During summer breaks away from VMI, on the weeks when I wasn't aboard a Navy ship during my midshipmen summer training cruises, I was off earning my keep and being a contributing member of the society known as Virginia Beach. Many of my college peers were smart enough to strap on business attire and do administrative support type work in cushy, air-conditioned offices for their temporary summer jobs. As for me, I was barely one level above an illegal migrant worker hopping into the back of a total stranger's pickup truck loaded with farm animals to break my back with some serious blister-producing man labor. And you know what, I've got zero regrets about sweating my tail off during those "summer breaks." There's something very humbling about good old-fashioned manual labor. We need to teach our kids this lesson. God loves a hard worker.
And so my destiny in life for a few summers was to be a member of the Timberlake Community Association maintenance crew. Our charter was to keep the homeowner's association happy by maintaining the grounds. We were the silent refrigerator trolls that scurried around out of sight, beautifying the neighborhood and raising property values whenever the refrigerator door closed. We landscaped, cut grass with tractors and mowers, manicured the curbs with edgers, and took a weedeater to every square inch of that huge community.
Whenever a private homeowner was lax with their lawn mowing duties of their own personal property, they would receive a nasty-gram from the homeowner's association. If they didn't cut their grass after several warnings, the association would call in the maintenance crew to cut the slacker's yard - whether they wanted it cut or not. It was communism at its finest. The cherry on top was the over-inflated bill these slackers would receive in their mailbox shortly after the covert grass cutting. These homeowners were never pleased to have total strangers cutting their yards.
I remember one angry old man standing in his doorway as we're about to crank up our faithful Toro mower, cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth with two inches of ash barely hanging on, beer-stained wifebeater t-shirt covering his gut, and double-barreled shotgun at his side. I swear I heard him mutter under his Pabst Blue Ribbon breath, "Go ahead, mow my lawn." Yeah, we weren't gonna take a chance on that one. Considering that the best years of our lives were still in front of us and that our current salaries were just a smidge north of minimum wage, we collectively decided that we wouldn't test that guy's resolve on that sweltering day. I can imagine that old guy's explanation while proudly standing over our dead corpses, "They were on my property officer!"
We encountered a wide gamut of characters during these attempted "forced mowings." At one end of the spectrum was the trigger happy old man wielding a shotgun. At the other end was the slightly attractive cougar clad in her open bathrobe revealing enough cleavage to make Christina Aguilera blush. Btw, have you seen Christina as a judge and mentor on the singing competition show, "The Voice?" My gosh girl, cover those things up. It's incredibly distracting. Makes for a titillating show, but still. Anyway, back to the cougar. I think this Mrs. Robinson wannabe was purposely letting her garden grow just so she could get a rise out of our sweaty band of migrant workers. It worked.
And so one of the funniest memories from my days as an, ahem, Professional Landscape Technician, was when one of the filipino guys on the crew started eyeballing the ducks. It was a nice neighborhood with several quaint ponds. The ducks were plentiful. During the spring, the yellow ducklings would follow Mama duck around. Cars would politely stop as the train of ducks would cross the streets. Very cute stuff.
Well, my filipino buddy hadn't been in the US for all that long. His accent was still very thick and more importantly, his attitude on life was still thick with the filipino culture and life challenges. It can be tough living in the Philippines to say the least. I saw that with my own two eyes when I visited my parents in the PI back in 2008. Depending on where you live, food can be hard to come by, especially meat.
As time passed, my buddy's infatuation with the ducks steadily grew. It was pretty funny watching this grown man chase the ducks around and never catching them. This guy knew how to make us laugh. The work we were doing was back breaking stuff. I felt like the kid from Charlie Brown that always had the dust cloud surrounding him. I had multiple callouses on my hands from whacking weeds all day long and was extremely dark from hours sweating under that Virginia Beach sun. And so my friend's dalliance with the ducks was much needed comic relief.
Until one day, he chased down one of the neighborhood ducks, caught it, took it home, cooked it, and ate it for dinner.
I guess he wasn't joking after all. I'm pretty sure he only did it once.
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