Mowing the Lawn

It was Thursday night, well past sunset. They had already partaken of the sacrament and sung a hymn when Jesus stepped out of the room and set his feet on the path that would lead first to the garden Gethsemane and before the sun set again to the cruel cross of Calvary. The garden spot was a place well known to the Savior. A place he was accustomed to visiting when in Jerusalem. I wonder if he knew the first time he visited that garden the role it would play in God’s grand design. Perhaps he did. Or perhaps he simply chose it that night because it would provide the peace and solitude he would need to bear the weighty burden that awaited him.  John, his apostle, was with him. But John wrote little about what was about to happen. Only that Jesus, with his disciples, crossed over a brook into the garden. What we do know from John is that in the hours leading up to this moment Christ’s thoughts were on us. He prayed that we would find joy in the world, that we would be with him once ou...

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Our bones might crack this weekend in the Pacific Northwest as we experience our first real warm spell of the year.  It's raining now (which is great for my lawn), but the temperature is expected to reach the upper 70s on Saturday.  It shouldn't be a big deal, but anything over 68 qualifies as sweltering in my book. The onslaught of solar oppression has me thinking about fans and air conditioners.  Sadly, my trusted fan is on it's last leg.  For some reason, it will occasionally wait a few minutes between the time I turn it on and the time it starts to blow.  Maybe it's old and needs a breather.  Maybe it's time for me to accept that life is brutish and short and I need to move on. Thelma mocked me when we bought the fan at Costco.  I saw it one day and came home all excited to tell her about it.  It's a tower fan, so it doesn't have the hazardous legs that jump out to viscously try and trip you.  That's an important consideration for me...

I feel uneasy tonight. I'm not sure if I helped or was had. In what has become something of a Thursday-evening-post-basketball tradition, I drove to Walmart for some late night shopping. Two weeks ago it was new shorts and an exercise shirt. Last week it was another exercise shirt (because I liked the first one so much). This week it was new insoles and laces for my basketball shoes. (Thelma, who has thoroughly documented her distaste for shopping at Walmart has driven me to these shopping trips under the cover of night.) Approachable is not how I would have described myself as I trudged across the Walmart parking lot in my wife-beater sleeveless shirt, shorts and coordinating fleece vest. Sweaty, yes. Beleagured, perhaps. Approachable, no. But a woman did approach. Something told me to stop and wait for her. She was caught somewhere between out-of-breath and verge-of-tears. I could see she was nervous talking to me. She tripped quickly over some desperate story that I co...

All I could see was "is that chicken?" I had just pulled the mail from our mail cubby. One of the great, modern suburban tragedies is that mail boxes have been replaced by the oversized mail cupboard with each house allocated a puny cubby. It's depressing to the very core. Bland, file-cabinet grey. Institutional locks. Our particular version is tipped slightly to one side from a collision with a car. The whole scene resembles a lopsided morgue refrigeratior for mail. (My personal favorite, by the way, is the KH500 with the 26-gauge, corrosion-resistant, stucco-embossed, coated steel interior walls.) Insert key. Open door. Slide out letters. Shut door. Remove key. Try not to drop key in the strategically-placed storm drain directly below. Throw mail away. Curse Wilmington, Delaware, for the avalanche of credit card applications. There is, occasionally, some mild drama when you're anticipating a package. The package—if it's a respectable package of a ...

My wife is a blog hog—and a prolific one at that. On more than one occassion in the past few weeks, I've thought of posting to this blog about some topic only to find that she has beat me to it. The way our Christmas bear tradition was hatched in our poverty. My near-death experience with a pack of feral teenagers. The snowball luminaries I learned to make in Finland. It's that last one that really takes the cake. I knew I would have to be quick to the computer if I was going to write about it before Thelma did. But how quick? Impossibly so. Before I had my gloves of and had dusted the snow off my sandals, Thelma had beat me to the punch. Perhaps I'll start writing about what I'm going to do. I'm convinced that Thelma lives her life in draft. Somewhere in her mind she is always writing. She captures life in written form and then it's just a matter of finding time to get it down on paper. Dumbledore had a pensieve in the Harry Potter stories. Thel...

I was under strict orders from Thelma last night to come straight home with Braeden after Scouts. No dillying. No dallying. (Yes, I know "dillying" is not a word, but it should be.) I had every intention of being obedient when I set out from the Church. I let Colin Park ride in the front. Braeden sullenly slouched in the back seat because I had presumably ignored his cries of "shotgun" on the way to the van. I let Braeden move to the front after we dropped Colin off, but I let him know that his reaction was out of line. "Colin is older than you, he was our guest, 'shotgun' is not a binding legal contract..." And so forth. "But Dad, I just was looking forward to the two of us being together for a little while." I felt more than minor pangs of guilt. Here it was, about 8:30 in the evening, and I had given Braeden my undivided attention for about the seven minutes it takes to drive to the church building. That was all. That has bee...

After 24 hours in the cocoon I call the Marriott Maida Vale, I finally emerged a few minutes ago for fresh air, exercise and food. I've done far too much sitting around and staring at a computer. It's strange this is what I call work. This sitting, typing, talking, thinking, writing. That's the new reality on the edge of cyberspace. It doesn't feel right to call it work sometimes. It doesn't burn enough calories. It doesn't get me dirty enough. A stain on a shirt every now and again when I spill something at lunch. What does it say that my clothes are so clean as to make a stain look out of place? If my hands are clean, if my palms are without callus, have I really created something of worth? There is danger when we stop being part of the creative process. There is danger to the human spirit when we can't see the product of our own hands. When we become just one step in a process, just one role in a factory, we stop being fully human. We are com...

I'm nothing if not a humanitarian, so here's a bit of wisdom. It turns out that true bliss costs $100 plus gas. I'm not talking about in-the-moment bliss like Whac-a-mole or just-passing-through Bliss like the town in Idaho or even temporary bliss like the 90 minutes after you've had really good Chinese food . I'm talking about lasting bliss. The kind of bliss you can still feel when you close your eyes at night. The kind you think about the next day—that gets better the more you think about it. It's not true love, but it's a clear second. Yesterday Thelma fell in love with the raw beauty of Lake Chelan. I fell in love with the raw power of a four-cylinder, 1052cc, 20-valve, 110-horsepower, liquid-cooled, wave-running dream machine. For five and a half hours, it was the only thing between me and the lake. Throw my boys on the back and I'm in liquid heaven. I'm not exactly certain where my enthusiasm for wave runners originated. It must be...

I'm guessing if you ask people to name a great summer song, most of them will come up with something loud, upbeat or sunny.  Cheryl Crow, "All I Wanna Do" or "Soak Up the Sun".  B-52s, "Love Shack".  Dixie Chicks, "Goodbye Earl".  Lynyrd Skynrd, "Sweet Home Alabama". For my money, though, the perfect summer song is R.E.M.'s "Nightswimming".  It might be none of the above, but it captures for me the freedom of driving with windows down on dark, warm summer nights.  The joyful exhaustion at the end of days spent in the lake, at the river or playing volleyball on the beach. Amazon.com Widgets Nightswimming deserves a quiet night The photograph on the dashboard, taken years ago, Turned around backwards so the windshield shows Every streetlight reveals the picture in reverse I remember that sense of liberty knowing there was no school, no place I had to be for hours a day. I would sleep late into the morning until the sun...

Thus was he fair in his greatness... for his root was by great waters. I have made him fair by the multitude of his branches: so that all the trees of Eden, that were in the garden of God, envied him.  ( Ezekiel 31:7,9 ) I've heard Thelma talk about comfort foods or love languages.  What is the geographical equivalent? One of the Deep Places for me is Cascade Park ( view map ).  If you grew up a Mormon in the Everett area, you probably know it better simply as the Church Property or the River. It encompasses a series of terrace meadows and dense forest on the south fork of the Stilliguamish River northwest of Granite Falls .  It is a great place for camping and swimming.  As a child, I spent numerous nights each year camping at Cascade Park.  It might have been a family outing or priesthood commemoration or father/son night or a ward activity or a scout camp-out.  Other times my mom would just take us kids swimming for the day.  My sister, Megan, was even baptized there.  When I wa...

It's 6:30 in the morning as I write this. I'm overlooking a quiet field of fathers and 11-year-old scouts tucked in their tents and occasional camp trailer. No one else is awake. An empty flag pole is the only thing rising above the blanket of mist covering the field. What can subdue a crowd of energetic young boys? Last night it was the flag pole. More accurately, I suppose it was the flag flying from it. It had previously flown over the USS Arizona on Memorial Day, 2006. Braeden was part of the color guard that retrieved the flag during the campfire to close three days of scout camp. It was quite a site to see a field full of scouts—most in their best uniform—stand reverently as the flag was lowered and folded. All six patrols were then given the opportunity to retire a worn or weather-beaten flag that was no longer fit for flying. One at a time, each patrol unfolded a flag and carried it to the roaring fire around which all of the scouts and other onlookers were gathe...

I announced at dinner this evening that I had created a blog. In near unison, everyone asked me what it was named. "Mowing grass, with a hyphen. All the other names were taken." Thelma started to laugh. She was imagining a scenario where Blogger had run out of names and I had somehow been saddled with "mowing grass" (with a hyphen) as the only available option. (I've since changed the name from "mowing-grass" to "mowing the lawn".) Why "mowing the lawn"? I'm not entirely sure. It has something to do with my strange obsession with having a nice lawn and my fondness for mowing. I love to mow the lawn. I like to mow other people's lawn. I like lawn mowers. I like trying to figure out the most efficient path or pattern by which to mow the yard. I like the uniform lines. I like the evenly trimmed blades of grass. I mow over each section of lawn two or three times before I'm done. I like to sit on lawn mowers at the hardware...