How hard could it be? was a question for all my summer jobs, almost always answered with something along the lines of “pretty hard.” Most of these jobs turned out to be physically, mentally or emotionally hard. Sometimes all three. Except babysitting, which consisted of watching TV, talking on the phone and drinking Tang.
But lawn mowing, the job I was now contemplating for the summer of 1975? How hard could that be? By age 14, I was mowing our lawn every week during the spring, summer and fall. Fortunately, we had a new power lawn mower, a big red Toro that I loved startin
Filling the tank with gasoline and pulling on the cord and hearing the enormous rumble as the engine revved to life made me feel like an adult. Look at me! I thought, I’m mowing the lawn! It was almost like driving a car—after all, our mower’s noisy engine was powered by gasoline—which I couldn’t wait to do in another two years. In fact, I liked starting the lawn mower too much. “Jimmy! Don’t pull so hard,” said my dad. “You’re going to break it!”
Then he’d come out and show me how to do it. “Like this,” he’d say, and pull harder than I did.
Every time I filled the tank or started the engine, I wondered whether it would explode. When I poured the pungent gasoline from the red metal gas can into the Toro’s tank, it smelled like danger. Would a stone shoot up through the whirring metal blades and lodge itself in the engine and cause an explosion? Would the fact that my parents smoked when they came outside to check on my mowing progress mean that a cigarette ember would land on the motor, find its way into the tank and set off a gas-fueled conflagration? Would yanking the cord too fast create a spark that would ignite the gas and destroy our backyard in a catastrophic fireball? I saw the disaster movie “The Hindenburg” that year, and from then on I thought about the big blimp exploding every time I yanked on the cord. “Oh, the humanity!” I would say, as our neighborhood was flattened by my carelessness.
Explosions were, to my mind, just an accident away. I got this attitude from my mom: You could never be too careful. I felt that I was pushing a lethal device over the grass, though I had never known anyone in our neighborhood whose lawn mower had blown up.
Despite my fears, I was happy not to rely on a hand-push lawn mower, like my grandmother had at her row home in Philadelphia, and which I occasionally used to cut her lawn, to ill effect. It was like pushing through molasses, for all the good the dull, rusted blades did, which were probably last sharpened during World War II. On the bright side, I didn’t have to worry about it exploding.
As may be evident, I spent a good portion of my adolescence in fear: of exploding lawn mowers, biting dogs, stinging bees, not to mention poison ivy (and oak and sumac), dentists, bullies, being called names, failing at sports and so on. The list grew longer each year.
I also worried that I would suffer the fate of one boy in our neighborhood. While mowing his family’s lawn, he accidentally ran over a nest of baby rabbits hidden in the grass, turning them into a bloody pulp. One of the toughest boys around, a few years older than me, he burst into tears and had to be consoled by his mom.
Every time I mowed, then, I was alert to possible rabbits’ nests and burrows, which meant that every hole needed to be inspected. Any perfectly formed holes were sure to house a massive snake, probably poisonous, though I lived in the Philadelphia suburbs, not the Florida Everglades.
Then again, you could never be too careful. One day a large snapping turtle walked right out of the woods, across Kings Road and up our driveway. It lived for a few weeks on rations of lettuce in a cardboard box in our garage until it tipped over its temporary home and walked away, no doubt looking for higher quality lettuce. We didn’t even have time to name it.
Our lawn, a quarter of an acre, took me almost two hours to mow. This presumed that my mom or dad weren’t monitoring me from the window, or even coming out to inspect my work, which meant more time, because it meant many do-overs.
I thought of my parents as the lawn police. They could get annoyed when I hadn’t cut close enough to the trees or bushes or lamppost or fence, didn’t make straight lines or did a substandard job on the edging around the driveway and sidewalk. I had a low tolerance for criticism, a trait that unfortunately dogged me into young adulthood. Rather than simply accepting that I wasn’t a good edger, or ask for help, or apologize, I took it as a personal attack.
“If you don’t like it, do it yourself!” I once said to my mom, whose face clouded as she stood in the doorway.
“HEY!” shouted my father from a bedroom window.
My parents would have made great spies, since they were always silently monitoring my and my sister’s activities. “Don’t talk to your mother like that!”
I sullenly started edging again.
Occasionally daydreaming, I would stop the lawn mower, still running, to look at anything that was more interesting than the grass, which was everything: an ant mound that I had avoided, a cardinal or blue jay in the trees, a flock of geese (now a nuisance, back then a rarity) or even a strange insect, even though most bugs grossed me out. Once, my mom caught me staring at something for a few minutes.
“What are you doing?” she shouted out the kitchen window.
“Whaaaaat?” I said. “I’m looking at a rock, okay?”
“You’re wasting gas! That costs money,” she said, taking a puff on her Kent and closing the window.
You might think that since I’m now a Jesuit priest, I was contemplating nature with a sense of religious awe. But that’s not how I saw it then. If you had asked me whether I was admiring God’s creation, I would have said, “No, I’m looking under a rock.” Perhaps some true contemplation was going on, but I wasn’t aware of it.
But there was one event in childhood, a few years before, that I now see as an early awareness of God. When it happened, I chalked it up as a strange experience and set it aside.
On the Way to Ridge Park
On most school days I pedaled my bike to Ridge Park Elementary School with the rest of our bike gang. But sometimes I rode alone. I loved sailing downhill to school, past the late-1950s split-levels, all constructed from the same architectural blueprints with enough variance in design to satisfy a town planner’s heart: some with square windows, others with long windows paned in diamond shapes; some with doors that led to a living room on the first floor, others that opened onto a landing with a living room a few steps above the entrance.
Most of the homes in our neighborhood, including our own, were filled with Danish-modern furniture, then labeled “contemporary.” In every house were low-slung chairs; maple coffee tables and end tables with spindly legs (with heavy crystal ashtrays on top); tall wooden lamps with oversize shades and tiles embedded into chunky ceramic bases; and giant metallic, moon-shaped chandeliers that hung from the dining room ceiling. By the 1970s, this décor was supplemented by thick shag carpeting and patterned wallpaper or vinyl faux-wood paneling. Nearly all the kitchens were decorated in either Harvest Gold or Avocado Green, including the blenders, crockpots, ovens and refrigerators. And nearly all the houses were filled with kids.
I passed the house of older kids I was afraid of; houses of friends from school; the house of my Cub Scout den mother; houses with dogs (fast); the house of our school principal’s secretary, Mrs. Voros, whose name made my parents laugh because in the first grade I told them that she was my “close, personal friend”; and the house of my friend Allison, whose backyard I would cut through to get to school more quickly, if I were walking. But mostly I biked.
At the bottom of a hill at the end of our street, you dismounted from your bike to walk a few feet on pavement between two houses, at the end of which was a concrete staircase. At the top of those steps was a meadow, my memory of which remains intact, now 50 years later.
The meadow was nothing more than a small undeveloped plot of land bordered on the left by a sidewalk and a stand of oak trees, and on the right by the wide green baseball fields of our elementary school. In the fall and winter, you walked over the brown, frost-covered, desiccated oak leaves that crunched underfoot and sometimes traipsed through the shin-high snow.
But in the spring and summer, the meadow was a riot of life, filled with weeds, wild grasses and all manner of wildflowers. It was a beautiful place, especially in the morning.
One spring morning, I hoisted my blue Schwinn bike to the top of the concrete steps, pedaled a few feet over the rutted dirt path that cut diagonally across the meadow, and stopped in the middle. Maybe my schoolbooks were falling out of my bike’s metal basket; maybe I stopped to check that the Wacky Packages decals or Day-Glo Flower Power stickers on my bike weren’t peeling off; maybe I had run over a stone and wanted to make sure that my tires weren’t punctured. Whatever the reason, I stopped and set my feet down.
On this unseasonably warm morning a sweet grassy smell came from the meadow. All around me was so much life: grasshoppers jumping from one blade of grass to another; Queen Anne’s lace waving slowly in the sun; and wild yellow snapdragons, black-eyed Susans, white daisies, and wild strawberry plants in profusion. Even the flowering weeds looked beautiful: yellow dandelions, white clovers and purple thistles. Bees buzzed, but they seemed friendly, uninterested in me, for the time being. A chorus of crickets chirred softly.
In the distance was my elementary school, which, though I complained about it, I loved. It was an inviting place, a space for learning and exploration. It felt, above all, safe and orderly—you knew you would be welcomed every day, you knew that the teachers would have carefully planned lessons, and you knew what was expected of you. Its quasi-monastic regularity appealed to me.
I loved almost everything about it, except the homework. I loved the First Day of School (always capitalized in my mind) when, wearing my new back-to-school clothes that my mom and I had picked out at the mall, I would walk or bike in the summery weather through our neighborhood into a new year. I loved looking at the minuscule insects that swam in brackish water drawn from a nearby stream, subjects we examined between two glass slides with our classroom microscopes; I loved finger-painting (and the splattered smocks we wore to protect our clothes); I loved the fragrance of glue and paste (I also liked the taste of the latter); I loved celebrating almost every holiday, both secular and religious, by taping up cardboard decorations on the windows of our classrooms; I loved dressing up for Halloween and marching around the school parking lot with the rest of the kids in an ersatz parade; I loved the elaborate posters we drew for our social studies classes; I loved inhaling the sweet fragrance of the purple ink on the wet mimeograph pages (almost every kid pressed the newly printed sheets to their noses immediately after receiving them from the teacher); I loved covering my textbooks (which were used by dozens of kids before me, who signed their names in the back) with paper from shopping bags to keep them clean; I loved almost anything about the library—new books filled me with joy; and I loved nearly all my teachers. I loved school. It was one of the earliest sources of what I experienced as real joy.
On this sunny day, unlike other mornings, when you would pass (or be passed) by other kids on their bikes, no one else was in the meadow. So I stopped to take it all in, still astride my bike, my feet on the bumpy dirt path. Suddenly I felt a strange sensation: a profound happiness coupled with a desire to stay in that meadow forever, to understand the source of this beauty, to know what was happening—to possess it all somehow.
It was an odd experience that I didn’t understand. But it seemed to point me to something else, something more, something beautiful, though at the time I had little understanding of what that meant. I just knew that I wanted to stay where I was.
At the time, I didn’t see this experience as especially important, just a weird moment of daydreaming. Like looking under the rocks in our backyard. I got back on the bike seat and pedaled the rest of the way to school. Later I’d come to see this moment as one of the first times that I felt a longing for God.
Spring Again
On a recent fall day, I visited that spot, no longer a meadow but just a grassy area behind some houses that have been built during the past few decades.
The stairs I dragged my bike up back then are still there. So are the sidewalk and oak trees that border the field on the left, but the trees are enormous now, perhaps 40 feet high.
I parked my car and walked toward the field from the direction of the elementary school, which looks as it did in the 1960s: an exemplar of midcentury-modern school architecture. The broad baseball fields are still there too, and as far as I know, the wire baseball backstops are the same ones used when I was a boy dreading Little League tryouts.
I approached the plot of land cautiously because I didn’t know if any homeowners would feel that I was trespassing. Someone else was on the sidewalk ahead of me, so it seemed that this was public property. Soon the person left the area, and I was alone in the crisp air.
As I walked closer, I felt a sense of consolation, an almost physical pang of recognition: How well I knew this place. Each of us knows places that are part of our core memories and can move us deeply when we encounter them again—especially if we’ve not seen them for a long time.
Then I saw something that amazed me: The diagonal, rutted path we took as children across the meadow was still there, 50 years later, now a deep indentation in the ground, carved out by thousands of bike wheels and children’s sneakers. The rut was filled with brown fall leaves, which had blown in and settled there, revealing the path I had taken as a boy as clearly as if someone were pointing it out to me—and perhaps someone was. In a flash, the memory of that morning came back to me, and on that chilly day it was suddenly spring again.
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This essay is adapted from Work in Progress: Confessions of a Busboy, Dishwasher, Caddy, Usher, Factory Worker, Bank Teller, Corporate Tool, and Priest (HarperOne), released this month.
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