My wife climbs into bed to take her afternoon nap, I snuggle into her and then we hear the roar. My father-in-law has used the chance to get on the lawn mower even though we’ve told him a dozen times to let us do it. I’m groggy from working third shift but get up, let my wife rest, walk down the stairs with the dogs trailing at my ankles. The dogs love to bark at my father-in-law as he mows the lawn. And down the stairs I go expecting to see him from the living room window, balanced precariously on the yellow Cub Cadet rider mower he bought at a yard sale on the cheap: the one that cuts out when you are half way done; the one he rides and then never puts gas in; the one he tries to cut the back forty with and gets it stuck in a divot and then tries to get it out and ends up laying out on the lawn; the one after a big argument between me and my wife and him he got on anyways, on a day too hot to ride, a day we hid the lawn mower keys in a different drawer and somehow he found them—this man who can’t find his glasses when they are on his head or his own phone even when it is ringing, the day he went out and as we watched him ride back and forth across the front lawn. And then he just fell right off that mower, slid over sideways, off balance, awkward yet softly enough nothing broke except his pride.

 But today it’s just our neighbor Justin mowing his lawn, and my father-in-law has fallen asleep with his phone in hand playing on-line poker. Though now we’re worried the sound of Justin mowing will wake him up, and out he’ll want to go to ride the mower. And if it needed it, my wife or I would go out before he got to it, but she just mowed the lawn yesterday. My wife likes to smoke a bowl and put her headphones on and mount that mower like a tiny pony and ride it, high and joyous, the way I remember we’d drive our cars doing donuts in supermarket parking lots when I was a teenager.

She and my father-in-law used to argue about the lines on the lawn. He said she never got them straight. He’d take her out, point at the lines, and say see how wavy they are. Me, I never looked at a lawn this way. This was all new to me. There he would be trying to belittle the labor she just did. But my wife had a lifetime of this and told him to get in the house. I never lived in the suburbs. At our old house closer to the city center we had a small lawn and a push mower. We could even get the lawn done with the old mechanical push mower that must have been invented in the nineteenth century, a dangerous looking machine with razor sharp rotating blades that took less effort than you’d think since the old house didn’t have hills. But this new house is on a big slope and no way could a mechanical mower do it, and even a push mower is a lot. All the neighbors have riding mowers except the young couple across the street. Ironically, the husband works for a landscaping business. But his push mower is self-propelled and takes those small hills in his yard like a champion.

When I was a small in Brooklyn no one had yards. We lived in row homes that ran down to Seventh Ave. We played on concrete, bounced Spalding balls on the stoop. We were all scraped knees and sidewalk scuffs. We had a little backyards that ran parallel with wooden fences. My grandmother grew roses back in that yard and bees and butterflies and sparrows would descend. The parents of my immigrant friends had gardens and grew vegetables. I didn’t know what a yard was. But we lived near Prospect Park and I loved the long green space of the park, the elms, and oaks, loved to watch the Koi in the Japanese garden, and to look up at a stretch of sky not lined by building roofs.

My father-in-law has woken up now, and sure enough to wants to mow the lawn. My wife explains it was mowed yesterday but he is adamant. She’s got the keys in her hand. She says, do you want a grilled cheese sandwich. That sounds great he says, but I can see his eyes staring out the window, wanting to be out there in the light of autumn. Perhaps he will go instead to trim the hedges, a job he still can manage. There are many labors he can still do, but he thinks he is still a young man. He is barely holding on to his license and we know soon he will lose that again soon. But for now he is distracted, and our small dog has climbed up the couch to sit beside his shoulder so he goes back to his poker game.

When I was seven we moved from Brooklyn to Toledo, Ohio. Toledo is the state of lawns. Every house, even in the poorest neighborhoods, had lawns. We lived in a working class part of the city called The Old West End. On one side of Collingwood Ave were huge houses with big lawns, house after house down the Avenue. This was the mostly white people’s side of town. On our side of the Avenue were the houses built post war for workers in the glass factories and auto parts plants. It was once a white working class neighborhood but by the nineteen sixties was evenly mixed with Black and white folks. My stepfather was Black and my mother was white. But that’s another long story to tell. We moved to Toledo so my mother could go to school. My father worked selling grocery products for the American can Company. He was on the road long hours. My parents rented an entire house for a hundred dollars a month. It had a small front yard and a back yard. We all had small back yards, the size one could barbecue out in but not even big enough to play catch. All of us were latch-key kids. We played in the back alley that ran between the fenced in houses. We’d run and weave through those backyards pissing off the neighbors as we played chase and hide games. Our yards we looked at as having no boundaries. We hopped fences and hid behind anyone’s grill or garbage cans. Not one of us kids loved our lawns. For us kids they were labor. We had an old mechanical lawn mower and my job was to mow the lawn. Its dull blades required a deep push and our front lawn was a small hill that sloped to the sidewalk. If my father was home he would do it but he worked long hours and left it to me. I liked that he trusted me with chores. Back then people looked at us funny, this Black man in a corduroy jacket with this blonde-haired Irish boy. But my father was very protective of me. When he was home, his arm was always on my shoulder or my mother’s waist.

In Toledo, most of us had fathers and mothers who worked long hours. Mothers going to school or working as teachers or nurses. It was the nineteen seventies and we sang, people get ready, for the train is coming. And we believed it. We were taught a new future in those public-school classrooms. A job and a house with a lawn for everyone was where we were headed. And we were tough city kids made strong by the lack of electric lawn mowers. Then my buddy Tony and his older brother fixed up an old electric mower. They were small engine masters. Tony said, let’s make some money so he and I began to mow the lawns of neighbors who didn’t have an electric mower. We charged two dollars a house. That was my first job. That electric mower cut out a lot and we had to pay for gas, but gas was only 39 cent a gallon back then. I remember most of our customers were mostly old white and Black folks. The older Black women like Mrs. Robinson might give us cookies and lemonade too. I remember Mr. Keith who worked at the glass factory and played with us kids, teaching us to throw a football, out shining his Lincoln in the alley every weekend, having us help him wash, he had us mow his lawn every Saturday. He showed us how to properly mow a lawn, standing out there telling us to straighten out, when and how to turn. Looking back Mr. Keith was a bit of shine. He loved shiny things. He wasn’t political the way my father was—he was about dating women, shining his car on Saturdays with a bucket of suds, working long shifts, and yet he still had time. It was more work for him to stand outside supervising us than it was to mow the lawn but looking back I know he was just being kind. He was teaching us how to work. He was showing us how to be a man I suspect, because he never yelled with scorn or derision. My father said to watch out for him. My father who was quiet and never raised his voice. Mr. Keith yelled with instruction the way perhaps our basketball coaches did, balanced it with praise. Looking back I think Mr. Keith wanted a son. I learned when I got older he had been married but his wife had died of a disease. And still to this day when I drive though this city along the lake and see a small house with a good lawn, and a Black father pointing out the lines in the lawn there with his son, I think of Mr. Keith.