The Metaphysics of Cutting Grass and Other Essays

The Metaphysics of Cutting Grass and Other Essays

Jerry DeNuccio

Contents

Quirks

The Mickey Mouse Episode

Smashin’ Fashion

Seeking Solitude

Why Am I a Vegetarian?

Scooter Dreams

Vagabond Philosophy

A Change of Season

No Deposit, No Return

Not Knowing

In Praise of Mystery

Nostalgia

The Metaphysics of Cutting Grass

Folks/Family

Palimpsests

Dad Danced When He Mowed

Grandma Jay’s Rolling Pin

Mom and Strange Faculty

Mom Liked Elvis, Dad Liked Perry Como

Matters of Faith

Fallen Away

What Easter Means

The Confession App

Golf, the Amish, and the Catholic Sensibility

Bead Counting

Creatures

Cardinal Virtue

What Squirrels Teach

What Obscure Force?

The Tonic of Wildness

The Transcendental Poodle

Turkey Vultures

Books/Reading

What Books Are For

The Hardy Boys

Poetry Rules

Outside Outside Magazine

The Margin Man

Occasional Essays

My MRI, Salma Hayek, and Kafka’s Cane

iKiss

Untracked, Unprofiled

Losing A Friend

Desheeting

The Haircut

Catholic Mass Changes

On the Combine

Just For Fun

Eulogy for an Unknown Grammarian

About the Author

Quirks

The Mickey Mouse Episode

At my house, the Mickey Mouse Episode has assumed iconic stature. To understand, you need to know two things about me.

First, I am reluctant, quite reluctant, to part with T-shirts. I’d rather spend a week factoring polynomials than part with a T-shirt. I’d rather hand-tat lace while operating a jackhammer than part with a T-shirt. If it is in shreds, held together by little more than a molecule or two, I’ll begin to consider throwing it away. I have T-shirts that are 25 years old. I had one that was 32 years old, but this past spring the molecules finally gave way, and I consigned it, ruefully, to the dustbin of T-shirt history.

I do not suffer from T-shirt Hoarder Syndrome, though my wife Kathy is convinced that if such a diagnosis appeared in the DSM, the definition would consist solely of my photograph. My T-shirts are really tinseled backward glances. They recount for me the races I competed in during my running days, the cities my son D.J. and I visited on our annual post-Christmas trips, the athletic teams I played on or rooted for, the politicians and political causes I supported, and the one sentence witticisms that, at the time, I took for profound truth.

Besides, T-shirts are like excuses for procrastination: you simply cannot have too many. So it was that I fished out of a basket of clothing which had lain, undisturbed and with an as yet undecided future, for 18 years under a table in the laundry room, a T-shirt emblazoned with a portrait of Mickey Mouse – wearing a red and black polo, with a three-fingered hand outstretched and palm up – encased in a red circle, across the bottom of which is written the proud declaration Mickey Mouse Club. It had belonged to my stepdaughter Alma. It was a bit musty but in good condition, it fit, and it cataylzed a nostalgic remembrance of my own membership in Mickey’s jolly clan, the preponderant benefit of which, for me anyway, was any number of prepubescent fantasies about Annette Funicello.

Second, I have a temper. I get angry. Really angry. Normally, I am imperturbable, a meek-shall-inherit-the- earth kind of guy with a portfolio of self-discipline well into the six figures. But, at times, not often, but at times, normal dissolves in the solvent of anger, an anger that does not start out small and mount, that does not, like the overture of Don Giovanni, begin in a minor key, but explodes, with a choral uproar that becomes my only music. It is an anger with kleig-light intensity; it is gale-force anger; tasered limbic circuit anger; hard-booted and sharp-spurred anger; lava-like anger that could rebury Herculeneum; mutinous anger that strips my frontal lobe region of command and sends it off in a lonely rowboat to some small, faraway deserted island. It is an anger that has bid a flippant adieu to anything but rant, a tiger-footed rage, to get all Shakespearean about it, an anger like a sequence of wrathful cannons that spit forth their indignation.

And, therefore, the Mickey Mouse Episode.

On an afternoon when the heat index hovered at 110 degrees, wearing my newly-reclaimed Mickey Mouse T-shirt, I began the ritual that precedes my mowing the lawn: coiling the strung-out 50 foot garden hose into the window well under the spigot. Coiling the hose is a skill my father taught me and which I duly passed on to my son. I take it seriously, not just as a practical matter, but as an aesthetic one. There is, quite simply, a beauty in a well-coiled garden hose. However, the supposedly kink-free hose was, with bullying audacity, with adamant kinkitude, resisting my art. And its antics didn’t stop there, oh no. It knotted, too; intricate gordian knots for which the sword-hacking solution of Alexander the Great would be wholly inappropriate. Instead, I was forced to unfurl yards of hose, often to find the knot still stubbornly in place. And that’s when I went ballistic.

Mark Twain counseled that when angry, count to four. When very angry, swear. I dispensed with the counting part. I flung every Anglo-Saxon-derived profanity I knew against the indifferent sky and then, for full measure, repeated them. I stomped and waved my arms, steroidally kinetic, tempestuously adrenalized. I quivered with fury; I gesticulated ungovernably; I gyrated tumultuously.

And all the while, I was being observed through the dining room window by Kathy and Alma, who were laughing uncontrollably at the dissonant sight of a grown and graying man in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt given over completely to a ponderous, pulsating rage. Thus was born the Mickey Mouse Episode, which my ever-mindful wife never tires of recounting. Through her efforts, it has become canonized as the family story.

I am not puzzled by my angered outbursts. I know exactly what causes them. I am not even especially alarmed by it. It is never directed against other persons, or sentient beings in general. It is directed against things, the unfairness of things, the rampant refusal of things to do what they are supposed to do, to yield to our expectations and intentions. Prior to the Mickey Mouse Episode, the light-saber wattage of my wrath was leveled against a string trimmer whose string repeatedly broke and, despite my repeatedly tapping the spool on the ground, declined to advance so much as a millimeter. Before that, the unaccountable rupture of a supposedly impervious 9 mil, 13 gallon garbage bag, spilling a toxic distillation of coffee grounds and other kitchen waste on a floor I had just mop ‘n glo-ed. I believe we need to dust off existentialism and rename it resistentialsm, a philosophy of resistance against the stiff-arming, ego-addling, tranquility-plundering nature of things. We need a resistential Satre or Camus under whose banner we can conscript ourselves and proudly march.

I know the Bible advises us to be slow to anger and warns us that anger resides in the bosom of fools. Yet, God often displays anger, as does Jesus at the Pharisees’ hypocrisy and hardness of heart and at the moneychangers defiling the temple at Jerusalem. St. Paul openly and angrily rebukes St. Peter, the first pope, for goodness sake – literally rebukes him, for, to Paul, Peter’s insistence that Jews and Gentile Christians cannot lawfully dine together unsutures the Galatian church Paul has sought so arduously to infuse with Christian unity.

I’d suppose these exemplify righteous anger, aroused in defense of faith’s principles. Yet, I would argue that my torrential anger is defensible and, in its own way, even righteous. It is a natural human emotion, a product of long-evolved brain processes serving perhaps to alert us to the wrongness of what should be right. It vents and dissipates pent-up stress, thereby promoting psychological hygiene. It is honest. Love can be feigned, friendship faked, caring counterfeited; anger, however, does not lend itself easily to affectation. Most significantly, I think, my anger is a refusal to accept the givenness of things. My anger makes demands: that things should be answerable to our expectations of them, that they should make sense, that they should make our lives easier, not strew them with obstacles. My rage is, at bottom, a rage for order, and packaged up tightly within that rage for order is a belief that purposeful change and improvement are possible.

Still, I have no doubt that, had she seen my exhibition of all-suffusing fury, the lovely Annette would have frowned, folded her arms, and turned her back on me. Cubby no doubt would have sought a restraining order. And parental figures Jimmy and Roy would no doubt have rescinded my you’re as welcome as can be status and banished me from the Mouseketeer tribe’s jamboree. Fortunately, Kathy still keeps me around, and that is a jamboree exquisitely, gratifyingly, all its own.

Smashin’ Fashion

Whenever someone compliments me on something I’m wearing on or carrying with me – a belt, a pair of shoes or pants or gloves, a shirt or sweater, a watch, my backpack, my wallet, even my cellphone – I am forced to make an embarrassing admission: Thanks, my wife Kathy bought it for me, or My stepdaughter Alma gave it to me as a birthday present, or Kathy’s mom Cora got that for me, or My mom sent it to me. Everything I wear or carry that shows the least bit of the current taste or fashion or style, everything that exhibits the smallest hint of being chic or dapper or Esquired and GQ-ed, was given to me by the women in my life. In the realm of fashion, I must forswear the active voice in favor of the passive: I do not dress and accessorize. I am dressed and accessorized.

One morning I came downstairs wearing a short-sleeved knit shirt that I thought rather becoming, but before I got out the door, Kathy uttered what are perhaps six of the more fearsome words in the English language: You’re not wearing that, are you? It was, I knew, the launch sequence of a disquisition that would chasten me sore. Well, yeah, I said; what’s wrong with it? She replied with four more fearsome words: Where do I begin? Evidently, the shirt was an eyeball kick to the current style: its colors, collar style, cut, and fabric were, I was informed, hideously antiquated, a relic from a bygone era of fashion. I thought the shirt was a classic look. She thought it was a Jurassic look. I changed the shirt.

How is it that I have watched this planet swing around the sun for more than sixty years and still remain an avatar of fashion ignorance? How is it that what I know of au courant style would fit in a finger bowl with room left over for a cantaloupe? How is it that I find the world of men’s fashion such a terra incognita, its map so filled with white spaces, that, to enter and circumnavigate it, I must rely on the female Magellans and Columbuses related to me by blood or marriage?

Now, I could, I suppose, plausibly defend my fashion blockheadery. I could offer the maturation fixity thesis. Having come of age in the 60s, where relevance, authenticity, and nonconformity defined our existential credo, fashion represented irrelevance, inauthenticity, and capitulation to the man.

I could offer the closely-related professionalization bias thesis. As an English professor credentialed to profess literature, ever on the interpretive lookout for the inflections and innuendos of deep meaning, a concern with fashion seems flat-souled and trivial.

I could offer the context-impoverishment thesis. It quickly became apparent to me, upon a desultory scan of the fashion catalogs that periodically arrived mysteriously, as if by elfin hands, in my mailbox, that the context in which fashionable people moved – the boat parties, the club scene, indeed, any occasion in which the smart set dressed so smartly – was not the context in which the tenor and pulse of my life was situated.

Finally, I could trot out the old standby, the socialization thesis, and claim that being born male and learning to perform maleness, made my interest in fashion about as likely as witnessing the process of evolution happen right before my eyes.

Rather than defend my fashion ineptitude, I could rectify it. I could read the fashion press; could observe what the celebrities and the glitterati are wearing, could attend to what Thom Browne, Marc Jacobs and Tom Ford are showing; could learn the year’s chosen color, could study the catalogs and web sites devoted to male fashion, taking notes, thoroughly metabolizing the latest trends in male garmenting.

But I won’t.

I would hate to be known as a man of fashion. Fashions