Post #31

Thought for the day:

A good way to relieve the monotony of any job is to think up ways of improving it.

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Grandma and I just got through taking our afternoon walk. We call it our afternoon walk because some afternoons we actually take it. We really like to get out together, and we will be more diligent about doing so if and when my back muscles finally decide to behave themselves. Anyway, as I was saying…. there is one house in our neighborhood that has a tall hedge of what looks like boxwood or maybe willows. The problem is that their hedge sticks out a foot or so onto the sidewalk, which makes it impossible for Grandma and me to walk side-by-side without one of us stepping off into the gutter (which I often do accidentally). I’ve talked to the man of the house with no luck, and then today I saw the daughter outside so talked to her to see if she could convince her dad to do some trimming. I’m not hopeful but we’ll wait and see.
Now, all of this is by way of getting around to something that happened in our neighborhood in 1938 when I was 12 years old and just starting junior high school in Compton, California. One of my weekly household chores was to take care of the yard. That meant mowing the front and back lawns and trimming our hedge, which ran the full length of the driveway. [Historical note: it wasn’t until well into the late 1940s that houses and garages were combined into one unit. Usually the garage sat at the back of the property and had a long driveway from the garage to the street. That driveway might be as much as sixty to one hundred feet long, depending on the size of the lot.] The yards at our house were fairly big but not huge, so the mowing took only about an hour or so—no power mowers in those “good old days.” Ha! The hedge, however, was something else. As I say, it ran the length of the driveway—about 70 feet—and was (should have been) about four feet high and a foot or so wide. The trick when clipping that hedge down to size was to keep it even so the top didn’t look like it had been done by someone with a bad case of the hic-ups. A major problem was that the clipping had to be done with a large, scissor-like tool that was called, oddly enough, a hedge clipper. Back then people didn’t fool around with catchy product names like they do now. If you wanted to clip your hedge, you bought a hedge clipper; if you wanted to Roto-Till your garden, you bought a hoe and rake. Our hedge clipper was a very old, very rusty one that required the strength of a full-grown man to use it for any length of time. Well, because of that (at least I like to blame it on that) I was not very diligent about that particular part of my chores. I did notice that the hedge was getting a little higher than it should have been and the width was invading the driveway space so it was kind of a tight squeeze for my dad to get the car into the garage, but I tried not to let that bother me. I kept telling myself that next Saturday for sure I’d get at that hedge. I must say that my folks were very patient with me. They kept “encouraging” me to take care of it, but they never came right out and threatened me with dire consequences if I didn’t get it done. [Historical note: In those days the term dire consequences was the ultimate threat to a troublemaker. It was left up to the troublemaker to imagine what those consequences might entail. One thing that term taught me is that anxiety is almost always worse than the punishment.] Well, one Saturday my dad called me into his office to have a little chat with him and our neighbor, Mr. Costello (this may have been the origin of the Chat Room as we know it today). It seems that the hedge had grown, not only on our side of the property, but on the neighbor’s as well. Now Mr. Costello was not mad or anything, but the growth on his property made it difficult for him to keep his grass mowed and the weeds pulled. And believe me, he liked to have his grass mowed and his weeds pulled.
“Ralph,” he said to me, “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll trim my side of the hedge this one time, and one time only, but you will have to be sure to keep it trimmed in the future so we won’t have this problem again. You got it?”
Well, that sounded very fair and, all things considered, it was an offer I felt couldn’t be refused. So I went to the garage and got out the hedge clipper, some emery paper, and a can of motor oil. After a good half-hour of scraping, scrubbing, rubbing, dousing with oil and scraping some more, I got enough of the rust off so I could work the tool pretty easily. The rest of that day and well into the evening I clipped...and clipped...and clipped, adnauseam. Finally, the hedge was trimmed. It was not a thing of beauty but it was a lot thinner and shorter, so that was a good thing. I wish I could say the same about the levelness of the thing, but I can’t. Even if I had been lucky enough to have one of today’s power trimmers that all of the “mow-and-blow” guys seem to have, it still would have taken a good eye and a steady hand to do a smooth job—two abilities that I didn’t have. Beside that, it was a difficult job because much of my trimming time was taken up just trying to make the thing look decent rather than in the work itself.
I should say right here that my philosophy in life is Do the very best you can at whatever you undertake, but always look for a better way to do it. Some people might consider that as an excuse for laziness, but I prefer to think of it as good old American ingenuity. That accounts for why, immediately after finishing the day’s trimming, I started trying to think of ways that would not only make the job easier but make the results a little nicer to look at. My solution was a simple one, really. I drove four large stakes into the ground—one at the front end of the hedge, one at the back end, and the other two spaced evenly in the middle. I then carefully measured and cut each one so that it would be exactly four feet high and would more or less follow the contour of the sloping driveway. So far, so good. Then I tightly stretched a length of bailing wire from the front to the back, attaching it to the top of each stake. [Historical note: In case you don’t know what bailing wire is, maybe this will help. Those farmers who grew hay for feeding their livestock usually compressed it into bails with a large machine called—are you ready for this? —a hay bailer. In order to hold the bails together, each was wrapped with two heavy strands of wire. I know it’s hard to believe but this wire was known as bailing wire. The term eventually became kind of a generic one for strands of wire in general.]
Now, where was I? Oh yes….This wire gave me a good, if not perfect, contour guide to follow for future Saturdays. Boy! How smart can a 12-year-old kid be?
This would have worked beautifully for me except for the fact that two weeks after I completed my great timesaving project, the house we were living in was sold and we had to move. That was bad enough but the really ironical thing about it was that one of the first things the new owners did was tear out the entire hedge. Man!! If I had only waited a little while longer!
I guess the moral might be: Never do today what you can put off doing until tomorrow.