Happy end of July!
Independence Day, independence month, independence year
(Independence is overrated.)
BBQ is as American as it gets, says the sign outside the Pig ‘n Chik.
Mowing grass is as American as it gets, I muttered to myself as sweat dripped into my eyes. I had heard the lawnmowers start in the neighborhood, my sign that this balmy, 83-degree, overcast day was a good time to mow. My second time mowing this lawn was one early morning, which I later discovered, to my dismay, that morning dew made the cut grass stick to everything- the blade, the chute, my legs. Mowing the lawn has always been something I enjoyed, hard physical labor (no doubt made easier by the purchase of an electric, self-propelling mower) resulted in the instant gratification of a well-groomed lawn, with the bonus of freshly cut grass smell, a distinctive and singular aroma I never smelled growing up in a concrete and beach city like Hong Kong. This might be the biggest yard I’ve ever owned, having only otherwise owned a co-op with a tiny patio backyard and a high-rise apartment. Even at our biggest house, the ‘yard’ was no more than a few feet of grass bordering a heavily wooded forest, with only a small wooden deck separating us from nature. So there are things I had to learn about mowing the lawn, and certain steps to take to ensure success. Sure, you could just go out there and do it, but you could also do it better, preparing by picking up all the large twigs beforehand, mowing in an organized fashion, and finishing off by weed-whacking the edges. It’s kind of like raising children. You can do it, and you can try to do it better, but every once in a while you still watch in horror as your daughter’s favorite turtle teether gets caught up in the blades and spit up in bite-sized chunks of green rubber, and sometimes no matter what you do- fertilize, water, and mow, you’re worried that the grass still looks half dead.
But then once you’ve been doing this a while, you’ve gotten more practice, and you realize that, for the most part, the grass always comes back. Cutting the grass disperses the seed, and the mulch helps to protect their roots in the soil. Sometimes regular maintenance, a little faith, and a little love are all you need.
I recall a conversation my brother-in-law was having with my dad, about the particular type of grass in his front lawn. Pride in your grass, though I feel is sometimes misplaced, may be considered as something different- tenderness towards another living thing, tending to it? Or sometimes mansplaining grass is just mansplaining.
What to do with cut grass, though? We are talking about grass now, and not children. You can use it as mulch, spread it on the lawn, in flower and garden beds, and on top of wood chip mulch. I learned that on YouTube.
Lindsay suggested this morning that our Francine is a verb in and of herself, as in she will “Frank things up”, or to be “franked up” is a possibility. In that case, to “Frank” is to deconstruct so spectacularly that you thank her for it and it makes me think what our verbs would be. For example, to “Carm” might be to consistently wiggle your way into a position that you're completely underqualified for, or to “Linds” would mean to finish something at the very last minute with fantastic results. And as for the youngest member of our family, Addie Addie, she may be too young to have much of a describable personality, but I think to “Addie” might mean to disarm someone with an alarmingly, sweet smile before immediately pooping her pants and making you change it.
These definitions made me giggle in the car on my drive home. It’s a shorter drive now that we're in our new house and school is out. It's still 25 minutes on the highway, but I'm getting used to it and I like being alone with my thoughts for that hour of the day. It makes me think that to make yourself a verb is another way of defining yourself as the hero of your own story and the agent of your destiny. You write what happens next. In college, my senior project was called “The Book of Girls”, in which I screen-printed images of all the women in my life and their names. On the last page, it said, “We are more than our names. We are no more than our names”. Because both are true. In my healthcare leadership class, we were learning about implicit and unconscious bias about having a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce and while I agree, that unconscious bias tends to be a bad thing (someone automatically being put in the no pile because of purple hair or a red polka dot dress, see this TED talk), I think that it's also completely unavoidable. In the same way that we are made up of stories, we are made up of biases. They’re integral to our makeup as taught by societal constructs, personal experience, and parental wisdom (or trauma). I come back again and again to this theory that generational trauma is brought on by fears that can be passed down–fear of gun violence, fear of sexual assault, fear of racist hate crimes, fear of poverty, fear of being too fat, too thin, not good enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not rich, not poor enough, not enough.
My thoughts make me a sentimental nincompoop, as one of my writer friends said. I challenge you to redefine yourself as a verb but to be gracious enough to allow your verb definition to include “to be enough” and that you can be in the right time, in the right place, for right now.
I’m sitting in my living room, in our comfortable house with my two kids, two cats and a wife and it feels like I’m living the American dream, two and half kids and a white picket fence. We always say we don’t want it until we get it. Maybe part of it is that the grass looks greener on the neighbor’s side, but I can see the thick palm trees he has to mow under. The other neighbor has a rocky slope that doesn’t look fun either. So maybe my grass is a little yellow in patches but you know what, my grass is my grass. And that is something.
Until next time, always go black tie.
