Clickclickclickclick. The mower wouldn’t start. Normally, a muttered prayer and a few more turns of the key would get the old beast rumbling, but not this time. A new battery didn’t solve the problem, either. It was really and truly dead.
With my yard approaching jungle-like conditions, I had no choice but to buy a new mower or else risk receding into an Amazonian-like existence for the rest of the growing season, hacking my way to my car each day with a machete.
My fear of machetes led me to scrounge about for whatever cheap lawn tractor I could get my hands on.
My quest resulted in a new mower at an unbeatable price – but I gained something even more valuable and far more unexpected: A truly local and humane economic transaction that I won’t soon forget. For a moment, I glimpsed what virtually all economic activity would have been like a century ago: Local, face-to-face interactions that were not merely utilitarian transactions but also social and cultural acts that knit together the community.
I remembered seeing mowers for sale in certain neighbor’s driveway. I rolled up to his small, neatly-kept house, and the neighbor – we’ll call him Ray – welcomed me into his backyard to see his full collection.
The tidy house and front yard were a charade, it turned out, because the backyard was anything but tidy. If lawnmowers have nightmares, they must look something like this gentleman’s backyard: it was filled to the brim with busted and dismembered lawn tractors, piles of tires, jumbles of tractor innards, empty oil cans, heaps of unidentifiable metal. The small brush pile he had burning in the middle of it all only added to the impression that I’d stepped into a lawnmower inferno.
But Ray was as friendly as they come. He eased himself to his feet at my appearance, a bit stiffly, greeting me with a wide and welcoming stubbled face. He talked freely as he led me through the mower graveyard to a particular machine that was actually in good working condition, sans a battery and an oil change. I asked to test drive it (although there were hardly more than a few square feet of open ground inside that labyrinth), and he agreed. He departed to unearth a battery from his porch, which was really more a dismal tunnel because of all the parts piled on it.
In between our discussion of the mower and our attempts to get the battery in, I asked him about his one-man mower menagerie. He told me it was a hobby, something he’d picked up after he was unceremoniously fired from his 20-some-year post at a manufacturing company. “Unceremoniously” is my word, not his. His description involved a lot fewer 16-letter words and a lot more four-letter ones.
It did sound like a raw deal, the kind of story all too familiar to working-class men of his generation: the company was bought out, new management stepped in with a host of new ideas, the old guard disappeared one by one. The new guard had no scruples about cutting pay or canning all the “old timers” on whose backs the company had been built. Their stories meant nothing to the newcomers. The blood and sweat they’d put into the place was dismissed with a wave of the hand and a (pitiful) severance package. Personal loyalty was sacrificed to efficiency and progress.
Ray must have sensed that my sympathy was genuine because once I’d agreed to buy the tractor – he only charged me $400 for it – he invited me to drink a beer with him. He also volunteered to deliver the tractor for free along with a quart of oil and to sell me a lawn sweep for $25, just as soon as he fixed it up.
We sat, then, beside the ashes of his brush pile and drank our Miller Lites. I picked up from his conversation some fragments of his life – vague hints at its hopes and disappointments. Especially its disappointments.
It would be an overstatement to say we became friends. But I was certainly more than just a customer at that point. “This is what buying a mower should be,” I thought. No smooth sales pitches. No slick brochures. No corporate bureaucracy. Just two guys sipping beers and telling stories.
What occurred was genuine human connection, not just business. When we cut out this human connection from our economic activity, we risk losing something essential. And, in the long run, human beings become just cogs in a larger economic machine instead of being the purpose of the machine.
I could have bought a shiny, brand-new tractor at a big-box store. I could have even ordered one online. Instead, I made a real connection with a real person.
I am convinced that our economic system ought to be built on actual relationships amongst people who know one another’s names, not vast and inscrutable systems where customers are just numbers, sellers are faceless, and “old-timers” can be fired at the drop of a hat.
I don’t think I’ll be buying many parts or new mowers from the spick-and-span dealerships or major retailers. I’ve got Ray and his ramshackle curiosity shop. It may be dirty and gritty, but it’s the dirt and grit of authenticity. You can’t put a price on that. Though, if Ray did, I think it’d be a pretty reasonable one.
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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image credit: Flickr-Jo Zimny Photos, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
