I heard from the commander yesterday afternoon. Well actually it was his wife, Kim who called saying that I had traumatized her husband with my recent commentary regarding his new designer phone. Now he was on a single-minded mission to find some way to cover up the thing, make it look like a true sailors phone… looking for pirate stickers and maybe a rugged covering…..something on the order of neoprene or maybe split water buffalo hide. Give it the singularity of purpose that it deserves…..

The first time I spoke with him they were in the Dairy Queen, in public and Kim handed him the phone. I had a couple of questions for him, but it suddenly occurred to me that he was talking on the thing in broad daylight. I wondered if he was disguising it with paper napkins or something……

The next time I spoke with him was in the evening, under more troubling circumstances.

Kim answered the phone again. Now I was getting curious. “Hey, why does Kim answer your new phone?”

“Well, he explained, I figured that I’d have her answer it, and that way if anybody wondered, I could always tell them that the phone was hers…..”

The commander is a brilliant and resourceful individual, and this latest tack reinforced that fact.

“I received some very disturbing news today” I told him.

“Yea?”

“Right, it seems that D was at the main office this afternoon. There’s a woman who works over there….about 35 or so. Her husband was about 36 or 37, I think. He dropped over dead from a vapor lock last Friday…..I betcha can’t guess from what?”

As I was about to answer my own rhetorical question the commander piped in; “MOWING THE LAWN!”

“Right, right” I said.

“See? I told you those things weren’t any good” his voice low with concern.

“Can you imagine?” I continued, “the last breath you take, and it’s that lawn smell. What a horrendous way to go. Needless, just needless I tell ya”

I relayed how one of my favorite jazz musicians, Grover Washington Jr. had fallen over dead in 1999 from mowing the lawn. And there are beau coups other examples of people dropping like flies from this most dangerous activity. Bottom line: Lawns are unsafe! The Sturgeon General has determined that it is better to sell the house, get rid of the lawn, go cruising in order to prolong what little time you have on this water planet.

And that’s just what I intend to do.

I know, I know…..some people enjoy the lawn thing. But, it gives me a bad case of the heebie-jeebies to think about being tied to an entity that requires so much work. I would watch these mindless drones toiling in their green oceans, maybe enjoying a tall glass of iced tea, vapid smiles on their faces as they surveyed orderly rows of chrysanthemums and hydrangea…and I would become scared that I might suddenly turn into that…into somebody other than me. I used to think “what’s wrong with me?” Now though, just like the commander, I wonder; “What’s wrong with them?”

The other day I was musing over the notion that maybe these big green spacious lawns are really a mimicry of the wide open plains, which are really just a mimicry of the wide open expanse of the ocean of which, by the way this planet is covered two thirds by….They are places where the mind and soul can roam freely. I found this excerpt from the old “Eye of the Hurricane” blog, which explains my own approach to these wide open spaces. I had been fishing aboard  my friend Dons powerboat, Catatonic, many miles offshore, contemplating these same ideas:

“In the fighting chair, gazing back at the churning blue water, I listen to the hypnotic throb of the engines, occasionally staring off at the clouds on the horizon and the vista of nothingness before me. I am inward and introspective. Out here, for me it’s the opportunity to let my brain free spool, abstractly associating any event it wants to pick up on, from early fishing experiences as a child with my own dad, to my life as it stands today. Most importantly, it is my own time to connect with my creator in an environment uncluttered by the things of the land and people. I am in the presence of God, and I am small and unimportant in the great plan, yet as if in oxymoron, I am important enough to have this connection, and a place in the hierarchy of all things created by this inestimable power, important enough to be allowed a glimpse of understanding in this mystery, and the chance to be an eternal part of it. I am always in awe out here. Always reverent and listening, always at peace. Quiet and stilled for a seeming instant.”

No I do not like lawns, at least the ones belonging to me, in fact I despise them, but I do love wide open spaces.

And so I go back to my dark hobbit hole, redolent with the smell of diesel and salt water, fiddling with steel, fiberglass and canvas. In the evening I like to sit out on the back deck surveying the biggest lawn in creation, not an iced tea, but a rum and coke in my grasp, letting the rhythm of the ocean wash through me.

This is where I want to draw my last breath.

I have resolved never to mow another lawn.