We are, once again, lawn mower challenged. Grrr. This may not sound like much of a problem to you townies with postage stamp yards & an entire yellow pages packed with people dying to mow your lawn. Not so out here. A downed mower is a disaster of near-epic proportions & this is not one of those breaks that can be repaired with rural ingenuity & a pair of hose. Nope, this one requires skilled surgery. Personally, Id prefer Lowes to simply give us a new mower since this one is under warranty, but everyone knows how warranties in actual fact work. Or dont work as it were. Grrr again. All of these trials & tribulations - that sound very superficial to those of you with the above-mentioned yards that could be trimmed with a pair of nail scissors - have led me to musing on Character. Now theres a word not heard much any longer & thats a shame. Building character was second only to mind your manners in my family. Hard work, mistakes of all sorts, difficult areas of study, & challenges in general all were lumped under Building character. For instance, after my repeated tries & failures, my inability to grasp basic math concepts (except for dollars & cents - that I learned very well) was no longer chalked up to character building. It was demoted to some genetic aberration inherited from my mother & I was turned over to my Aunt Tootsies (not her given name) tutelage as the family math whiz. We labored together & I finally got some of it &gained Character Building points & a few chocolate milkshakes as reward. Lets just say that most of lifes disappointments (and there were many), chores (ditto), challenges (double ditto), and everything except for the most serious (such as war, pestilence, smallpox, and the like) were blanketed as Character Building. Pretty much everything else came under the heading of Manners. Between the two, we acquired a work ethic, sense of community & family, knew right from wrong (even if we occasionally strayed from the side of right), honed skills and independence, and had admirable manners. Ive come to believe that Character Building is not a bad thing despite being bombarded by media night & day showing us a very idealized, sanitized version of how things should be. I guess those Ad men never knew the character building qualities of using an outhouse...
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 12:05:14 +0000
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