peter brav

grass springs eternal

If I close my eyes, I can see him clearly. He is wearing one of his Fruit of the Loom A-shirts with small holes of frugality in too many places. Plaid shorts, dark socks, too-small baseball cap promoting a motor oil company. The sun burns high in the sky and reddens his unprotected skin. He is sweating, beads of glistening perspiration starting in his thinning brown scalp, cascading down, wiped away by occasional rubs of his right forearm. He is no fashion statement, my father Herman, not that cutting a suburban lawn on summer Saturday afternoons was ever intended as frolic down a Seventh Avenue runway.

The Long Island split-level home of my youth is centered on a lot 60 feet wide and 100 feet deep. That plot is in turn centered on a street with 27 other similar houses amidst a rectangular grid of other streets with thousands more of these similar houses. They have been placed there on potato farms and swampland by William Levitt and others anxious to meet the demands of postwar America and its returning servicemen. My father is one of those men, two decades removed from shaking hands with Russian soldiers at the Elbe River after four years with the Fighting 69th Infantry, diving to the ground and clenching his rifle outside burned-out buildings throughout France and Germany. 

He married in 1950, a father of two in ensuing years, off at dawn five days a week for long hours in Brooklyn to pay for it all. The ten years in a red-brick apartment building in Queens on a busy street lined by as much brick and asphalt and as little green as logistically possible were enough. He dreamed of more room for the kids, a place for the occasional charcoal grilling, the blue above-ground pool put up for a few months on the concrete patio. Fewer people and cars, some quieter times, away from a desk and everyone else two afternoons out of seven, a safer haven to put aside memories of family and friends departing before their time. A lawn. A blissfully pea green, jade green, forest green, emerald green lawn.

There is no mulching of this lawn, just a walk-behind gas mower with catch bag he will empty several times this afternoon into bent and rusting metal garbage cans he has placed at the curb. Monday morning, union workers will swing by at seven and carry the grass away in the same gray trucks they take the empty boxes and wrappers of Swanson and Hostess. My father, off to work already, will miss them and wait the five days until he can do it all over again.

I am busy too, running to little league games and schoolyard football, riding my bicycle, playing with friends just down the block and a mile away. I never offer to help. He does not ask. He wants to be alone, to forget about good buddies Gambino shot on his left and Walisko shot on his right somewhere near Leipzig, to lose his worries over mortgage payments and the future in the grass he trims. He wants me to run and play on the green he has brought me to. He wants me to do the young boy things he tried to do too, albeit on paved asphalt and solitary weeds, wondering why he doesn’t have a nickel for the movies this afternoon and why his father, brother and sister had to pass away so young. 

There was this one time. I was thirteen as I recall, a newly minted man according to Jewish tradition, a man in a hurry to go where thirteen year-olds go. He stopped me at the edge of the driveway and complained in not so many words that I should help him out once in a while. So I did, right then and right there, listened how to flip a choke switch and how to pull hard on a starter rope, to never put my hand underneath by the blade, to push the mower straight ahead. I wasn’t very good at it, that was my impression of how he felt, and he wasn’t very patient. I was off on my bicycle after a few laps, off to friends, to baseball fields, to pizzerias, to longing glimpses of young female classmates of mine shopping with their mothers along the avenue, leaving my father and his sweat and his grass bag behind.

We have no photographs of those Saturday afternoons. My mother was busy inside, my sister and I were busy playing. None of it seemed very special anyway, not like hitting home runs, sashaying down a runway or even firing an M-16. A movie, an 8mm, a videotape would be even better. How I wish I could see that grass grow every week, see my father trim it and carry it to the curb. He didn’t say a lot, my father, and he never talked about his war years until he was near the end. It was his way of insulating us, unburdening us from the burdens he carried his whole life. Only now can I understand it, when I look at other photographs, black and whites taken in the mid-forties of my father’s journey through France, Belgium and Germany, most taken with rifle in hand alongside fellow soldiers, perched by tanks and anti-tank artillery, but all too often holding bunny rabbits, climbing a tree or running through farm fields. Only now do I understand why he ripped out my backyard basketball pole the day after I left for college and replaced it with a birdfeeder on a red pole. Why he continued to mow that lawn until he could do it no longer.

No one, other than my sister chiming in from Chicago and me speaking up from New Jersey a few hundred times, told my father that the house was becoming too much for him and my mother Adele. Folks must have noticed when he began to leave the mower in the garage and the green grass grew taller than it should. Grass and weeds wanted to do what grass and weeds want to do, turn back the clock to Long Island wild, to potatoes, to reeds, to green, and there was no warrior to turn them away every Saturday afternoon. Soon a benevolent neighbor next door would extend his own afternoon just long enough to take care of it when he could.

My mother’s stroke and both of their sudden declines over that last decade happened so rapidly all I could do was what I had to.

If I close my eyes again, I will crash the Kubota Z421KWT-3-60 zero-turn riding mower I am piloting through the many acres of our central New Jersey farm. We bought this place for many reasons at retirement time when we should have been looking at easy living townhouses or, heaven forbid, an apartment. There are fenced pastures for horses in need of refurbishing, red stables and sheds in need of paint and, surrounding the farmhouse and the fencing, several acres of lovely green grass in need of nothing but a little attention. Who’s going to mow all of this? I wondered too loudly and my wife presented me with her knowing answer in the form of an invoice and the shiny bright orange metallic marvel. It’s now been two years of weekly circling and perfecting. I love the repetition, the smells, the deer who watch and seem to laugh and wave. I love the therapy and the feeling of accomplishment I find nowhere else. My friends are bemused and wonder when I will get bored and turn it over to third parties with catchy names on fancy trucks. I hope someone will let me know when it’s my time to quit but until then I don’t care. I know I am doing a good job.

My father saw this place once, three weeks before he died, even before we finished necessary renovations and moved in. My sister, my father and I sat outside, sharing a pizza, staring out at the acres of grass. My father wondered if we owned the land to the nearby fence and I explained we were the caretakers up to the next street, off in the distance.

What do you need it for and who’s going to mow all that grass? he wondered.

I saw the befuddlement and the worry on the face I knew so well. Yet I saw something else. It is there each and every time I think of it. A knowing, widening, almost beaming, undeniable smile. Rest in peace in the grass, Dad. I’m taking care of it for you.

PETER BRAV IS THE AUTHOR OF THE NOVELS SNEAKING IN, THE OTHER SIDE OF LOSING, ZAPPY I'M NOT, AND 331 INNINGS. HE IS A 1977 GRADUATE OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY AND A 1980 GRADUATE OF HARVARD LAW SCHOOL. HE LIVES WITH HIS WIFE JANET AND SHEEP, DOGS AND HORSES ON A HOPEWELL, NEW JERSEY FARM WHERE HE SPENDS A GOOD DEAL OF TIME THESE DAYS CUTTING GRASS AND, MUCH TO HIS SURPRISE, ENJOYING IT.