Once upon a time, when Papa was just a little boy,
he had a habit of crashing things, small and large. It is not that he wanted to crash, or that he was clumsy or uncoordinated, it always just seemed that if something bad could happen to him, it was the same thing as saying something bad would happen to him. He fell off skateboards and landed on his head, he crashed his 10-speed bike going 35 miles an hour into a tetherball pole (the kind that rise up out of concrete from a tire, so you can roll the poles around and often drop them on your feet, which he also did) in a church parking lot. During the heydays of Evel Knievel he built progressively bigger and bigger ramps to jump his 1-speed Schwinn bicycle over such things as a little red waggon and a few of his friends lying on the ground, and off the biggest ramp his Dada actually jumped his Yamaha 650 motorcycle (which he probably will deny) and almost crashed into the horse corral; and Dougie did crash off those ramps, the worst one was when he dug a great pit at the end of the ramp, and his bicycle tire came down on the edge of the pit, and he immediately slammed into the high cross bar and thus making it impossible for him to ever have children (psyche!).
The scariest crash he suffered (at least when he was a boy) was when he was about twelve years old, and running a highly lucrative lawn-mowing business (he made $35 a month, which was like having a small fortune in the early 1970s), and he was aided and abetted in his crash by none other than Mama herself (the person who was usually the most upset when he came home with a bloody nose, or big cuts, scrapes, bruises, contusions, loose teeth, lacerations, and other assorted boo-boos.At twelve years of age he was rebelling against the name "Dougie," even though all his family members would stubbornly cling to the name for many years after. But at twelve, Douglas was too high faluting, and though "Doug" sounds like the noise you make when you flick that spring door-stop mounted on the wall behind the door, "DOUG!" It was the best he could do (for a while he flirted with the idea of going with his middle name, "Christian," although that might get funny looks, and his Mama suggested "Chris" as the diminutive version, but in the end he ended up with "Doug!").The silliest part of this story is that in this scariest of boyhood crashes, it was not a motorcycle (of his two motorcycle crashes, one happened when he was ten, on a Honda 50, if you've ever heard of such a thing, while he was giving his friend Russell Gibbs a ride, and the other crash, a much worse one, was eleven years in his future, a week before his first marriage), or a car (he had never driven a car at this point, and his two car crashes were still far in the future, one a week after his major motorcycle crash), and not even a bicycle or skateboard, but a LAWNMOWER. Generally, lawnmowers are hard to crash (not a riding lawnmower, which could be somewhat understandable; this is a push mower we are discussing).But with great ideas (that are not so great) and the aid of your Mama, you can sometimes accomplish the impossible.Dougie usually pushed the lawnmower about one mile to the house with the big front yard and the huge back yard, and it took him about three hours to mow the grass. He would sweat and push, push and sweat in the hot desert summer sun, but during these three hours his imagination would come alive, and he would commence huge wars as evil green hordes attempted to swarm upon him. He, the general, would direct his military machine into the best strategic actions, creating curving swaths to be retaining walls, cutting off the rear advance by doing some quick straight lines, and then sallying out into the vast body of the enemy. All of this created some interesting patterns in the lawns, and which techniques are probably not included in any manual of Lawn-Mowing 101. But it kept his mind occupied and the job was generally done soon enough, and then the long hike home, yanking the lawnmower backward behind him.On this day Mama was waiting for him out by the curb, parked in the old blue Pontiac Le Mans, which was a very small car. It seemed there was an appointment Doug had to be at, and very soon. Mama told Doug to put the lawnmower in the trunk, but after a few experiments it was obvious it would never fit. Then Doug had a great idea."I know, I'll sit on the back of the car and hold the lawnmower's handle, and you can drive slow, it's only a mile!"Brilliant. Could you come up with a more tantalyzing idea than THAT?And Mama said: "Okay, but if you need me to slow down just yell."So they set off, this intrepid two, Mama driving about ten miles an hour, and Doug sitting on the back of the car, holding onto the thin chrome strip encircling the rear window. The Le Mans, circa 1970, had a very slick, droopy tail, so you were sitting on a distinct downhill slope, and Doug, with a firm grip of his left fingertips (his extremely weak hand, mind you), was barely able to cling to the rear of the car, and the lawnmower trailing behind in his right hand, jerked and fishtailed back and forth."Is everything okay?" Mama called."Just fine!" Doug returned through gritted teeth.With everything appearing just dandy doo, Mama increased speed. Everything had gone fine for a quarter of a mile, at ten miles an hour, and when you think of it, twenty miles and hour isn't such a very much, is it?The lawnmower turned into a powerful snake, whipping angrily in Doug's hand, bouncing vengefully, shaking and rocking, and his left fingertips were now going numb clutching the thin chrome strip. It was agony. The lawnmower bounced and almost flipped, but Doug was determined to keep hold of it, it was his bread and butter wasn't it (plus, it belonged to Dada, who would not appreciate a totaled lawnmower)?"Slow down!" Doug cried. But through gritted teeth "slow down" sounds more like "Nnnoooo cooow!" and Mama agreed that there was no cow ahead in the road. Things looked bad. Doug kept slipping lower and lower on the trunk of the Le Mans and Mama was not slowing down, and the lawnmower was getting angrier and angrier as its little wheels complained at the speed it was never meant to be pushed.To Mama's point of view, everything seemed good, and in fact, they were making twice the time, and it wouldn't be good to be late for an appointment, would it? Why not drive a tad faster?Doug's eyes slitted in concentration as he realized the speed was picking up, and now the lawnmower was literally hopping behind the car. It was all over, he realized, and he figured it was best to loose the lawnmower and suffer the consequences, than fall off the car onto the blacktop at thirty miles and hour. Plus, now his whole left arm was numb from the strain, and he was literally perched on the last couple of inches of trunk.He opened his right hand. The lawnmower skittered away, crazily, delighted, happy to discover freedom at last. But the odd thing about experiencing such an odd situation, when Doug sent the message down to his right finger to "release," apparently his left hand heard the message too, and it released.At first he didn't realize what was going on, why everything kept moving, and why he wasn't feeling anything, and yet he knew his face was on the road, for a brief instant, and now he was looking at a flash of the sky, and he couldn't put two and two together, nothing added up, because when you fell off the back of a car you plunk down on your butt and that is the end of the story, right? Probably things were happening too quickly, but mathematics was absolutely never his strong suit, and he had forgotten to figure in the thirty miles and hour he was moving at as he touched down upon the tarmac, I mean the blacktop.Then he was lying in the dirt alongside the road. Hey, that wasn't as bad as he thought it was going to be. Falling off the back of a car at thirty miles an hour, rolling and bumping over the pavement didn't even hurt. He glanced to his feet and there was the runaway mower, and apparently it missed him, because it had come home, and was now lying on its back at his feet, apparently it wanted him to scratch its belly. Its little black wheels were still spinning.But now came the sound of an approaching car. Uh-oh, now he was going to be run over. But it was only Mama, reversing the Le Mans to where he lay beside the road. He sat up. It was weird, but nothing seemed real. He wasn't sure if he was only dreaming this. It seemed about as real as a dream. Yuck, he had dirt in his mouth. He spit and the spit ran down his neck.Mama came running from the car. "Why didn't you tell me to stop?"Doug laughed. He figured this wasn't such a good idea, crashing the lawnmower. And now he was starting to...FEEL things. Like his elbows. And his knees, through his ripped out jeans which oddly hadn't been ripped out while he was mowing the lawn, were bleeding."I knew this wasn't a good idea," Mama said, checking her son over, making a tally of all the bumps, scrapes, scratches, contusions, bruises, and generalized boo-boos.So being people that learn from their mistakes, do you know what they did? Dougie uprighted the lawnmower, climbed on the back of the Le Mans, and Mama drover SLOWLY home, which was only one and a half blocks away.Of course, they never tried that again, and amazingly enough, Doug wasn't hurt in any significant way, as he never seemed to be. Many would say that he had a charmed life, because with all the terrible things that kept happening to him, nothing terrible actually happened to him. It was almost as if two forces were competing over him, one slamming him to the ground, and the other cushioning him where he landed.All Stories © 2009 Douglas Christian Larsen
important - FIGHT THE FLU WITH HERBS - important
