"Some people hoist a flag to show they love their country. Well, my lawn is my flag!"
--Hank Hill
I've been a homeowner for about ten years, and I've noticed that you can learn a lot about people by how they take care of their front yards. In fact, my residential block in Normal Heights is an exhibition of contrasting values that are on display between the street and the various front doors.
The politics of lawn care start with the question of whether you do your own yard work. I have two close neighbors who, to my knowledge, have never pushed a lawn mower across their yards. They hire people to do it for them.
This might mean that they are too busy to cut their grass. But there also seems to be a social hierarchy at work. People who have money don't mow their own lawns, and people who hire others to do their yard work are comfortable with that division of labor. This arrangement comes easily in a place like San Diego where cheap immigrant labor is plentiful.
I cut my own grass. This means that I am either (A) short of cash, (B) politically utopian/egalitarian or (C) have too much free time. It could also mean that I don't really care what my lawn looks like, because it's pretty obvious that it's not done by professional landscapers.
My neighbors' yards are neatly edged every week and mown as flat and even as a Marine Corps brush cut. My lawn is edged about once a month and not very well. The cut of my grass is uneven, due to the fact that I use a non-motorized push mower.
A Republican friend of mine once mocked me as a weenie liberal for having a push mower, as if everyone with a 2500-square-foot lot should own a gigantic John Deere riding mower just to show that they are red-blooded Americans.
This is not to say that I'm on the far left wing of my block, lawn-care-wise. I have neighbors across the street who never cut their grass. They have a front-yard biosphere in which wild grasses grow long in the spring and turn yellow in the summer. At some point they probably go in there and cut the stuff back [with a scythe, I imagine] but I've never seen them do it.
I feel grateful that people in my neighborhood can make their own choices about what they do with their front lawns and gardens. A friend of mine lives in a new development in Hemet. Her homeowners' association recently informed her that her lawn was not adequately edged, and she had until a certain date to correct the problem.
It's better to celebrate diversity when it comes to managing turf.
In the news: A B.A. in Partay
A couple of weeks ago the university that provides a home to KPBS received a questionable honor. San Diego State was named one of the nation's top ten "party schools" by Playboy Magazine.
SDSU graduates seemed to respond to this news with varying degrees of amusement. One of my colleagues noted with pride that he owed his higher education to two of the schools on Playboy's top ten party list: San Diego State and the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Of course, getting named a top party school is the kind of thing that drives most university administrators crazy. They take it as an insult. They make angry comments in the press about it and they try to reassure that public that their institutions offer many tedious academic programs. My advice to them is to lighten up.
For one thing, top-ten lists like this are meaningless. They're created to sell magazines, and reasonable people understand that. Secondly, why not look at the upside of being called the party school. Isn't it a positive thing to have good collegiate social life? Would you rather be named one of the top ten "dull egg-head schools?"
Besides, isn't UW Madison ranked as one of the best public universities in the country? Isn't the University of Indiana (also in Playboy's top ten) home to the nation's best music conservatory? This isn't bad company, SDSU. So party on.
