Now that I have a new lawn mower...

...I have to figure out when I'm going to start using it. I really can't tell if the lawn is ready yet or not. Watching grass grow is kind of like watching paint dry. Is there an official start to the season or something? Does someone blow a whistle somewhere, or ring a bell at least? I could watch and wait for my neighbors, but I'm not so sure that's a good idea. Even though they seem like they know what they're doing in the yard work department, the rest of their judgment seems a little suspect.

Take the guy to my north for example (let's call him Ray). He's seventy-something and the chairman of one of the many engineering departments at Northwestern University. He's obviously a bright man, but I'm not sure you would arrive at that conclusion from watching him do yard work. First of all, he doesn't start until about five or six in the afternoon. He's a night owl, you see, and I know that because he once told me that a car pulled into our driveway at around three or four in the morning. Never mind why you're up at that hour, Ray. Why are you up at that hour looking out your window at my driveway? Then there's the matter of how he dresses while cutting his grass. Most men would be better off not to appear in public without their shirts. That goes double for seventy-plus year-old men with big bellies and no tan. To make it worse, he combines this with tiny shorts that in another era would have been known as hot pants. As if that wasn't enough, he also wears old black dress shoes with low black socks. Talk about scaring children! One time when my wife and I were sitting on our patio minding our own business, Ray thought it would be a good idea to drop everything, run inside and get some old photo albums and show us pictures of himself as a child. The whole time he was narrating this fascinating journey down memory lane, I could tell it was all my wife could do not to laugh out loud. When I asked her about this later she noted that one of his shoes was being held together by duct tape. I've seen better-dressed panhandlers than this guy! And that's when he isn't outside wearing his jammies. I'm not kidding. It kind of reminds me of that old mob boss in Brooklyn who used to go everywhere in his pajamas to make the Feds think he was senile and therefore harmless. I wonder what Ray's excuse is.

And then there's my neighbor to the south (we'll call him Dick), who's really eccentric. He's 80 and a widower. I know he's 80 because we went to his birthday party last year (says a lot about our social life). Dick also wears shorts, although they are of the cut-off sweatpants variety. He wears them pretty much year-round, even to shovel snow. But he doesn't always wear them all the way up. Just the other day, I came out of my house and Dick was bent over tending something in his garden. He didn't just have the plumber butt thing going--it was almost a full-fledged moon. Dick, this is a family neighborhood!

Now about that "garden" that Dick was tending; it requires some explanation. It's actually a group of small trees (weeds) surrounded by a semi-circle of about thirty rocks that he's painted silver. Yes, silver. I haven't yet decided if that's an improvement over the bright red that they were painted before. When we went to his birthday party, I had to ask his daughter about that. She laughed it off at first, but when I pressed her on the issue she got a serious look on her face as if to say, "We both know he's nuts so just drop it." Fine. But that's just the front yard. What about all those brightly colored flags in the back yard? You know, those little things landscapers put down to inform you that your lawn has been fertilized. Or that the cable or phone company put down for whatever reason. I'm sure you've seen them. Well, Dick has at least fifty of them in his backyard. I can see them in the winter when all the leaves are down between our houses. He says they're in place of flowers. The rabbits and whatnot eat his flowers and he wants a little color back there. Sure you do. Sometimes I wonder if there's a body buried under each one of those flags. His daughter didn't want to talk about that, either. I can just hear the other neighbors musing to the TV reporters: "He was a very nice man...very quiet...kept to himself...no one ever dreamed anything like that was going on over there..."

Dick's been retired from the advertising business for about thirty years. God knows what he lives on, although he doesn't seem to spend much, certainly not on clothes. He confided in me that at one time he thought he was going to have to go back to work before his house caught fire. He got a pretty good settlement from the insurance company, though, and was able to continue his life of leisure. That was the first time he had a fire at his house. Yes, the first. There's been two of them, the second just after we moved in. And talk about a Chinese fire drill! He and his wife Edie couldn't remember if it was 911 or 919 0r 991 that you were supposed to call in an emergency. It didn't matter anyway because Edie had the phone line tied up while she was writing the Great American Novel on her computer at the time. So the two of them had to run out to the back where the children from the school behind their house were watching the show through the fence. "Quick, kids," Edie instructed them, "Go tell the principal to call the fire department!" So the fire department responded, the fire was put out, and Dick and Edie went to live somewhere else for about a year while their house was being repaired. "I recognized the fire chief from my first fire," Dick told me later. "He's a real nice guy." I didn't have the heart to tell him that it's not necessarily a good thing to be on a first-name basis with the fire chief. It's not like you were having an open house. I have to admit that sometimes it's not very comforting to live next door to a guy who's house is always catching fire.

But they're really good neighbors, and I often think of how good we have it. Just to give you an idea, shortly after we moved in Dick was in his front yard talking to a friend who had stopped by in his car. He was bent over the passenger-side window and his backside was just too tempting a target for my older boy who was all of three at the time. So my son reared back with a snowball and threw a perfect strike, hitting Dick right in the butt. Great way to make a good impression, I thought. What's this old guy going to do? And to my surprise Dick spun around and yelled, "Great shot, Joe!"