Hemingway Summer

This summer was our Hemingway summer even though technically it started in the winter.

Johnny called me one day when I was in Hawaii with my mom after her heart surgery. While my dad drove us home from a doctor’s appointment, Johnny told me that he was reading The Sun Also Rises and he had questions.

“They’re out drinking and they keep saying they’re ‘tight.’ What does that mean?”

“Well, it means they’re drunk, not falling down drunk, but buzzed.”

My parents listened to my half of the conversation with some curiosity.

“What’s an ex-patriot? Why were they in Paris? Why were they called the Lost Generation? Why were they disillusioned?”

I explained as best as I could off the cuff, and told him I hadn’t read Hemingway since I was in college. Nothing like a pop quiz decades later. I told him I was sure his professor could give him better answers than I could.

Then he told me that he wasn’t reading it for a course. He called me so that I could be his teacher. No pressure there! He also said that he’d convinced his roommate to read it too, and they were having some good discussions about it.

I promised him I’d read it when I got home, and then we could talk some more.

       Back home in Washington, I pulled The Sun Also Rises off a dusty shelf and started reading. It was slow going, especially compared to the fast-paced, action packed plots of books and movies now. The slow pace made me wonder if it would get published if Hemingway tried to get it published now. Once I settled in, it got better. It was as I remembered it, lots of drinking and bullfights.

John decided to read it too. When the sun also rose over our back yard, he’d be out on the deck reading. He agreed that it was really slow.

Ernest Hemingway

When I asked Johnny why he liked the book so much, he said that he really liked how simple things were back then. People weren’t in constant communication with texting, cell phones, and the internet. His favorite part of the book was when Jake and Bill went on a fishing trip in Spain. At one point, they decided to take a nap on the grass, out in the open. Johnny was amazed that they could be that relaxed.

He also said that people often discredit Hemingway saying that his writing style was overly simplistic. Johnny thinks that is a strength. Hemingway chose each word carefully and made each one count to describe scenes vividly.

In mid-summer, I discovered a movie called Midnight in Paris playing at an independent movie theater in Tacoma. I convinced Sarah, and eventually Johnny and John to go and see it with me.

Owen Wilson plays a writer who is visiting Paris. Wandering the streets of Paris one night, he is transported back in time to the 1920s and gets to hang out with Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein, and other artists from the lost generation.

Sarah didn’t read Hemingway this summer, but she’s spent two summers writing a novel set in the past, so she could relate to Gil Pender (played by Owen Wilson). She also got a kick out of Pablo Picasso and Salvadore Dali, since she’d learned about them in an Art History class.

We kept shooting looks at each other over our popcorn whenever actor Corey Stoll delivered a classic Hemingway line. Directed by Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris captured how it must have been back then. It fit in perfectly with our Hemingway summer.

Laura Keolanui Stark probably has her nose stuck in a book. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.

Hit and Run

I’m not sure when the rules changed, but apparently now if you hit another car with yours, you’re supposed to sneak away without doing anything. That’s right, hit and run. After all, why should the wrongdoer pay? The innocent victim is the one who should pay.  

       In the last six months, I’ve been a victim or bystander to three incidents. The first one happened at the gym while I was at Zumba. I came out and my rear bumper had a softball sized dent/crease in the left corner.

There wasn’t a note left under my windshield wiper. Nobody had left a message for me at the front desk of the gym. Whoever did it, had to work at it because I purposely park where there’s not a row of cars behind me.

       The second incident happened while I was at work. At this particular job, I eat lunch in my car. One day while I ate my sandwich, I heard someone honking. It sounded like it was coming from the next row of parked cars, but I couldn’t see anything.

       After lunch, I went back inside and got to work. My supervisor didn’t come in for another 20 minutes. That was unusual, so we all wondered what happened.

When she came in, she told us that she’d been eating in her Jeep SUV. She looked up and saw someone backing up into her. She honked her horn, but the car kept coming.

It hit her, and then pulled forward and parked. Nobody got out of the car. She finally got out of her Jeep and went up to the car.

It was, of course, a co-worker since that’s our designated area of the parking lot. My supervisor, who is pregnant, asked the hitter, who was already on crutches, what happened. The answer was that somehow she didn’t see the Jeep SUV, and didn’t hear the horn honking either.

It took a long time for her to admit that she’d even hit her. She also said that she thought there was already damage to my supervisor’s bumper, and added that she didn’t have any insurance. 

The latest parking lot hit and run happened yesterday. Johnny and I wanted to blow the pine needles off Sarah’s car and then park it in the garage. We needed to get some groceries, so we drove Sarah’s Audi to Fred Meyer’s which also got rid of the pine needles.

 We parked and went into the store. Twenty minutes later we came out, and found the corner of the rear bumper cracked and scraped. No note, nothing, but damage. We weren’t sticking out of the space. It was angled parking. It probably happened because someone across from our space backed out to go the wrong way down the row.

We haven’t even had the car for a month. I waited a day to call Sarah and break the bad news to her.

Accidents happen. I know that. These aren’t expensive new cars. Nobody was physically hurt. I’m sure that’s how the hitter justified forgiving himself and then leaving. But, it’s not up to him to forgive himself. It’s up to him to apologize and try to make it better.  

How can someone damage someone else’s property and drive away without a word. Why is it so hard for some people to take responsibility for their actions? If you can’t be responsible for the little things, how will you handle the big things?

When I was learning to drive, my father stressed that one of the most dangerous places to drive was the parking lot. Apparently, it’s also one of the worst places to park.

Laura Keolanui Stark is getting more exercise hiking into stores from the farthest spaces in parking lots. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.

First Car Love

It had been delayed due to lack of funds, and the need for more driving experience, but the momentous day finally arrived---the day that Sarah got her first car!

       Our car shopping technique is not exactly typical. First, drive across the state with thousands of dollars in cash to look at a car that a graduate student who is returning to Korea is selling. Before you even get halfway there, listen to your daughter tell you that it’s too late, the graduate student sold the car to someone else.

Spend the rest of the weekend feeling nervous because you’ve got all that cash on you, and feeling thankful that you’re in Pullman, Washington where there aren’t many muggings.  

Then, two months later, go out to eat Mexican food. As you leave, crane your neck to check out what cars are for sale in the little car lot next door.  A gold car about the same size as my Camry caught Sarah’s eye. The wheels on my car kept rolling back to John’s office to drop him off.  He told us that if we wanted to, we should go back and look at that car.

        So Sarah and I did. The car was a 1999 Audi A4. It looked sleek and clean with a tan leather interior and black carpeting. It was an automatic, which was good because Sarah hasn’t learned how to drive a stick. We went inside, and asked how many miles it had on it: 113,000.

       That night, John and Johnny got online and looked up the Kelly blue book value. Johnny asked if it had all-wheel drive. We shrugged. We hadn’t asked about that. We didn’t even know that was a possibility. He asked us if it said “Quattro” on the trunk. More shrugs from us. Despite the limited information we gave him, it looked like they were asking below the blue book value.

John asked why we didn’t test drive it. We figured he and Johnny have to test drive it anyway, so why bother getting the salesman’s (and Sarah’s) hopes up?

        The online search shifted to Subarus because they’ve got 4-wheel drive, a very good option for snowy winters in Pullman, and driving through Snoqualmie Pass. Then it expanded to Hondas because that’s what Johnny drives, so he knows a lot about them.

        John called a few people, but the cars they were advertising had already sold.

        Schedules got busy. Johnny got sick. Our car shopping enthusiasm wore down, except for Sarah’s.

        The next week we passed by the Mexican restaurant car lot a few times while we were running errands, and Sarah always swiveled around to look for the Audi. Once she despaired, “It’s gone!”

Then she sat up taller in her seat, and got excited, “No, it’s still there! They just moved it.”

        I told her not to get her heart set on that car. We hadn’t driven it. It might have something wrong with it. Someone else might buy it before we did. She said she knew all that, but I could still hear it in her voice that she was getting attached.

         The weekend arrived and she started bugging us. Could we just go down there and test-drive it?

         John said he wanted to talk to someone about a Honda Accord. We went to see the Honda Accord, but while we were driving over, it had been sold. This was becoming an annoying trend.

         We went to see the Audi. They were closed! For the WHOLE weekend! “The boys” agreed to test-drive it on Monday. The place opened at 8:00. Sarah calmed down.

         I called home Monday on my lunch break. Sarah said that John and Johnny were waiting to test-drive it after Johnny got off of work. She was getting a haircut, and then meeting her friend Jerica, who was driving, to go shopping. That would keep her mind off the car.

         After work, I was less than a block away from home, when I spotted a gold Audi driving toward me! Johnny and his girlfriend Sarah were in it. I parked my car and climbed in. We went to Costco, and filled the gas tank up. Sarah didn’t know that we’d bought it yet.

          Johnny filled me in on the details: how the the car handled, where they drove it, what the salesman told them, and how the car lot is really a side business to their repair shop.

I drove the Audi home. The 4-wheel drive felt very different from my car’s front-wheel drive. It  really gripped the road. The interior looked and smelled new. The body was also in great shape. Sarah’s cello will easily fit in the trunk. The back seats can fold down, making the trunk even roomier to haul lots of her things back and forth to college.

My cell phone rang. It was Sarah, “Did they drive the car?”

I tried, unsuccessfully, to be cryptic, then blurted out the exciting news, “Yep, they drove it, bought it, and it’s parked in front of the house right now.” She was still squealing when I hung up.

1999 Audi A4

Before we owned one, whenever I’d see an Audi, I had a little joke that I’d always (insert eye roll) say, “They audi bought a BMW.”

Sarah has driven her car every day since we got it. She agrees with my new saying, “You audi drive an Audi.”

Laura Keolanui Stark is looking for the Audi’s owner’s manual. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.

In Search of Big Foot

In the last blog, I talked about how I love to watch game shows. Well, when John has the remote, the TV’s tuned to football, old movies, or programs about aliens, or Big Foot. He was watching “Finding Big Foot” on Animal Planet a few months ago. I walked through our family room when the team of investigators howled and “Big Foot” howled back. They were all excited. I thought it was just some campers fooling around.

         Our family has had some pretty good discussions about whether Big Foot exists or not. I want to believe that Big Foot is out there. John, with his degree in Biology, argues against it pointing out that nobody has ever caught one, shot one, or found the remains of one.

   I think Big Foot is highly intelligent and manages to avoid humans. After driving around Mt. Rainier and on the Olympic peninsula, I could easily picture Big Foot living out there undetected. In fact, when we moved here in 1990, it was much less developed, and wilder. The population then was 23,878 (compared to 37,022 in 2010). It seemed feasible to me that Big Foot could be living right here in Puyallup.

A couple of months ago, John gave a talk to US Fish and Wildlife in Stevenson, Washington. I tagged along with him. There were quite a few Big Foot souvenirs in the hotel gift shop for tourists.

          The second night we were there, we went out to dinner with a group of scientists. I confess to tuning out a lot at the “scientific” functions when they start talking shop. But this time, the conversation turned to Big Foot. Apparently a few years before this meeting, the invited speaker was an expert on Big Foot. They asked me if John had told me about this. I shook my head no.

They filled me in. They thought this man was a flake. They couldn’t believe that he had been chosen as the guest speaker, and had some fun at his expense by asking him questions that they thought would prove Big Foot was a myth. John was the lead questioner. The poor man didn’t know that John had plenty of experience arguing against Big Foot with me. I’m pretty sure it didn’t change the man’s belief in Big Foot, or these scientists’ disbelief.

I kept fairly quiet as they reminisced about how funny the whole incident was. I only chimed in to prod John into disclosing a fellow WSU professor’s explanation for why no Big Foot bones were ever found: the soil around here is so acidic from all the fir trees, the bones dissolve. And I pointed out that there was a WSU professor whose whole career was spent looking for Big Foot. They were polite.

         Today, Sarah and I took a relative who is visiting from Virginia, to Tacoma, supposedly to visit the Tacoma Art Museum. We left late and made a few stops before getting there. We walked through the Chihuly Glass Tunnel and tried to get into the glass museum, but it was closed for their annual auction. We stopped in at the Washington State Museum store to find out what time the art museum closed and were told that it closed in 15 minutes, so instead, we browsed through the store.

That’s where I found a book titled The Best of Sasquatch Bigfoot. I snatched it up and bought it as a joke for John and we left. He laughed when I presented it to him at home, and said that he thought the author, John Green, was the man who talked at the infamous meeting.

A few hours later, I started looking through it. There is a map of Washington sightings and tracks.  Puyallup had 12 reports. The only place with more reports was Mt. St. Helens, with 16. Hmmmm.

I looked up “Puyallup” in the index. On page 128, there was something extremely interesting:

“Sasquatches may do a lot of screaming, but screams don’t necessarily mean a sasquatch. If they did Puyallup would be the sasquatch capital of the world . . .The screams were most often heard in an area of mixed woods and subdivisions southeast of town . . . They first came to public attention in July, 1972, when a resident of a new subdivision called Forest Green wrote to the Tacoma News Tribune about hearing loud screams one or two nights a month in the woods behind his home.”

The book goes on to say that people recorded the sounds, and that the “unidentified noise is not an ‘eeeee’ scream, but more of a long ‘whooOooOooOoo” or “woopwoopwoop” at a high pitch and with immense volume.”

Background information on why this was so intriguing to me: Forest Green is the development next door to ours. It’s the same distance from our house, as the elementary and junior high school that the kids’ walked to. Our house was built in 1979. If Sasquatch has the same lifespan as a human, he/she could still be around. There have been bears sighted nearby, and a pack of coyotes have been eating pets in our neighborhood. A newspaper article said that they coyotes are living nearby in Wildwood Park. The satellite view on Google Maps shows that there’s still a fair amount of wooded area near us.

John actually unknowingly provided the best piece Big Foot evidence this past winter. He told me that he went out to get the mail, and he heard a strange sound come from our back yard. He said it was really loud, and it sounded like a monkey. He ran back to the house to look out back for it, but didn’t see anything.

I talked to my friend Carol about it. Her back yard and mine are back to back. She said that she had heard the same sound, several times. We still haven’t figured out what animal was screaming.

Big Foot sighting at the Puyallup Fair 2011.

So, does Big Foot exist? Is he roaming around in my own neighborhood? I don’t know, but while I was writing this blog, the dogs went ballistic, and I got jumpy. I’m keeping binoculars, and a camera handy.

Laura Keolanui Stark is keeping an eye out for Sasquatch. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.

Life Is a Game Show

Whenever I win control of the remote in our house, if there’s a game show on TV, that’s what I’ll be watching. I like Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, but my current favorite is Cash Cab. When we visit New York City again, I’ll be looking for Ben Bailey.

         Sarah and I were watching a Cash Cab marathon one day when I asked, “How come it’s always the MAN who gets to be the one to give the answer?”

          We started getting all feminist riled up about that, “Yeah! What’s that about?”

          After a few episodes, we realized it wasn’t a gender thing. Whoever sat in the seat that was not directly behind the driver got to be the one who answered for the group. Most of the time, it was a man in that seat because men are chivalrous and let women and children get in the cab first. We felt a little stupid.

         Then I started wondering, if the winners split the money evenly when they got out of the cab, or if they divided it according to how many correct answers each person gave?  Who would I call for a mobile shout out? Could you choose based on the question?

          It’s always interesting too, if they haven’t gotten kicked out of the cab, to see if the contestants will take the double or nothing gamble at the end of the cab ride. And, it's refreshing to see how polite New Yorkers are.

          Years of watching game shows meant that I was fully prepared on one of the first sunny days of summer last year. John had played hooky from work and we went to eat lunch on Ruston Way, Tacoma’s waterfront.

           Afterwards, we walked out onto the end of a pier to look out at the water. That’s when we spotted an old piling sticking up out of the water covered with coins, mostly pennies. John dug in his pocket, and I dug in my purse for pennies. We were tossing coins, trying to make them “stick” to the top of the 6” diameter piling, watching them bounce off or miss entirely and plunk into the Puget Sound, when a couple walked up to us and issued a challenge.

          They were about the same age as we are, but not married. They were dating—long enough for the guy to feel comfortable launching passive aggressive barbs at his girlfriend and her supposed lack of intelligence. 

          Then he turned his spotlight on me, “I bet YOU can’t name the colleges in the Pac-10.”

           I had no choice but to start naming them, from north to south along the west coast. Mr. Obnoxious held up fingers as I rattled them off. The girlfriend got more excited the more I named. At eight, I stalled. He started gloating.

         John threw me a hint, “Our friends, Pat and Stephanie, moved to . . .”

         "Got it! Arizona and Arizona State!”

          Quiz guy was disappointed. His girlfriend high-fived me.

          Then I turned to him and threw my gauntlet down, “OK, now you have to name ten designer handbags.”

          His girlfriend beamed, “Yeah! Yeah! Name ten designers!”

          He looked stunned, “Calvin Klein?” I held up one finger.

          John looked at me, “What’s that one? The purse that you got for Sarah in China? Dooney & Bourke!”

          “OK, that’s two.” The girlfriend was practically jumping up and down. We waited. They had bupkis. 

         Together, she and I came up with eight more. I was glad she knew because to tell the truth, I was bluffing just to watch him sweat. I buy my purses from Fred Meyer’s or Penneys.               

         We left that day, and I thought the Ruston Way game show was an isolated incident, until a couple of weeks ago.

         Sarah and I were in downtown Tacoma to do some shopping. I was feeding coins into a machine to pay for parking. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man walk up. I thought he was waiting to buy a parking ticket too, but instead, he was running his own impromptu game show.

         “I bet you can’t tell me who invented penicillin.”

         Sarah looked around for a camera. Maybe we were on Jay Leno. I was trying to figure out how many minutes we’d get for a quarter, how long we were going to be, and how much change I had. Without turning around and looking at him, I answered, “Salk.”

         “Wrong! But you were headed in the right direction. It was Alexander Fleming.”

          Dang it! I pulled the ticket out of the machine. Salk cured polio (and NOT with penicillin either). All I saw of the random quiz master was his backpack as he walked off down the street. And, I’d bought 30 minutes more parking time than I needed. Dang it again!

           So if you go to Tacoma, be prepared. As my teachers used to say, “make sure you take your thinking cap with you.”

Laura Keolanui Stark is hoping she’ll make it to the bonus round. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com. (The Pac-10 consisted of: Washington State University, University of Washington, University of Oregon, Oregon State, Stanford, California, UCLA, USC, Arizona, Arizona State.)

The Story of a Cat

   I never wanted a cat. I’m a dog person.

        Thirteen years ago, a feral cat had a litter of kittens under our house. She had a litter every spring. That particular spring, she chose our house. Then, for some reason, she left one kitten behind. The kitten was too small to jump over a cement perimeter. We could hear her crying through one of our heating vents.

         Two days later, John and the yellow lab mix dog we had then, Lucky, crawled under the house. As soon as she heard them, the kitten quit crying for her mother and hid. After playing the waiting game for a long time, she started crying again, and they found her wedged in between a supporting beam of the house and part of the heating system. When John reached in to get her, she went berserk—hissing, growling, clawing.

  No fool, Lucky bailed out right away. John yelled out to us, “Get the leather gloves.”

        Just to make things more interesting, when I handed the gloves to him, I asked, “What if it’s a cougar cub?” He was not amused.

         A few minutes later, John emerged from the crawl space with a fluffy black kitten. He said she’d finally given up when she figured out that if she didn’t, he was going to pull her head off. Inside, she looked up at him with big adoring eyes as if to say, “If I’d known it was you, I wouldn’t have put up such a fight.”

          We fed her milk with an eye dropper. She couldn’t get enough. Of course, the kids begged, “Can we keep her? Can we keep her?” I told them I didn’t want a cat. We had a dog.

          Later, we took her to the vet because her eyes looked bad. The receptionist asked what our kitten’s name was. I explained that she didn’t have a name because she wasn’t our kitten. We weren’t keeping her.

  We asked the vet if she could tell if the kitten with no name had been weaned. The vet put some cat food on a dish down in front of the kitten and she climbed up onto the plate to gobble it up. That answered that question. She had an eye infection, so we got some medicine for that.

I asked everyone we knew if they wanted a kitten. I even announced it at the weekly Cub Scout meeting. Everyone agreed that she was adorable. Everyone held her and snuggled with her. Nobody wanted to keep her. The kids begged relentlessly. I stayed firm. No kitten.

Then one day I sat down at my sewing machine on the dining room table. I had just started learning to quilt. Suddenly, a little ball of black fluff was sitting on my lap, purring contentedly. She knew just whose heartstrings to play. My anti-cat resolve melted.

Her fur was so soft, we named her Velvet. She was sassy enough to kick Lucky off his favorite pillow, and smart enough to come and get you if she was hungry or her litter box wasn’t clean enough for her. Her tail was always twitching.

In the spring especially, she’d try to answer her feral call of the wild, making a stealthy dash for the door any time someone opened it. Most of the time, she would blend into the rhythm of our home, disappearing whenever a visitor came.

But once she took center stage. We were having a barbecue, and she kept watch so that when someone inadvertently left the screen door open, she made her escape.

We had a bird feeder about five yards away from the house. While everyone at the party chatted and ate, I spotted Velvet running crouched across the yard. Then in one incredibly athletic, graceful leap about five feet up in the air, she caught an unsuspecting bird and brought it down. Women screamed and children cried.

Velvet slinked back toward us with the bird in her mouth and ducked under the deck with her prize. I tried to comfort the kids, while a female guest lectured me about “letting our cat outside” and how cruel we were to have bird feeder and a cat.

Lucky and Velvet

When we moved to this house, she’d cry at the door leading to the garage, and I’d let her out there—a sorry substitute for the real outdoors, but a change of pace for her.

She knew not to sit on me (I shooed her off my lap when I figured out I was allergic to cats). But she’d sit with anyone else sitting on one particular chair in the family room. She’d let you pet her for awhile, and then nip you when she decided that she’d had enough. She took all the other pets in stride, and got along famously with T-Bone.

This past year, she started drinking water constantly, even drinking from T-Bone’s bowl when hers ran dry. He didn’t have a problem with that. Sometimes I’d find her sleeping with her head resting on her water bowl. She looked like a passed out drunk.

In October, the vet told me that she had diabetes. We could give Velvet daily insulin shots, but that wasn’t feasible. She said that Velvet would start to lose weight, get flat footed, and then it wouldn’t be long after that, that she would die. I hoped that she’d hold on until November, so that the kids would be able to say goodbye to her at Thanksgiving.

She lost weight, but she’d been overweight before diabetes, so she looked pretty good for awhile. She was always beautiful: sleek with big green eyes set in a perfectly shaped face, and a little lilt to her nose.

Keeping her water bowl filled and her litter clean got harder, but she came upstairs every morning to sing for some tuna, and to lounge in her favorite spots. She still kept me company whenever I was quilting. She approved every quilt I made after that fateful day when she first sat on my lap at the sewing machine.  

When we left for Italy in May, I told Johnny what to do if she died. In June, I called the vet twice and made appointments to have her euthanized, but then I couldn’t go through with it. Although she was thin, she didn’t seem like she was in pain. She was still making it up and down the stairs, slowly and carefully. Every time I had taken her to the vet before, she had been scared, but looked up to me with those wise green eyes trusting that I would take care of her. How could I “betray” that trust?

John and I went away for a weekend, and when we came back, Velvet had lost even more weight. Her body wasn’t able to absorb the nutrients from her food anymore. She was starving no matter how much she ate. She started missing the litter box. One night she climbed under my desk looking for a litter box that had never been there. It was time.

So on July 1st, more than eight months after we thought we’d lose her, we took her to the vet one last time. When I picked her up, she was so light. There was nothing to her. In the car, she talked along the way. At the vet’s she was calm. I stroked her nose, like I always had to soothe her, and the best cat ever, slipped away.  Someone who didn’t want a cat had a catch in her throat, and tears flowing down her cheeks. Good-bye Velvet, you were well loved, especially by a certain dog person.

Laura Keolanui Stark can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.

The Grass Is Greener

They say that trying new things keeps you young. Last weekend I tried something I don’t remember doing even as a wild teenager.

               John’s back is out. He can’t even turn over in bed when he’s sleeping without moaning in pain. He did something wrong while working out. Isn’t exercise supposed to be good for you?

               That’s why on Sunday, I mowed the lawn.

               Johnny mowed it while we were in Milan. When we got home, he told us our lawn mower was “terrifying.” He kept waiting for the blade to come flying off.  We were going to replace it last summer, but just never got around to it. Besides, with two kids in college, it fell into the keeping expenses down category.

               We bit the bullet and went to buy a new mower. We haven’t had good luck with mowers. The last two were horrible: a Sears Craftsmen and a Scotts mower. Consumer Reports lied about those two. Standing next to their mower ratings in Home Depot, we hoped they’d be accurate this time.

               When Johnny told us about the terrifying mower, he told us to get a Honda for our next one. John studied the features. A salesman came by and stopped to help us. He really knew his stuff. While he had one of the mowers flipped over to show us the twin cutting blades, some old duffer came by and offered his two cents, “It’s the finest lawn mower they can make in China.” Then he burst into laughter. Why do so many old guys think that being rude is the same as being funny? We ignored him.  

When the salesman told us that a man had come in the other day and said his Honda mower was still running after 30 years, John was sold.

               We loaded it into his pickup and took it home. John took it out for a spin, and said it was so much better than his old mower he couldn’t believe it. He really liked that the motor could be running while the blade wasn’t turning. He couldn’t wait for Johnny to get home from WSU to show him.

               Now for some background, for those of you who don’t live in the Pacific Northwest. For the rest of the country, the timing of mowing is no big deal. You mow the grass on the weekend, when it’s convenient and fits into your schedule.

               Here, it’s more complicated. You have to wait until it’s not raining, which has been a rarity this spring. The flipside of the rain problem is that the more it rains, the faster the grass grows, and the more saturated your yard gets. As soon as the sun comes out here, you can hear lawn mowers cranking up throughout the neighborhood.

               It had been a couple of rainy weeks, and the grass was getting high when John’s back went out. Johnny is still over in Pullman, so I told John I’d mow the yard. He scoffed, which made him wince from the stabbing pain in his back.

               Now, you may ask why I have never mowed before. Aren’t I a liberated woman? Why yes, I am. I pump my own gas. I made sure my daughter played sports growing up. I even vote!

               The reason I have never mowed is because I’m a delicate flower. I have severe allergies. I tested off the charts. I’m allergic to trees, weeds, ferns, cats, dogs, dust mites, and most of all, grass. I took allergy shots for years. I carry antihistamines in my purse at all times, in case I ever start to go into anaphylactic shock.

               So last Sunday, I took an antihistamine. Twenty minutes later, I suited up: jeans, long sleeved shirt, hair tucked under a hat, sunglasses, bandanna over my face. John tried to make me wear ear protection too, but I refused. I’d reached my protection limit.

               I had asked John if I could use the old-style, push mower. He said the grass had gotten too long. I had to use the new gas mower. I pushed the new gassed up mower up the driveway while waving him off. He wasn’t used to me “driving” his mower. Old habits die hard.

          Then we stood in the yard as he gave me a lawn mower lesson about throttles, speed, the drive clutch, engaging the blade, mulching, not mulching, bagging, or not bagging. He stood on top of one of the sprinklers, hidden in the high grass warning me not to hit it. He was more nervous than when he taught the kids how to drive.

               Finally, I got to pull the cord. The engine sprang to life, sputtered, and then died when I pushed the shift lever toward the handlebar. A few more tries, and I was off. So was the lawn mower.

               I hammed it up and acted like the mower was going way too fast for me, my tennis shoes flying up behind me as I ran for my life.

               John yelled, “Let go of the handle! Let go! Let go!”

               I found this hysterically funny. I let go of the drive clutch lever, opting to push the mower myself instead of letting it pull me along. Our house is built into a hill, so the self-propelled feature will be great for the guys who won’t let it get away from them.

          John supervised me pointing out patches that I missed. He overlooked the places I buzzed. I was flinchy about getting too close to the sidewalk. I didn’t want to be the first one to run the blade into cement.

          The whole job didn’t take long. Our front yard is small. I think the instructions took longer than the actual mowing.

               What was interesting about this new experience was the crowd that my lawn mower performance drew. Before the mower even started, during the instructions, one of our neighbors suddenly had to come out and hover in her driveway. A friend of hers pulled up in his pickup and felt compelled to honk. Then they both stood there observing intently.

               After I wheeled the mower back down the driveway, we noticed our other neighbor lurking in the bushes between our houses watching while we hosed the lawn mower down.

               They are so weird! Haven’t they ever seen a masked woman mow the lawn while her husband directs her? Take a picture, it lasts longer (plus you can post it on Facebook)!

Laura Keolanui Stark will not be starting a landscape service anytime soon. She can be reached at stark.laura.k @gmail.com.