As Good as I Once Was

 As Good as I Once Was

By Bobby Neal Winters

I mowed for the third time this week. It was a good mow, a satisfying mow, one of those mows that keeps you coming back.

These days, I spread the mowing of my lawn over three days.  We have the lawn at our house, which has a moderately large lot.  In addition, we have a lot next door.  I do the front yard of the two houses one day; I do the backyard of our house the next chance I get; finally, when weather permits, I do the backyard of the lot next door.

It organizes my life during the summer: It is good to have purpose.

As I look back on my life, I remember there was a time when I could’ve mowed it all in one day. There was a time when I did indeed mow most of it in one day.  Then the time came when after doing it in one day, I sat down in my recliner and became one with it, a cartoon cloud of Zs floating above my head.

Pacing the mowing came as my answer to the reality of being older. For me, mowing is a way to measure the aging process. 

Unfortunately, there are other measures.

When I was in graduate school, I used to get up in the morning early enough to eat breakfast and teach a class at 7:30am.  I would then take my classes, study, and stay up studying until 10pm.

The next day it would all repeat again.

Ah, those were the days.  But I graduated, got a real job, and time passed.

By the time my middle daughter was in algebra, she learned that it was useless to ask me for help after 8pm.

These days I try not to do even elementary arithmetic too late in the day.

Early in the day, I can still do as much as I ever did.  Indeed, I think because of experience and broadened insight, I can do more. I understand more; I can think more clearly; I can boil a problem down to its essentials.  I can do more on the back of a Home Depot receipt than my younger self could’ve done on a yellow pad.

But as the clock ticks forward on the day, my energy level goes down.  I become like an LED operating on a battery that has been drained: the light blinks more and more erratically until it flickers out entirely, the voltage having fallen below the LED’s threshold. 

As is so often the case, I find my situation summed up nicely by a line from country music.  The late, great poet Toby Keith put it this way:

I’m not as good as I once was, but I am as good once as I ever was.

Salacious interpretations aside, of course. 

I’d been having trouble with plantars fasciitis. The pain in my right heel was excruciating whenever I first got up to walk. I was afraid that I would have to give up walking and working in my shop.  Switching to Skechers and generally babying my feet has taken care of it, but in the meantime--rightly or wrongly--I thought that the way I stood at my lathe might be contributing to my problem.  

To fix this, I made myself a new lathe stand.  This took six 8-foot two-by-sixes.  Think about that. It was heavy.  I glued together pieces first, but after I joined all of the pieces together, I couldn’t lift it.  Luckily for me, my daughter and her fiance came to visit, so I asked him to help. I thought I’d get one end and he’d get the other, but while I was busy sweeping up a spot of floor to put it on, he put it under one arm and carried it over.

I am okay with that.  My body has “matured” enough that it can’t perform such feats of strength; my ego has matured enough to appreciate another man’s strength.

He’ll be able to open those pickle jars when the time comes.

He is in the spring of his life, just as we are in the spring of the year.  The days are pleasant now, with the cool mornings and the warm afternoons.  The smell of freshly mown grass is in the air.

But the days on the calendar will soon begin to whip by like in one of those passing time sequences in the old movies.  It will be summer, then fall, and then winter again.

Let’s enjoy it now.  Let’s enjoy every day.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.