We got rid of the gardener this fall, just as the leaves in the yard began their late turn to golden brown and red. This was no Mitt Romney move on our part - I've never uttered the phrase "your papers please" like some character actor in an Otto Preminger flick. We don't do police state too well, around the Watson acreage. We're not that orderly and in general terms, any new arrivals willing to do work we don't have the time for at a very reasonable rate are - as they used to be in around the Romney shack before the head of household was forced to turn into a snarling, hate-mongering national Republican, much like our formerly liberal New York City mayor - quite welcome.
No, it wasn't legal status of any sort that sent the gardener and his crew packing. Two other factors entirely drove the decision. One was the dreaded, gas-powered, super-hemi, fuel-injected leaf blower - those infernal strap-on machines than can exceed 100 decibels of Saturday-crushing roar, and infuse my stucco and screens with a thick film of organic matter. I hate them - and while we couldn't banish them from the neighborhood, we could send them from our little slice of suburbia. Now, I can just stand at the windows and shake my fist at the neighbor's gardeners - thereby indulging my love of the theatrically misanthropic, the well-loved "Mr. Wilson Snarl."
Still, the gardeners may have remained - blowing beasts and all - if not for another factor. The young 'uns. My son turned 13 on Friday, and in that coming of (teen) age arrived a moral imperative, in my mind: the importance of some physical labor, some turning of the soil for the common good of our little clan, something to sustain us on the arrable semi-urban land. For Lance Mannion, that moment involved a snow shovel:
All teenage boys aren't naturally averse to hard work. If they were, family farms would fail after the farmer himself hit fifty, no car engines would ever get rebuilt, every marina on every lake in the country would have to shut down, and the parking lots of all the supermarkets would be stacked up with empty shopping carts.
But there are periods in most adolescent male's daily lives when a natural indolence overwhelms, when a simple request to straighten their rooms strikes them as announcement that slavery has returned, when getting them to budge off the couch to take out the trash is like trying to get a mule to climb a barbed wire fence, when handing them a pick and a shovel and helmet and sending them down into a coal mine couldn't be more onerous or unfair than pointing them out into the backyard with a rake.
And for us, it was that rake. Why, thought I, should we fork over cash to some brutes strapping the aural equivalent of a stack of Marshall amps on their backs to create a whirlwind of dust and grime just to gather a few harmless leaves. Why, the rake would do just fine, thought I. Especially with my 13-year-old wielding it.
Too many video games, too much computer, too many afternoons in front of the television, too many spectator sports, too much sloth. Why should my new teenager learn my bad habits! It was time to contribute. And besides, being a practicing capitalist, I knew it was important to link his rewards (some cash) with his action. So we agreed on a weekly retainer as a base - plus a per-bag (biodegradable, of course) bonus.
It's a form of social entrepreneurship on my part. I'm priming the pump in a growing economy, rewarding labor and energy, and saving money by not paying my gardeners. Plus, there's the lesson. Other kids may sit around as pure consumers. But you, son, will produce and you will be rewarded. (He went for this, good lad).
Gosh, Mr. Wilson. You'd think a chest-thumping, tax-cutting capitalist like Mitt Romney would have sent his own boys in the yard a long time ago? Then he wouldn't have had to undergo the sad ethnic cleansing of his landscaping staff.
