The Life of C.L. Boss

I mowed the yard today. No, that doesn’t make me special – hundreds of thousands of middle-aged men in the Midwest mowed their yard today. It was about the seventh time I mowed the yard this year. Again, this hardly differentiates me from other men my age. What makes this particular mundane chore different is that up until about four years ago, there wasn’t a yard to mow at my house. When I bought my house in a neighborhood full of free thinkers just outside a college town seven years ago, you could barely see the house from the street despite the fact that it was no farther back than a normal house in a suburb. A previous owner of the house, who had purchased the house in 1958, decided that thirty-nine years of lawn care was enough and just let it go. The front yard become the province of honeysuckle, scrubby trees, and poison ivy. Slowly but surely, Ms. Boss and I beat back the jungle until a lawnmower became a necessity. Four years ago, I mowed once. The next year, I probably tripled that number. Last year I made it seven times total. This year I find myself mowing with the frequency of your average middle-aged midwestern male for the first time.

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As teenager, I was hired by the company my father worked for to mow their lawn. Thirty minutes travel there, four hours riding, two hours pushing, one hour string trimming, and the ride home made for a long day. I made decent money for a decent day’s work… until I got fired. It seems that the Gravely mower I used needed oil to run properly. I was running it downhill when it started to strain then… POW!!! When a mechanic at he company pronounced it well and truly dead, my father fired me but said I had to finish the job with a push mower first. It remains the one and only time I ever got fired. The epilogue to this story is that I got rehired four weeks later… and religiously checked the oil in the lawnmower afterwards.

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I got my license suspended when I was seventeen (you’ll need to wait for another post for that story) and found myself unable to drive the thirty minutes needed to get to my mowing job. Football practice consumed the weekdays that time of year so riding with my dad was a no go. He insisted I find a way to get there so I enlisted the services of my best friend from high school. For half of my pay for the day he drove me up and did the push mowing and trimming while I rode on the mower. Of course it rained cats and dogs the only day we could do it. I can still remember passing by him while he was push mowing the front of the building. With water pouring off the end of his nose, he flashed me a smile as I drove by. He was a true friend doing me a solid favor and I’ll never forget it.

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Ms. Boss tried to do me a solid favor in the early years of our marriage by mowing our yard when I worked a bunch of overtime. It was her first time. It was also her last time. Instead of recognizing the achievement and thanking her, I instead told her it would never pass my father’s inspection. She vowed she would never do it again and has been true to her word. I was a complete asshole and definitely deserved that.

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The Bosses lived on a piece of property in a Western state for about seven years when our children were young. Quite poor at the time, we could only afford a push mower for our 15-acre property when the sixty-five year old tractor we owned wasn’t up to the task. During the dry months, it really didn’t matter… except one place. As Erma Bombeck once wrote, grass really does grow greener over the septic tank. What she doesn’t say is that it also grows taller. I was tackling that particular chore one day – mowing the dry edges then pushing furtively into the green tangle – when on one particular pass, I pulled the mower out to find the lawnmower ablaze. Dried grass had gathered near the exhaust and caught on fire. I yelled at the kids to bring me the garden hose and made quick work of the problem and commenced to mowing again. It made an impression on the kids though. When one of the Bosslets – in second grade at the time – brought their journal home from school the next week, there was a full account at what had transpired. It was possibly one of the funniest things I have ever read. I wish I still had it around.

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The house I grew up in was the first house in the subdivision off a state highway. A huge, deep ditch lie between our driveway and the state highway about a hundred feet long. Standing at the top and pulling it up and down the side was not option since it was deep making mowing across the only option. The sides were so steep you pretty much had to stand at the bottom of the ditch and angle the mower up to get it to mow straight across. It was a pain in the ass that my step-brothers and I endured for years. As soon as the last brother left the house, my father filled in the ditch so he didn’t have to put up with it.

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Growing up, we had a Snapper riding mower. It hung around for years until after I left the house for good. There’s a picture of me riding on my father’s lap as he mowed the yard. I have very fond memories of those times.

I listen to NPR regularly on the way. Yesterday, they played an interview with Yo Yo Ma who discussed music during the times we’re having today. To close, he was asked to play his cello. He chose a tune he called ‘Coming Home’ later explaining it was by Dvorak. I was unfamiliar until he played the first seven notes. I knew the song better as the Second Movement of his New World Symphony. He could not have chosen a better song, at least for me. This song, played on the organ in the church I grew up in by my piano teacher, opened the music for my father’s funeral and provided a moment that will forever be seared in my mind forever. I cannot hear that piece of music and not be moved.

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I sang in a choir affiliated with a church for about four years. Every other year they put on a big classical music production. My last year there it was Brahms’ Requiem. Unlike most other classical requiems, Brahms chose not to use the Catholic mass as his text and instead chose verses from the Bible to speak to the living through the first six movements of the piece. The sixth movement is glorious building up to a moment where the choir challenges death’s hold over us by singing ‘Grave where is thy victory? Death where is thy sting?’ Afterwards, Brahms launches immediately into what the Germans do best – a fugue at warp speed talking about the glory and power of the Lord building up to what feels like the end of the entire piece – but it isn’t. Done right, Brahms takes that triumphant moment away from you and launches you directly into the seventh movement with no pause with a long, drawn out ‘Blessed are the dead who in the Lord shall die.’ For various reasons, we only launched directly into the seventh at the actual performance. Fortunately the tenors didn’t have to sing first, I wouldn’t have been able to. We sang Brahms Requiem the year my father died. I absolutely balled like a baby at that very moment.

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I wish that were the end of the story – the church providing a touching moment during a season of grief. The problem is that’s all they offered me. Nothing else. No sympathy. No care. Not even a single word of acknowledgement. I was to have faith in the second resurrection and look forward to the opportunity to teach him according to the government of God. My outburst of emotion would have been looked upon unkindly. I’m not with them anymore for many reasons, but that was a big one.

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I worked for a police department as a civilian employee when my father died. My relationship with the officers there was rocky at best and downright hostile at worse. My family and I lived over a thousand miles from my home town and once we were finally able to leave for the funeral, the trip was awful. Exhausted and unable to make it all the way to my hometown, we found a place that could accommodate six for the night. Winding down, I took a moment to check my work email and found, much to my surprise, an email to the entire department from an officer I didn’t particularly get along with asking everyone to sign a sympathy card for me. She went on the explain that I was having a tough time of it and needed support. After wiping away my tears, I sent an email thanking her for that support from the bottom of my heart. It reminded me of the parable of the Good Samaritan – a part of the Bible we never covered in the church I was attending.

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One person supported me throughout my grieving. That, of course, was Ms. Boss. Throughout the entire time, she stayed by my side both literally and figuratively while supporting me in any way she could. I didn’t make it easy for her. A decided introvert, I kept much of my grief inside and kept nearly everyone else at arm’s length including her. I failed to notice her own sorrow at my father’s passing in the meantime. Her unflinching support during those times is one of the many reasons why I am truly fortunate to call her my wife.

Pandemic sucks. There’s just no two ways about it – life in this world will never be the same.

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I’ve often told Ms. Boss that her eyes are the window to her soul. That’s still very true, but it took pandemic to recognize that the rest of her face is necessary to know at a glance what is going on in the mind of the woman I love.

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I was walking across the parking lot of my work the other day lost in thought, when a woman says ‘hi’ across the parking to me. I look towards her and see someone in dark chunky sunglasses and a black face mask. My ‘friend or foe’ function was a little slow to respond to the situation, so I gave a perfunctory ‘hi’ that could easily have been interpreted as ‘do I know you?’ and moved on. It was about three seconds later – after the situation was no longer recoverable – that I realized she was one of my bosses. I definitely could have handled that better.

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The previous encounter could have been worse. I ran into the father of one of my daughter’s best friends the other day and it took five days to finally realize who he was.

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I can’t hear, which is to say I can hear, but not very well. This likely comes from too much heavy metal music and wearing a headset at work for the last thirty years – different topics that will need to be addressed in different posts. I first learned that I was supposed to have a problem in 2009 when my hearing test for a job said I had problems with the high ranges in one ear. I didn’t think anything of it – no one needs to hear that high because people don’t talk that high. Fast forward about eight years when I finally get it looked at and the doctor tells me the higher ranges are necessary to understand what people are saying because they shape the voice. Over time my hearing has gotten worse little by little (my right ear is ringing as we speak) which is frustrating in and of itself, but then pandemic comes along. Take a person in the service industry, put a mask on them, then place them behind plexiglass. Next, bring in a 49 year-old dude and have him try to make a transaction. Hilarity may ensue for you, but frustration reigns for him.

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Last night, I went to pick up Indian food for Ms. Boss and myself. The counter persons accent made things I wrote about in the previous paragraph even worse for me. When he said how much our food was, I was definitely having a ‘never coming back here again’ moment. When the bill actually showed the meal to be twenty dollars less, he ended up getting a $3 tip out of it. I guess in that very small sense, pandemic worked out for him.

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I don’t just struggle with other people’s mask, I struggle with my own as well. My work requires them and I’m required to be there so I’m wearing one anytime I’m out of the office. As I mentioned yesterday, C.L. is quite a bit more rotund than he used to be and needs a bit of air to walk up the stairs – no problem without a mask. With a mask, I get foggy glasses, a mouth full of mask, and an elevated heart rate to start my day. I also barely leave the office anymore because I don’t want to put up with my mask. As result, my exercise goes down, and struggles with the mask have the potential to get worse if I embrace the sedentary lifestyle.

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I used to fancy myself a Libertarian. Despite the fact that I work for government – a very necessary part of government I hasten to add – I felt that government was too much into our lives. Then the pandemic came along and all my fellow Libertarians clamored for the economy to open back up because government was infringing on their rights. What about my rights? Sure, it hasn’t been easy dealing with all this, but I know it’s for the greater good. I just know it.

Have you ever had one of the moments where you say, “Huh? I hadn’t realized it had been that long.” That was me recently when I realized it had been two years since I’d written in my blog.

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Since we’ve last visited I’ve gotten fat… like, I don’t know, sixty pounds fatter. Too many commitments, not enough time, plantar’s fasciitis, blah, blah, blah – at the end of it all it points back to me.

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Let’s see… what else has happened. I got a new job which resulted in sixty percent increase in pay which comes with a sixty percent increase in responsibility and a sixty percent increase in commuting time. I do have an office this time with a gorgeous view of the city.

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Plagues, recession, and civil unrest have happened. If you didn’t know that you’ve been living under a rock or something. Both Ms. Boss and I have kept our jobs and our health which makes us both fortunate.

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Ms. Boss? She’s just fine, thank you for asking. She has now joined me in the forties doing it a hell of a lot better than I did. She landed a new job, got promoted, has a boss who works in England, and generally excels in everything she does. I married well… quite well.

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You can thank (or blame, your choice) my revisiting this blog on a recent vacation. I rested. I relaxed. I read. I made plans for the future. I started new habits which included journalling. I remembered I’m actually paying for this space and not using it which is a bad decision. I decided to put my journalling efforts on the web for all kinds of people (and things, don’t forget things, bots are my number one audience) to read and enjoy.

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My inbox has over 61,000 comments to moderate. Is it even worth the time to look back through them and see if one of them is a real live person? I tried to start deleting them, but can only do so 20 at a time on my phone. That dear reader, means I would need to mass delete over 3,000 times. Maybe I take the time to read a few of them and do a ‘fan mail’ post.

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In a little more than seven months, the subtitle of this blog will change. I’m not quite prepared for that.