Lawn Tractors, Yuppy Coffee and Reliving My Childhood

I cut the grass today. My new John Deere riding mower complete with cupholder...complete with a salted caramel mocha frappuccino. (Let me say that I only yielded to the riding mower out of necessity. How was I to know the new house Allie and I fell in love with would come with a FREAKIN' ACRE OF UNINTERRUPTED GRASS? But I still keep my old push mower for reasons of self-respect.) That said, it is a lot of fun. But I have observed that my neighbors, taming their own private savannas, seem so hurried and aggressive out there on their mowers. Heads down, high gear, hard banking and haul ass back to the garage as fast as possible. I can't understand that approach. I love the monotony; the relaxed concentration that comes over me while keeping an eye on my cutting path. I never imagined a lawn tractor could be so enjoyable.
And that's the magic word: tractor. As soon as I set out on my first pass through the yard, I am taken back to a golden time of my childhood. A time when the grumbling beast upon which I perched was much more deserving of the label "tractor".  When the ground over which I crawled was a field being readied for planting or the dirt road home after a day of the same. Often times I was settled on the fender while my father piloted the machine. Now there's something that would have DFACS reaching for their pitchforks and torches these days. But, being on a farm and being practical, my father taught me how to operate the tractor by myself. We never knew when an accident may have befallen him and I was the only one who could get us to help. That was the same reason I learned how to drive a truck when I was eleven. Did I mention it was a golden time of my childhood?
Back to the present for a moment. I was aware of myself assuming the same posture and experiencing a hint of the same joy puttering along on my mower, ( I just can't use the words "lawn tractor" with a straight face. The previous mention was merely for introductory purposes.) as I used to when piloting that enormous Ford; bright blue and shiny, with a vertical exhaust, that bad boy meant business! I have never forgotten the feeling of driving that beast. I've never forgotten the feeling of being a kid on that farm.
I cannot say, by any means, that I was raised in the country. On the contrary, I grew up in the Virginia Tidewater, a coastal industrial area dominated by the presence of the U.S. Navy. There were not many  tractors as I recall.
 My father retired from the Navy to find himself away from his family almost as much as he was while on active duty. He consulted for the companies that produced the nuclear reactor propulsion systems for the Navy, as he had been such an engineer himself. I don't know the particulars, but I think it was safe to say that he saw his family as more important than atomic energy.
 And with that, we headed south. Way south. All the way to the homeplace of his step father. An area that the word "rural" does not even begin to convey the depths of isolation we experienced. Our nearest neighbor was over a mile up the dirt road. And "neighborly" is not a word I'd use to describe him. (Although "inbred hilljack SOB" fits the bill nicely). This was the land where men still gathered on a saturday morning in the back of the local general store to shoot the shit. Where Camouflage was always in style and a gunrack in your pickup truck window was considered standard equipment. In short: it was a ten year old boy's vision of Heaven.
It was a learning experience of the highest order. I learned to chew tobacco, shoot a gun, clean a fish, field dress a deer and that bears are much more frightening up close and personal than you can possibly imagine from watching Animal Planet. But what I learned the most about was my father. Every minute that I wasn't in school, I spent as his shadow. I never asked where we were going, I just hopped in and away we went. After having spent almost all of my life up to then at sea, I felt like I was getting to know him for the first time in some ways. And I wanted to be just like him.
Even now, thirty years later, I can still say some of the best times I recall were spent riding in that huge truck of his, with the squeaky guard on the front, talking his ear off or listening to some bit of wisdom. I loved discussing reactor theory and the elegant design of nuclear propulsion systems as much as I did driving down the road with a .22 pistol between us on the seat. The objective was to locate a bottle in the ditch and, whomever found one would get the pistol and shoot it. Then we'd drive on to the next one and pass the gun over. We could do that for miles. It never got old.
As all things do, our time in the country came to an end for one reason or another. But though I may have left the farm, the farm hasn't entirely left me. It still manifests itself in the posture and attitude I fall into when I crank my lawn mower. I could just as easily be heading out to plow under the north forty as  maintaining the pleasingly manicured appearance of my suburban lawn. Although the frappuccino does decidedly anchor me in the present. Real tractors didn't have cupholders anyway. And if they did, it would have held Gatorade or just ice water-something quintessentially blue-collar like that. I should be ashamed of myself and my frilly suburbanized ways to which I've succumbed. But did I mention it was a salted caramel mocha? That's got to count for something, right?


Semper Fi