Keillor: What mowing the lawn and gratitude does for bad mood

By Garrison Keillor

An old man gets absorbed in our national drama, same as you — the paper is full of it, the madman who has moved into our lives — and then suddenly I am distracted by the memory of lawn mowing. I once loved mowing, then I hired young men to do it, and now a gang of them comes every week and they roar around for half an hour while I read the paper. Maybe I would be happier if I mowed instead.

Mowing was my mother’s remedy for a boy’s melancholy. She didn’t believe in melancholy. Her point of view was: So you’re lonely — do something about it. There is nothing special about feeling bad. Nobody needs to hear about it. Don’t be a whiner. You think you’ve got it bad, think again: Children in China would be overjoyed to have what you’ve got.

So I learned to keep it to myself. If you moped around, Mother gave you two options: Go outdoors or do something useful. Or both: Go mow the lawn. Dad worked hard all day; it wasn’t right that he should come home and have to mow the lawn while he had a big strong 14-year-old boy to do it. So I did it. And found lawn mowing very satisfying — the repetitiveness, the roar of the mower, the sense of progress, turning raggedy grass into a model lawn, and when you shut the mower off and raked up the clippings, you’d earned the right to sit in the shade with a glass of grape Kool-Aid, and when you did, you realized that your misery had dissipated.

I was an ordinary 1950s misfit, scrawny, squinty behind wire-rim glasses, bookish but not so smart, timid, a daydreamer, a frequent moper, and once, when my mother was tired of my moodiness, she gave me a book to read, “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” in which good Bible-believing Christians like ourselves were tied to the stake by French papists and, as the fire was lit, prayed that God would forgive their persecutors and, as the flames enveloped their bodies, sang hymns in praise of the Savior with their dying breath.

“Foxe’s” gave a moody boy a certain perspective: It could be worse. Much worse. Nobody is piling kindling around your ankles. You are not a Huguenot hiding from mobs of crazed enemies carrying torches. You have a home, a bed, a cat who loves you, and a cookie jar in the kitchen. And there is a public library nearby where you can sit and feast on books. Be grateful.

Somehow, this cheerful stoicism seemed to lose traction in the culture and we got bombarded by neurotic anger — the Beat poets, bad boys in movies, outlaw mythology, troubled rock stars, spectacular burnouts, wounded, bitter, addicted, nice middle-class kids trying to be tortured artists — which is all very interesting but still the norms of everyday society prevail. Angry neurotics are more interesting at a distance; when you have one under your roof, it’s exhausting. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” wrote Allen Ginsberg in a long angry poem that inspired a great deal of bad poetry but when you met Allen, he was kind and thoughtful. An angry young man on the page but in person he was as nice as could be.

I suppose it’s necessary for every boy to horrify his father, swagger, read trash, listen to deafening music, get ugly tattoos, but it doesn’t lead to much that’s worth the trouble, whereas learning a useful trade — carpentry, math, raising tomatoes, baking bread, reporting, cleaning hotel rooms — leads you out into the world beyond your ego and into unexpected friendships and discoveries, valuable experiences, an enduring respect for laws and limits and for the energy of optimism, and eventually you can learn to be a good person.

This is common wisdom, shared by stubborn conservatives and airy liberals alike, and no wonder we are all fascinated by the raging alien who is president of the United States. The smirk, the scowl, the New Yawk con man talk — so-and-so is a “great, great guy,” it was a “beautiful meeting,” the “incredible support,” “fantastic,” “unbelievable” — the compulsive bragging, the inability to admit mistakes, the blindness to ethics. What is this jerk doing in the White House? How soon will he disappear?

Garrison Keillor is an author and performer.