me that Summer.

As I’ve grown older, oddly, mowing my lawn has turned out to be the most difficult task I’ve been asked by my sons to relinquish to their capable hands.