Back in the 1960s, before "green" meant anything other than the color of 7 Up bottles, Jack Marshall was in love with St. Augustine. Not the actual saint, nor the city in Florida, but the type of lush, green grass that grew on our lawn and the lawns of countless other proud Southerners.
Dad cultivated our St. Augustine lawn on Atlantic Street in Shreveport as if it weren't green at all, but pure gold.
He fertilized the lawn each spring, watered it faithfully through the searing hot Louisiana summers, luxuriated in its cool comfort in the fall, and waited patiently through its maize-brown dormancy each winter.
And every Saturday, from early spring to late fall, he mowed. That is, until his sons were old enough to do it for him.
My older brothers, John and David, got their turns in the mid to late 1950s. And then, sometime in 1960, in the summer of my sixth year, it was finally my time.
You cannot imagine my elation at being allowed to operate our lawn mower -- a huge, heavy, reel-type contraption with a giant spark plug and a scalding hot muffler astride its smoke-belching Briggs & Stratton engine.
To start the engine, first you opened the choke and then you carefully wrapped a knotted-end rope around the metal crank. After that you steadied yourself with one foot on the mower wheel and gave the wooden-handle end of the rope a mighty tug. If you were lucky and the engine "caught," you had to very quickly turn off the choke and adjust the throttle. More often, you had to repeat the entire process two-three-four or maybe even a half dozen times until finally, gloriously, that engine sputtered to life.
All of which seemed mysterious, possibily dangerous, and unimaginably exciting to little Tommy Marshall.
Once the mower was successfully started, you knotted the pull-cord on the handle (because inevitably you needed it again later), jerked on the knob to engage the power assisted wheels (Dad's concession to "progress") and finally started to actually cut the beautiful green expanse of St. Augustine grass (see Jack Marshall's photo of me wrangling the mower beast, above).
This all happened under Dad's watchful eyes. He nodded approvingly when I got it right, and he offered a gentle course correction with a steady hand when I struggled. Then he stood aside as I criss-crossed the lawn, feeling in my heart a pure, innocent, utter euphoria.
When the job was well under way, if he wasn't edging, pruning, or sweeping, Dad would sit on the concrete front steps, shirtless, sweaty and content, smoking a Camel cigarette and surveying his domain with obvious satisfaction. (When he died of malignant melanoma at age 55 in 1976, I often thought of such days. He quit smoking a couple of years later, but the sun must already have done its damage to his fair skin.)
Two years after my initial lawn mowing experience, we moved to a new house. Dad's dream house was was built to his exact specifications -- including a custom darkroom to better indulge his life's great passion for photography -- by A.E. "Swede" Johnson and his team of carpenters, electricians and plumbers.
That house had an even bigger lawn of St. Augustine grass, and Jack Marshall had placed each piece of sod firmly and lovingly in place. In time the grass grew thick and full, and hosted countless whiffle ball games, birthday parties, scout troop meetings, badminton matches and dogs, cats and other pets of every size, shape and color. My mother still lives in that home and enjoys that grass every day.
I now live in New York City, in a tiny apartment on the 28th floor of a Manhattan high-rise. The view is spectacular. But I have no grass, no lawn, and no yard work to do on summer Saturdays. On my almost daily runs in Central Park, a few blocks from my grassless home, I often stop and watch workers mowing one of the park's many lawns. I still am drawn to the beauty and smell of freshly mown grass.
At such times, though, my thoughts are more likely to be 1,400 miles and nearly 50 years away from New York City in 2009. They are with my Dad, Jack Marshall, on his lawn of St. Augustine grass in 1960s Shreveport. It is how I imagine heaven surely must be.
-Tom Marshall, New York City
Tom, you should have been a writer. You're very good at it. I felt like I was thrown back into the '60s watching you and your Dad do the yard work. And as for your apartment with no yard? I'll take that any day. I do love the smell of fresh mown grass, and love looking at beautiful yards, but hate doing yard work and taking care of lawns. Actually my grass is pretty dead right now because of the horrendous heat and lack of rain. And I'm too lazy to water it. Oh, well. Perhaps I should go for the apartment living close to my job in Houston.... But feel free to come down to Texas any time you feel the need to do yard work. Mine could use it. :) Thanks again for posting this blog. Vicki Hermes Willis
ReplyDeleteVery nice. Very, very nice. I share some of the same memories of my father and mowing the grass. Actually, my mother commented that it was a sad day for her when she noticed that the grass had actually filled in the back yard. It meant the boys were grown and gone. No more baseball, football, or basketball to be played there. We had very little grass on the playing fields then. But the front and sides were always ripe for mowing.
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