Life on the Lakefront
The past few weeks have been rather tumultuous. The turmoil has even reached as far as the usually placid Lakewood Village area where I live. The reason for the turmoil is clear, graduation. I had forgotten since my daughter graduated a couple of years ago, how much time, energy, and of course expense goes into the ceremonial passage that we refer to as graduation. But it has seemed that the last couple of weeks virtually every day has been filled with one ceremony or another, not that they have been bad, in fact they have been very pleasant, cathartic even, but there has been relatively little quiet time.
Truthfully, the only quiet time I have had recently has been doing yard work, mowing, edging, and savagely killing six legged monsters that live in my yard. This time of communing with nature and trying my best to bludgeon it, has given me some much needed quiet time to contemplate my life so far.
One day, I was engaged in my communal mowing, not that I live in a commune but I was communing while mowing, and considering life, the universe, and everything, when suddenly something moved in the grass.
At this point it may be necessary to remind you that I grew up in west Texas. In west Texas when something moves in the grass it can only be two possible things, a rattlesnake or something else, and no one in that part of the country ever sticks around long enough to find out what the something else might be. But, being the brave, manly, masculine type, I did what any other he-man in a similar situation would do, I looked for a stick that was long enough to safely beat the snake, I figured I needed one about 40 feet long. It was then the grass moved again, this time, I looked squarely into the horrible, reptilian eyes of a --- frog. Yeah, I know it’s an amphibian but reptilian sounds scarier.
I felt a little silly about being afraid of a frog and because running from a frog is not considered very macho I scanned the environment and was relieved to find that no one was around to have seen my moment of weakness. Since I had been unobserved, I continued mowing and after completing my work went in the house, where I found my whole family sitting around the table laughing, wanting to be in on joke I innocently asked what was going on. My wife said, “Nothing.” My daughter said, “Nothing.” My son, the salutatorian (just had to stick that in), said “Ribbit.” They immediately all started laughing again. I never did find out what the joke was about.
