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closeMowers are dangerous, comically frustrating
Soup du jour: George Le Me
While doing some seriously complicated scientific research on the most ergonomic entry and exit of the common household hammock, I came upon a startling statistic: more men are injured while mowing lawns each year than those who sit around and drink beer.
In fact, 68,000 people are injured in lawn-mowing accidents every year, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. They say 850 kids per year get run over by lawn mowers, and that lawn mowers accounted for about 22 percent of all amputations in the Seattle trauma center.
This tells me that lawn mowers are a major cause of amputation and should only be operated by trained professionals. Also, if the kids had been actually operating the lawn mowers, as God intended them to do, they wouldn’t have been lying around randomly in the grass where some incompetent older guy, who’d rather be golfing, could run them over.
That’s why those of us who really care about the current state of lawn safety leave our lawn mowers outside during the winter. Lawn Safety Advocates such as myself have figured out that if the mower won’t start, we won’t have to cut the lawn, ergo, we create less chance of injury to ourselves and any children that might be hiding in our lawns.
I was pondering this theory recently as I sat up from my hammock just long enough to notice Franni marching toward the garage, obviously in a lawn mowing mood. Just as I was settling back down, wondering if the neighbors would notice and appreciate “our” dedication to the beautification of the street, the news that the mower wouldn’t start hit me like a rain cloud.
I spent the next hour getting all greasy taking apart a machine I pretended to know something about, cursing and hoping the lawn would take pity on me and suck itself back down to a respectable length.
Just as I was about to stab it to death with a screwdriver, I looked up to find a small teen-aged boy from down the street staring at me, trying to figure out what all the commotion was about. When he saw I was working on an engine, his eyes lit up.
“Lost your spark?” he asked.
“I beg your pardon,” I huffed, hoping he wasn’t making a snide comment about my age.
Once he determined that I had indeed lost my spark, he proceeded to tell me about removing the flywheel to polish the points and why I would need a brass punch. He started reducing my mower to about 8,000 separate pieces, announced he had found the problem and fixed it in about 10 minutes.
“But I have to get home for lunch, can you get it back together?” he asked.
“Are you kidding?” I said, kidding.
“Oh, good,” he said and left.
I panicked. But after two more hours, it was back together again. I just threw all the extra pieces in the garbage.
It started on the second crank.
About that time, Franni came outside surprised to see the lawn mower was working again.
“Have any trouble with it,” she asked.
“Naw, it was a snap,” I said.
And off she went happily mowing the lawn, swerving to miss the kids scattered about, while I returned to my science project over by the hammock.