The Man Who Mows at Seven
My neighbour Gerald mows his lawn at seven o'clock on Sunday morning. He has done this for eleven years, through drought and downpour, and I want to say at the outset that I have nothing but admiration for a man of such consistency. It cannot be easy to keep that standard up. There are Sundays when the grass is visibly shorter than it was the week before, and out he goes regardless, so that nothing is left to chance. It is a good machine, too. I looked the model up one evening, which is not, I accept, the act of an indifferent man.
I have never mentioned it to him. This is not cowardice; it is a national procedure. A grievance here is not raised, it is filed — you carry it about with you for a decade, you mention it to everybody except the person concerned, and eventually you write a short piece about it for a magazine. Once, in the ninth year, I met him at the gate and said that the lawn was looking very well. He said thank you. I consider that the matter has now been addressed.
Last spring the mowing stopped for six weeks. I noticed on the second Sunday. By the fourth I was waking at seven anyway and lying there in the enormous silence where my grievance used to be. He had been in hospital, which I found out from somebody else, in the way that one finds out everything here. He is home now, and so is the mower, and I am pleased about both — a sentence I have read back several times and have decided to leave exactly as it stands.
Glossary
- at the outset
- — right at the beginning, before anything else is said
- a grievance
- — a complaint you feel entitled to make, whether or not you ever make it
- left to chance
- — allowed to depend on luck instead of being controlled
- the matter has been addressed
- — formal English for a problem that has been properly dealt with