We pick up the action from last week, where you’ll remember I was tunneling down into a neighbor’s yard to expose a magical “earth bubble” with the sole purpose of soothing my
end-of-summer boredom and of orbiting our planet should the yard bubble explode under me and hurtle me into the solar system. In the meantime, I had angered my neighbor who was bearing down on me hard on his lawn mower, and a gardener and his dog, one of whom was rabid. I was eight years old. Let’s pick up the action there, shall we?
As my long life and the whirling blade of a lawnmower passed over me, I took a huge gulp of oxygen, which included dirt and insect larvae, and ducked south for cover. I knew oxygen would come in handy should I find myself in the atmospheric void of one of Saturn rings or caught in a meteor storm. Actually, I remember that last breath quite vividly because it was promptly and unexpected sucked back out of me by the Toro lawnmower, a new bagging type that created a grass vacuum, and incidentally passed within an inch of my head. I was no sooner in the rear-view mirror, ready to take a giant leap out of my hole for mankind, than I had to duck back down to avoid a face-to-face meeting with the viscous teeth, numbering in the tens of thousands, of the Snarling Dog owned by Ancient Tool Man.
All my senses told me that these times were indeed the worst of times, and I was in the worst of trouble. Yet my fear, that illusive traitor, was blocked when off in the distance I picked up the voice of my grandmother, discharged like a drill sergeant, calling me home. My hearing, by the way, was one of the few bodily functions I still had operating at that moment.
You may be wondering how I could hear my grandmother given the layers of violence that surrounded me at that moment. However, scientific research, (or possibly the Nature Channel) has proven that kids, those tiny little creatures inhabiting Lawn Holes across our planet, can hear their grandmother’s voice from distances of up to twenty miles away. It is also important to note here that for me to not answer my grandmother when she called was tantamount to family treason, with no chance for parole or cartoons before I went to bed, whichever came first.
Fearing my grandmother over all other fears, I was just about to poke my head up again like a worm in a rainstorm, and run for my life, when I heard:
“SIT!”
and looked up to see my grandmother, all 4 foot seven of her, reigning command over all the earth, reference Genesis 1: 5 when as you remember from Sunday School, God divided the light from the darkness. In this case, Toro Man and Ancient Man divided themselves out of sight immediately, and Foaming Dog, being the only creature there obeying her command, was given a delicious crispy salted butterscotch macadamia nut oatmeal cookie, fresh out of my grandmother’s oven.
She handed me one too, patted the dog on the head, and holding my hand, escorted me through the meadow, bypassing Venus and Mercury, down a narrow brick path by our tool shed, where she met Ancient Man and gave him back his shovel and a warm cookie.
Summer was over, the sky was clear, school was nearly here, but there was nothing to fear at all.