Yardwork, Brown Man Style

There wasn’t much TV watching or newspaper reading or web surfing going on this weekend in our house. I didn't get to see the man who wanted Lindsay Graham come out of the closet, although I had no idea he was even in a damn closet, or watch the endless hours of billowing ash clouds shown over and over that obviously touched the inner child inside of the cable network news producers fascinated by the idea of a real live volcano, or catch the clip of El Dumbo Rusho blaming the volcano eruption on the black man who lives in the White House, or listen to the incessant chatter from political pundits about the Supreme Court nominees as if they were contestants on American Idol.

Nope, this was one of those weekends where instead of cobbling together an extended profane political polemic like “Goldman Sachs Got 99 Problems But Telling Lies Ain’t One”, S. and I were eagerly working in the yard, cleaning away dead leaves, pruning trees and bushes, and spreading a black velvet colored mulch around the yard. Okay, “eagerly” is probably the wrong word for the attitude I had. It was probably more like “why the hell am I, a well documented life-long allergy sufferer, outside in all this damn pollen?”

The yard does look a lot better, although I am still itching and sneezing. I guess “yard” is probably the wrong word too – there is no grass (hallelujah!!) at all, just a couple of narrow, mulch covered areas between the house and the street. The only topiary are bushes that ring the red brick colored pavers of the turnaround and the perimeter of the front, bushes that are now like old friends whose hair I cut every week with scissors-like shears.

A friend of mine from across town showed up Sunday afternoon with his two boys and their friend after attending a soccer game just around the corner. Two four year olds and a nine year old, they were the Three Musketeers – one mini afro, one mini fade, and one Mini Wheats colored shock of blonde hair that kept disappearing around corners and behind cars, at least until the kids from next door came outside.

The family next door are Russians, as in Russians from Russia, with heavy accents like they have in the movies and an insane obsession with cars. Their daughter is in the second or third grade, and their son, who speaks a totally unintelligible polyglot of Russian and English fragments, is three. In twenty minutes, I’d gone from being a lone field negro bagging dead leaves while breathing through a makeshift turban to starring in a cast of characters that included S. with the dog, a bowl of popcorn, three pre-testosterone boys following the Russian princesses every move, and a three year old I had to do sign language with who hollered every time he saw a bee.

Needless to say, a good bit of that pile of mulch remains right where the truck dropped it off. For in the midst of all this chaos, my buddy remembered the brace of cigars he’d brought over, and pulled them out of his pocket. A word to the wise - if you ever get to choose your friends, choose the kind that are apt to pull a handful of Romeo Y Julieta double coronas out of their pocket . They are even better than the occasional bottle of hooch when it comes to making a friend's flaws recede into nothingness.

By the time this was all over, I had been forced to pull out my Super Soaker to defend my manhood. The kids had dropped so much popcorn on the paving stones, the dog had simply given up trying to eat them all. The pink Barbie Escalade had run out of power after careening around the cul-de-sac loaded down with passengers. And young Master Mini Wheats surprised himself by yelling “I love you” to the Russian princess from the backseat of my friend’s truck as he pulled off.

As I write this, there is a Thank You note on the table from another pair of kids who live a few houses down. They are likely to be of Russian origin themselves, although their families have been mainstream Americans for a few generations. The note reads, “Dear Miss S. – Thank you so much for our candy filled pumpkins, We are so happy that you live in our neighborhood!”

I thought about all of these things later, while S. and I and that handy Romeo Y Julieta I was puffing on began to start spreading the mulch over the deweeded, deleafed areas. I thought about the disconnect in America between our brownskinned president of the United States and those Americans who feel so strongly that he does not belong in the White House, that he is not their president, that he cannot be trusted to talk to their kids. I thought about all of the people I live around, who most of whom are white, to whom S. and the dog or me and my cigars and my hedge clippers are as ubiquitous as the pine trees are in the subdivision we live in. Why can't the crazy folks across America I didn't get to see on my TV this weekend see what my neighbors see? I mean, S. is tall, and is a lawyer, like Michelle. And I like to talk a lot, and I'm biracial myself, just like the president...

...okay, maybe being half black and half Geechie isn't exactly the same as being half black and half white - more like half black and half rice - but you get where I'm going with the general theme. Smart, well educated, well behaved, well mannered black folks like us and practically every black person who reads this blog have been goodwill ambassadors before anybody even knew who the Obama's were, bridging the gap between the ignorance of stereotypes and the reality of our existence.

I thought about the disconnect between my neighbors, who expect to see me and know who I am, and the weekenders touring the neighborhood whose eyes often jump when they see me trimming hedges in my “Obama” t-shirt while puffing a trusty stogie. I think of the one weekender in particular who saw me coming out the garage a couple of years ago and slammed into reverse. It took three months for the paint he scraped away from the bumper of his brand new car when he hit the stone wall ringing the cul-de-sac to fade away.

Meanwhile, a stubborn subset of white America continues to embarrass their saner, more normal brethren on an almost hourly basis these days on my TV. It's almost enough to make me want grab one of those choice Romeo Y Julietas my buddy brought me and head outside to that slowly dwindling pile of mulch and get to spreading.

Then again, I could just smoke the cigar and think about doing some work.

I Must Be Living Right

I must be living right.

I was outside yesterday, blowing the drifts of leaves that had accumulated on our end of the cul-de-sac off the street when my neighbor walks up with a box of Partagas cigars. I had actually just finished a cigar, so there was a certain amount of serendipity to his arrival. To add icing on the cake, so to speak, I reminded him that I'd just had a birthday the day before. The timing of it all seemed to make him smile even harder as he handed me that beautiful yellow box.

Turkey, wine and talk filled the rest of the day. Everyone at the table seemed to be very upset about the breach of security at the White House earlier in the week, but other than that, we successfully stuck to good old homegrown gossip and personal milestones for the rest of the day. In the interests of maintaining the holiday spirit for another day or so, I will save all comments about the reality show gate crashers who waltzed into the state dinner at the White House on Tuesday night for another day.

Unless something big happens, I think I'm going to stay off the internet for a day or two and see what else is happening in the world. Some of my neighbors have been busy putting up Christmas decorations all week, as if they have been looking forward to escaping from the economy and politics and war for a little while.

The thanks has been given.

The bread has been broken.

And in a little while, when it warms up, I will light one of these cigars.

Let the season of good cheer and good tidings begin.

Spring Fling

Spring is here.

Which means yellow green dust is everywhere in Atlanta and my nose is stopped up. Which means the hedges that have been dormant all year are now growing like they're on steroids, taunting me with new, unruly tendrils yesterday, just two days after I'd given them their first "high and tight" shape up of the year.

Which means I have used enough Clorox to bleach an army in my efforts to get all the mildew off of the birdbath. Which means all that Spectracide weed killer I've squirted into the nooks and crannies around here where the tough guy weeds like to hang out needs to be working as I write this, before all this rain gives their thirsty roots the wrong ideas.

It only takes a few weeks to get your rhythm back, after you've knocked a few of the once a year clean up jobs off your list, but it's almost enough to make you wish winter lasted a little longer.

So after a hot shower to get rid of that pollen itch, I get a cold beer to wash that scratchiness out of my throat, a nice big cigar to remind me that I'm not the hired help, and step outside to admire my handiwork in the muted light of the late afternoon sun.

The cul-de-sac is full of cars. It's so full that my neighbor, who is looking to take some relatives who are visiting out to eat, can't pull his car out of his driveway without major contortions.

"What's going on?" he asked me.

"I thought you were having a party," I replied.

"What? Me?" It took him a second to figure out that I was joking with him.

"Actually," I said, "it's a prom thing."

My neighbor, a West Coast transplant in his fifties who had never had any children, looked a little concerned. "Oh my. I wonder...I wonder what we're going to do. Do you know which house they're in?"

I took a puff on my cigar. "They won't be there long."

"Are you sure?"

"Yep. We went through this last year. This is the beginning. They're all getting together at this girl's house with their friends and their dates and take pictures. Then they'll be barreling out here in a hurry, because they don't want to be late for the reservations they have at the restaurant they've chosen for dinner, which, I imagine, is all the way in Buckhead or Midtown. You shouldn't have to wait more than ten minutes."

"Sounds like you've been through this before."

"Yep." I am amazed that he doesn't remember this same procession happening last year, except it was at our house, and our people were more courteous parking their cars. But then again, they are always biking or tubing or walking a nature trail or hiking up Stone Mountain, so they probably missed all that frantic energy."

"Ten minutes, you think?"

"I saw them all pull up when I went in to take a shower."

It wasn't five minutes later that we saw the group of girls in gowns and boys in tuxedos swarming down the street. The couple who had parked closest to my neighbor's mailbox smiled as they approached their car. She was giddy. He looked like he had just won the lottery.

There was something about the zeal and enthusiasm of youth in those few moments that had me, my neighbor and his guests still talking long after the last car had left the cul-de-sac, until I had to remind them that they needed to be heading on. It was a sort of spring fling moment in time as we all began to recall some of the more memorable highlights of our youth. These are the kinds of things that we often overlook as we cut hedges, clean birdbaths, kill weeds, beat rugs, clean windows, cut grass, or blow driveways clean. These activities are merely the fine tuning of the backdrop for the things that should really matter to us, the same way politics are intended as an adjustment to the background of the communities we live in.