UPON A SUMMER'S DAY

If, as I remember it, I was twelve on the verge of turning
thirteen on that summer day, Cousin George would have been ten
and a half. I was sitting on the ground with pots and soil and
plants spread over a few square feet of the side lawn, re-potting
cacti. Cacti of the kind I had as a kid reproduce like alley
cats, and I couldn't bear to part with any of them. My mother and
I had some lively discussions when it came time to move them into
the house at the end of the summer.

George was mowing the lawn. George liked to mow lawns, as
did my mother, a taste I have never been able to fathom. George
also liked to tell other people what to do. As the mowing
advanced, my cacti and I came to be in the way. He threatened,
loudly and pugnaciously -- George was somewhere in the upper
percentiles of pugnaciousness, even for a ten-year-old boy -- to
run over my planting operation. I stepped over my stuff and
positioned myself between it and the lawnmower. George and I
faced off and shouted over the noise of the motor, neither of us
about to back down. He repeatedly gestured with the lawnmower as
if to run over my bare feet. I knew he wouldn't do that and stood
my ground, shouting and being shouted at.

My family is, in some literal sense, famous for shouting: as
reported in Ripley's Believe It Or Not, a nineteenth-century
ancestor drilling the militia on the town common was heard distinctly
in the next town, three or four miles away. Eventually the uproar
George and I were making attracted my mother's attention. She
gave me permission to finish my project and told George to go mow
somewhere else. Presumably he did and I did. My only memory of
the rest of that day is of retiring to bed with a monumental sick
headache, precipitated by stress, fumes, and allergens kicked up
by the lawnmower. I think I hated lawnmowers even before that
occasion. I have certainly hated them ever since.