There are a handful of moments in a young man’s life that stick with him forever. First movie in a theatre. First moped. First time you accidentally turn a turtle into mulch with a push mower on a hot Tennessee afternoon…
I was fifteen, already half-baked by the summer sun, wrestling our old push mower across the yard. It made noises that no self respecting mower should make. Granted many of them came from prior instances of lawn-mower abuse. Running over a 4×4, running over a Car Tire. Running over 150ft of rope. My father ever amazing fixed it through them all, (the joys of being middle class.) That mower had one setting: angry. It rattled, shook, and smelled like burning oil, but it was mine to command. Or so I thought.
Then it happened. Thunk-crunch.
The kind of sound that immediately makes your stomach lurch because you know whatever it was, it didn’t deserve that. I yanked the mower back and looked down. There it was. A large… turtle? Most defiantly, no longer among the living.
I froze. My mouth went dry. My teenage brain screamed, I have committed reptilian homicide. I didn’t even know if you could go to jail for that, but I was ready to turn myself in to the local sheriff. I imagined the headlines: “Boy With deadly Briggs and Stratton Emulsifies Beloved Neighborhood Turtle.”
I couldn’t take it. I left the mower sitting in the sun, ran inside, and found my dad.
“Dad,” I stammered, “I…I ran over a turtle with the mower. I feel sick. I don’t think I can finish the yard. This is…traumatizing.”
My dad looked up from his chair, raised one eyebrow, and delivered a line from some ancient text, wisdom of the ages. “Well, son, you’re gonna have to move that turtle carcass and get back to mowing. Grass ain’t gonna cut itself.”
That was harsh enough, but then he added the kicker. “And I’m gonna need you to just mow till I get tired.”
Cue my internal teenage meltdown. How exactly is he gonna get tired? He’s sitting in the lovely A/C, flipping through a book, while I’m outside in 538-degree heat, committing war crimes against the local wildlife!
It was the great unsolvable riddle of dad logic. Somehow, until he got tired in the recliner, I was obligated to keep pushing that mower until kingdom come. It was as if our household operated on a mysterious union contract that only he had signed and I was bound by.
So I did what teenage boys have always done: I muttered under my breath, gagged a little while moving the turtle, and trudged back to the yard to finish the job. Every push of that mower was heavy with guilt and grass clippings and sweat.
That day left a scar. To this day, I slam the brakes anytime I see a turtle crossing the road, like I’m protecting the last dinosaur on earth. Meanwhile, somewhere deep inside, fifteen-year-old me is still mowing “until Dad gets tired.”
Moral of the story? Teenage trauma is real, Tennessee summers are brutal, and dads will always value a finished yard over your emotional well-being. Especially if they can supervise your character growth from the comfort of central air conditioning.
hope today is a good one!
austininva
