I’ve posted this before, but it’s emblematic of my father’s approach to Dad things. WWII infantry company commander in ETO. A great man and forever my hero.

Third grade. Late May. We’d just moved back from to Metairie 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 edge, trim…”do the fine tuning, so to speak” as he put it.

So he turned me loose with an ancient, heavy, unwieldy iron reel push mower whose handle was too high for me to leverage to push and keep blades on the grass simultaneously.
[For all I know, this might be the actual beast.]

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.

“Well, 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 a 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’d finished issuing instructions and orders.

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

That Christmas Santa 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 in 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, maybe not surprisingly, mowing my lawn has turned out to be the most difficult task I’ve been asked to relinquish to my sons.