Green green grass of home

I laid on the couch so long watching sports this afternoon I was in danger of getting bed sores, so I finally decided to get off my lazy butt and go cut the grass.

We don’t “mow the lawn” where I come from, we cut the grass. And I actually enjoy doing it. It’s good exercise, and it has given me an incredibly sexy farmer’s tan. I suppose I could do it with my shirt off, but I’d have to sell tickets to all the ladies in the neighborhood.

Stop laughing.

My grandmother, who just turned 97, told me not long ago that she hated it when she finally got too old to cut her own grass, because she liked the feeling of accomplishment she always got when she finished. She’s right. I can go to work and sit in meetings and listen to conference calls all day and go home feeling like I didn’t really do a durned thing.

But when I finish cutting the grass, I can stand there and gaze at it proudly, admiring the neatly-cut lines, the smooth surface of the grass, and my chest swells with pride. Michelangelo probably felt the same way when he finished painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The difference is, he didn’t have to do it again one week later.

I take a lot of pride in how my yard looks, and I tend to think unfavorably about a man who lets his get to looking bad. There are many such people in my own neighborhood, including my next door neighbor, who is either agoraphobic or allergic to the sun. His grass gets so high, you could hide bowling balls in there.

Then there are the neighbors up the street who do cut the grass, except for the patch under the car that has been sitting in their front yard for, oh, two months. Perhaps this is a custom in their home country, along with leaving the Christmas decorations up past Valentine’s Day.

I use a push mower, since my yard isn’t all that big, but it makes me feel like less of a man, because a real man needs a good riding lawn mower. I recall the first time my dad let me cut the grass on our riding mower. I felt all grown up, and it was like I was driving a car, except it only went about 3 miles per hour. It was a thrill to get up on that thing and go around the yard.

Then we moved to the country, and the size of our yard grew exponentially. My mother always said my daddy had “taken in too much yard,” and she was right. It took a good three hours to cut that grass, even on a souped-up mini tractor with a blade attachment. The thrill was gone.

I do about 90 percent of the grass-cutting at my house, occasionally “allowing” my son to help out. My wife never cuts the grass, nor do I want her to. I have a few firmly-held principles, and one of them is you don’t let your woman cut the grass. This may be sexist of me, but she’s never complained.

It’s not that I don’t think she could handle it, I just don’t believe in it. Now, occasionally, when you’re riding through the country, you’ll see a redneck woman up on a riding lawn mower wearing her Rebel flag bikini, and I suppose that’s all right. But for the most part, it should be a man’s job. I will let her blow the clippings off the driveway once in awhile. Never let it be said I’m not magnanimous.

I do some of my best thinking when I’m out there cutting the grass. I was lost deep in thought one day several years ago, and didn’t realize I had just run the mower over a yellow jackets’ nest in the ground on the side of the house. About 20 stings later, I hopped back outside, cranked her up and finished the job.

Can’t have the neighbors thinking bad about me, you know.

Drivin' and cryin'

“Tonight, tonight, the highway’s bright, out of our way mister, you’d best keep
The summer's here and the time is right for racing in the street” – Bruce Springsteen, Racing in the Street

Ah, yes. There’s nothing like the lure of being behind the wheel of a car out on the open road, wind in your hair, freedom in your eyes.

It is a notion that has been romanticized by some of my favorite songwriters. In Thunder Road, Springsteen writes “So roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair, well the night’s busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere.” Tom Petty sang about it in Running Down a Dream, and Mark Knopfler’s Speedway at Nazareth is one of the best driving songs ever.

But none of those guys has to commute into downtown Atlanta every day. Trust me, I do it, and it has sucked every bit of romance out of being behind the wheel.

I drive in about 25 miles each way, every day. It takes about an hour in the mornings, usually a little less coming back home. And it is a miracle every day that I arrive home safely, because the highways are filled with morons, miscreants and homicidal maniacs.

I have seen people do all of these things while driving: Text message, watch a DVD, read the newspaper, take notes on a legal pad, eat a salad, apply makeup, and a few things you normally only seen done in a car on HBO’s “Taxicab Confessions.” It is disturbing.

There are all sorts of crazy drivers out there. I enjoy the people who, in heavy traffic, like to change lanes constantly, weaving in and out, even though you can see that cars are bumper-to-bumper for five miles ahead. Through all of their maneuvering, they generally get to their destination about one second faster than if they had just stayed in one lane.

Then there’s the “This left lane is just for me even though I’m going 15 miles per hour slower than everybody else” crowd. There’s a special place reserved in hell for these folks.

And of course, you have the tailgaters. These people believe they need to stay so close to the car in front of them that you couldn’t slide a credit card between the bumpers. How there aren’t a thousand wrecks a day on I-75 between my house and Atlanta, I’ll never know.

One morning, I was driving an Oldsmobile Cutlass and I was right downtown, in morning rush hour traffic, when it died on me. Seems the alternator had crapped out, so there I was, sitting helplessly until the police could come. And how did my wonderful Atlanta fellow travelers react to my plight? By sitting on their horns, shooting me birds, and rolling down their windows to call me every dirty name in the book.

I’m not exaggerating. Osama Bin Laden would have been treated nicer than those people were to me. What did they think, that I broke down there on purpose? I gotta tell you, it kind of hurt my feelings.

I once calculated how many hours every week I sit in traffic, and it depressed me so much I never did it again. I could have used that time to write the great American novel, or work myself into tip-top shape, or figure out that little golf-tee game they have on the table at Cracker Barrel restaurants.

There are days when I get ready to leave work, and I just sit in the minivan for a few minutes without cranking it up because I dread getting into that traffic. Then I have to leave, in part because the air conditioning only works when the car is moving, and if I sit there much longer I’ll melt like the Nazis at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

There’s been talk of putting a high-speed commuter train down my way, but I’ll be retired before that ever happens. So I’ll just keep on sucking it up, wading into that sea of traffic every morning and every afternoon, and pray the Lord my soul to keep.

This old house

The house where I grew up was an average sized one-story red-brick ranch house in northern Spalding County, about 40 miles south of Atlanta. It wasn’t the country, and it wasn’t in town, and it wasn’t in a suburb.

I guess you’d just call it a neighborhood, but it didn’t have a pretentious name like Forest Trace or Falcon Glen. I see a lot of neighborhoods with words like “glen” or “trace” in their names. I don’t even really know what a glen is.

The house was on the corner of Vineyard Road and a short, dead-end road that was called Vineyard something, though there wasn’t a vineyard within 10 miles of there. I remember the dead-end road because it featured a tremendously steep hill, which I used to ride my bike up and down. It took me years of trying before I was strong enough to pedal all the way to the top without having to stop.

We moved from that house when I was 15, and many years later, I decided to ride by and see how things looked. I was shocked to discover that the hill, the Mount Everest of my memory, was really barely a hill at all. It was nothing more than a slight grade. How could this be?

The road was paved now. It had been only gravel when I lived there. You don’t see many gravel roads anymore. If you ride a bike shirtless, as I mostly did, a gravel road is a most unpleasant place to wipe out on your bike. I still get queasy when I think of the time I went flying over the handlebars and skidded down the road on my scrawny bare chest. I was a walking scab for about two weeks.

When I revisited my old house, everything seemed smaller. The backyard, where I set Whiffle ball records that will never be broken (all without the aid of steroids, I might add) seemed half the size I remembered. The ditch I used to jump over with my bike no longer seemed as deep and wide as the Snake River Canyon. The world can seem like such a big place when you’re small.

I dream almost once a week that I’m back in that house. I never dream about any other house where I’ve lived – it’s always that one. Maybe that’s the period of my life I most want to re-live.

I remember that my mama used to fuss all the time that the kitchen was too small. “There ain’t enough room in here to turn around twice,” she would say. I wanted to show her that it could be done, but she wasn’t the kind of person you disputed, so I always wisely let it go.

One of my strongest memories of that house is of Sunday mornings. Even though I would grumble and complain about having to take a bath and get ready for church, I was comforted by the sounds and smells Sunday would always bring – bacon sizzling in the kitchen, gospel music playing on the radio (“You’re invited to the gospel jubileeeeeee..”), my dad tying his tie and smelling like Old Spice after-shave. The bacon smelled a lot better than the Old Spice.

I don’t like to go by the house anymore, because it makes me sad. Some obviously trashy people have lived there in recent years and let the house go to hell. The last time I went past, the yard that was always kept up so nice was weedy, the gutters were hanging off the house, and there were so many rusted cars scattered around the backyard, I expected to see Fred Sanford and Lamont walk out at any minute.

It doesn’t matter. They can’t take away it looks and feels in my memory, or in my dreams. Maybe I’ll go there tonight. I hope there’ll be bacon!

Return to sender

If you ever want to accomplish anything in life, you have to learn to deal with rejection.

This is especially true if you want to be a writer. A couple of years ago, I completed a novel titled Brother to Brother. It’s set in the south, and it features a lot of characters with rough edges, and some humorous (I thought) scenes, and it took me about three years off and on to finish.

My friend Sam Starnes, an accomplished (and published) author in his own right, reviewed my manuscript for me and gave me a lot of helpful suggestions. I started getting up at 5 a.m. to write and work on it for a couple of hours before I’d go to work. I read parts of it to my writers’ group and got a great reaction. I sent the first 100 pages off to a contest and, though I didn’t win, got a nice critique back that said it was definitely publishable.

So, I bundled up my 300-page manuscript, dove into the process of getting it published, and began dreaming of my days of Grisham-like success. Wonder who will direct the movie version? What should I wear when I appear on Letterman? Should I buy a beach house or a mountain retreat with all the money I’m going to make, or both?

I’m sure you can guess the rest of the story. I’ve been rejected more than the president of the high school chess club. But I’m not whining. I realize this happens to almost everybody who tries to write. A lot of successful writers got rejected dozens, even hundreds, of times before they were discovered.

I gave a reading once from my manuscript at a conference in Atlanta. A guy from a publishing house was there and came up to me and told me he enjoyed it, and he’d like to see the rest of my manuscript. I was of course fired up, and sent it off to him immediately. He wrote me back and said thanks for sending it, and he was looking forward to reading it in the coming weeks and he would get back to me.

This was in May. Of 2006.

I called him and e-mailed him a few times, but he seems to have vanished from the face of the Earth. Perhaps he’s been kidnapped. Or maybe it’s like when you’re younger and you’re interested in a girl who isn’t interested in you, so instead of hurting your feelings she just avoids you, hoping you’ll get the message. You know, just give it to me straight. I don’t want to go out with you. Your book sucks. I can take it. At least I’d have some closure.

Of course, it’s hard to tell if agents and publishers think my book sucks, because the biggest obstacle is getting someone to read it. Publishers generally just want to hear from agents. Agents don’t want to see your book, they want you to write a query letter, in which you have to describe the book that you slaved over for three years in one paragraph.

They glance at your letter, deduce whether they think the book has potential to land on The New York Times bestseller list, decide it doesn’t, and send you a very polite form letter rejecting you. I’ve gotten about 20 of these letters (or e-mails) so far.

A publishing house in Montgomery actually asked to see my first three chapters a few weeks ago, and I almost passed out. I haven’t heard back from them, but I’m going with the “no news is good news” philosophy, for now.

The other day I found a listing for an agent who specializes in Southern writers, and likes humorous books. Wow, I thought, this sounds tailor-made, so I sent off an e-mail query. I’ll give them this, they didn’t keep me in suspense. I got an e-mail back in about five minutes, saying my book sounded “promising”, but they weren’t interested. I haven’t been rejected that fast since high school.

Is it discouraging? Of course it is. The late Larry Brown, one of my favorite authors, got 250 rejection slips before he ever got published. I don’t know how he did it.

And there’s always that elephant in the room in the back of my mind, which is the thought, “What if it’s not really very good?” That’s a possibility. Not everybody finds me to be funny – I can read my blog comments to confirm that. Or ask my children.

In the meantime, I’m about 30 pages into a new one, so I guess the smart thing to do is just bear down and try to get it done, and maybe I’ll have better luck. But 5 a.m. comes awfully early.

Cola wars

I went with a group of co-workers to lunch at a restaurant in downtown Atlanta the other day, and when the waiter came over to take our drink order, I asked for a Coke.

He paused, reminding me of one of my favorite John Prine songs (“There were spaces between Donald and whatever he said”), and said slowly, “We don’t serve Coke products. Is Pepsi OK?”

No, Pepsi is not OK. What is this, a Saturday Night Live skit? I kept looking around for John Belushi. I’m in downtown Atlanta and I can’t get a Coke?

I have never understood Pepsi drinkers. My dad used to be a Pepsi drinker, and this caused me much distress as a child, because I wanted to leave Santa Claus milk and cookies, like every normal American kid. But I was told no, Santa would prefer Pepsi and fruitcake. It didn’t dawn on me at the time that not only was my dad the only Pepsi drinker I knew, he also seemed to be the only person in the world who actually ate fruitcake. OK, so I wasn’t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.

I drank too much Coke as a kid, as my standing weekly appointment with the dentist will attest. I remember one summer day, when I was about 16, and I was getting ready to eat my favorite lunch meal – a banana sandwich with mayonnaise and potato chips, and an ice-cold Coke. (Though, if something were really “ice-cold”, wouldn’t it be frozen? Just a thought).

Anyway, there was a problem – no Cokes in the house. I suppose I could have had some water or juice or tea, but I had my mind set on a Coke, and nothing else would do. There was another problem – I was broke. I had a job, but since payday was the next day, I had nothing. If you could put a tuxedo on an elephant for a quarter, I couldn’t have put a t-shirt on a sand flea. If turkey was going for 25 cents a pound, I couldn’t have bought a raffle ticket on a jaybird’s ass. You get the picture.

There was a Coke machine in front of a convenience store about 2 miles away. I figured I had just enough gas to get there and back, and after that I could steal some from dad’s gas can. I scrounged around the house looking for change, and after about 30 minutes of looking under couch cushions and crawling under furniture, I had finally come up with the 50 cents I needed – a quarter, a dime and five nickels. I drove to the store, purchased my Coke, and was on my way back home to enjoy a heavenly lunch.

I cradled the glass bottle in my hand all the way home. I loved its smooth curves. I resisted the urge to open it and take a quick sip. It promised to be just what I was hoping – sweet, fizzy, as cold as an ex-wife.

I pulled up in the driveway, got out of the car, and Big Boy, my mongrel dog, came be-bopping up to greet me, and he bumped into my hand, knocking the precious bottle onto the sidewalk, whereupon it exploded into a million pieces. It took me a long time to forgive that dog.

Remember New Coke? That was the worst idea since Delilah decided Samson needed a trim. I recall my introduction to New Coke. I was at a Braves’ game. I had just broken up with my girlfriend, I was 21 years old and hanging out on a Saturday night with my parents, and Eddie Haas was the manager. Things couldn’t get much worse, right? But then I went and got a Coke.

I took one sip, and that was it. I had hit rock bottom. I looked to the heavens and said, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Coke now tasted like….Pepsi! Was this some sort of a cosmic joke?

Thankfully, they brought back the old Coke, sort of. They use a different sweetener now than they did before the New Coke debacle. Certain convenience stores sell Coca-Cola that is bottled in Mexico, and it tastes like the old Coke. The owner of one of those stores told me that they still use cane sugar in the Mexican plants. I don’t know if that’s true¸ but it sure does taste better to me.

I worked for Coca-Cola briefly, and it was kind of a weird, uptight atmosphere, but they offered the greatest employee perk in the world – Coke machines everywhere that required no money. You just pressed the button, and out popped a free Coca-Cola, in a glass bottle. I probably drank 15 of them my first day.

The truth is, as I get older and thicker, I rarely drink a real Coke anymore. I stick to Diet Coke or coffee, but I’ll still occasionally allow myself a sweet, sugary indulgence.

But never, ever, will I drink a Pepsi.

Teenage wasteland

My house is inhabited by two strange beings who prowl the halls at all hours of the night, eat everything in sight and communicate with me and my wife with only strange sounds and hand gestures.

I’m talking, of course, about teenagers.

I am told that I was once a creature not unlike them, until I evolved into a human being. Maybe I was, but I guess time has wiped my memory banks clean of the experience, because much of what they do is inexplicable to me.

They will stare into a refrigerator bursting at the seams with food and say, “Why do we never have anything here to eat?” They can go downstairs at 2 a.m. and cook a pizza when they’re hungry, but ask them to boil their own hot dogs and they whine like lonesome puppies.

Have you ever tried to get information from a teenager? If you really need to know something, unless you put bamboo chutes up their fingernails, you’re lucky to get anything beyond name, rank and serial number. Mimes carry on better conversations.

Here’s the typical after-school parent-teenager conversation:
Parent: “How was school?”
Teenager: “Grunt.”
Parent: “What did you do?”
Teenager: “Grunt.”
Parent: “Do you have any homework?”
Teenager: (silent eyeroll).
Parent: “Is everything ok?”
Teenager: “Why are you always on my back?”
Parent: “I’m sorry, I’m just concerned. I just want you to know that you can talk to me about anything that’s bothering you, ok?”
Teenager: “I’m hungry.”

When you have a child, along with the birth certificate you should be presented with a chauffeur’s license and a little black cap. You are constantly dropping them off and picking them up. If you ever complain about this, you get the “I didn’t ask to be born!’ response.

Through the magic of cell phones, the little darlings can call you as soon as they’re ready to be picked up and ask you to come get them. Generally, about 90 seconds after the first call, I get a second call asking, “Where are you?” Apparently they are under the impression that when they’re not home I am sitting in the car, hands on the wheel, foot on the accelerator, the car facing the street, so that as soon as I get the first call I can gun it and get there as fast as humanly possible. I’m expected to respond faster than Batman.

I am now presently trying to teach my daughter how to drive. I will give her credit, she is doing pretty well. I do most of the teaching, because when her mother rides with her it usually turns into a screaming match that would make Jerry Springer blush. I try to handle things more calmly and speak in an even tone of voice, even when I’m saying things like, “That was a curb, not a ramp. Now, let’s back off of the shrubbery and try it again, ok?”

Here’s my advice for anyone riding in a car with a teenager behind the wheel. First, take as many Xanax, Valium, Prozac and Vicodin pills as you can without overdosing. Then secure yourself in a straitjacket to make sure you don’t try to reach over and grab the wheel. Blindfold yourself so you won’t see the five near-miss accidents that occur before you even get out of the neighborhood. Then pray silently and ask God for forgiveness in advance for all of the things you’re about to say.

I talk to other parents and they assure me that they encounter the same odd behaviors in their offspring. And I must say, I am very proud of my children and I love them very much. They are both straight A students, very active in school and church, well-liked by adults, and can be a joy to be around, as long as it’s after noon.

And one day they’ll be gone, and I’ll be the one whining.

Looking for Sasquatch

I suppose you’ve read or heard about these two yahoos in Georgia who claim to have found Bigfoot.

It, of course, is turning out to be a hoax. A DNA test on the alleged remains they found were revealed to be from a possum. Either that was one enormous possum, or these guys are full of it. Their evidence is as flimsy as a Britney Spears outfit.

These self-proclaimed Bigfoot trackers are from Clayton County, a lovely part of the south Metro Atlanta area. You know those bumper stickers parents put on their cars saying, “My son is an honor student”? In Clayton County the bumper stickers read, “My son has only been arrested once.”

I have news for you – there is no Bigfoot. It does not exist and is a figment of the imagination, just like other mythical creatures, such as the Loch Ness Monster, the tooth fairy, honest politicians and Georgia Tech football fans.

This reminds me of a joke: An atheist is walking through the woods and he sees Bigfoot, who starts chasing him. He drops to his knees and says “Please God, help me!” God answers him, saying “I thought you didn’t believe in me.” The man says “Well, five minutes ago I didn’t believe in Bigfoot, either!”

Why did these guys have to be from Georgia? Whenever I see anybody from Georgia being interviewed on a television news show, it always makes me cringe. Especially after tornadoes. I believe the TV crews intentionally seek out the least attractive shirtless person they can find with the fewest teeth, and the interview generally sounds like this:

“Well me and Juanita was setting in the den watching the monster truck show on the VCR – my cousin Shorty taped it fer me – and we heared this awful roar like a freight train coming so I yelled to Juanita ‘we got to get to the basement’ and she yelled back that the trailer ain’t got no basement and she wasn’t going nowhere without Thor, which is her little Chihuahua, then the next thang I know the trailer begun to shake and I woke up in a sycamore tree across the road. I ain’t seen Juanita since but Thor turned up at my neighbor’s house and I reckon he’s gonna take up there since all we got left is a ce-ment slab.”

I remember back in 1973, there was an alleged UFO incident in Orchard Hill, Ga., just a few miles from my hometown of Griffin. An old man was sitting on his front porch when he claimed a “golden ball” descended from the sky and burned a spot in his yard about the size of a basketball. The old man claimed it was brimstone from heaven sent down to warn us to stop our wicked ways.

I’m not sure why God would pick Orchard Hill as a place to send a message. There’s nothing there but grain silos and a convenience store. Surely there are more wicked places to drop brimstone, like New York City or Los Angeles or Knoxville.

Believe it or not, the UFO story made the national news. I’m sure it was reported in a patronizing, “Ha-ha, look at these dumb hillbillies” way. I guess it was a welcomed break from all the news about Watergate, which I thought at the time was a big dam. Hey, I was 9. Nobody ever called me a prodigy.

I suppose there is a slight chance that there really is a Bigfoot or UFOs or sea monsters or whatever else people conjure up in their imaginations. I am a skeptic, though, so I’ll believe when I see it with my own two eyes (that’s kind of a dumb phrase – can you see things with somebody else’s eyes?).

Bigfoot, my foot.