We moved to a suburb of Columbus in 1959 and into a new brick home in a subdivision filled with others just like ours. Like other middle class families we had the requisite "things" that made us middle class. From tableware to appliances to fads, we all kept up with the Joneses. Where the Joneses got the idea that some of this stuff was essential to living the good life, I'll never know.

Fortunately my parents were not much into that and as a kid I was typically pretty oblivious. In this new subdivision it became important to distinguish your home from others through landscaping and lawns, and in that we did put some time. The company that built the homes had come through and scraped all the topsoil away from the rich farm field before they started building homes. When each house was done they stuck a sapling in the front yard and sodded the clay. The sod was okay but everyone needed to enrich the ground so we all bought loads of topsoil to spread. Of course they were selling us back the same topsoil, dumping the pile in the driveway. I recall looking down our street at one point and seeing a pile at almost every home.

After a few years every house began to be a bit different. My Dad's one great talent was building things with rock so we had lots of lovely beds and planters. Our neigbor, Bud, was a lawn freak. While our lawn was adequate, his was the kind of which a greenskeeper would be jealous. The turf was so thick and the Kentucky Bluegrass so lush and dense that you couldn't see the top of your shoes. It sprang right back into shape after you moved on. Bud was a railroader like my Dad and had an irregular schedule but mornings when he was home you'd see him out in his yard at 6 AM. He would sit on his honches with a plastic bucket at his side pulling weeds by hand. No one else ever saw any weeds so the neighborhood joke was that he was removing the individual blades of grass he didn't like. Fanatic is not too strong a word.

Somewhere or another Bud read about processed sewage and it's great value as a fertilizer so he had to have some. He talked it up in the little conclaves of men who would pass an evening together standing in front of someone's house and playing the Jones game. Whatever Bud had was, in his words, "the best gawdamn whatever it was you can buy." And so it was his sewage was delivered and spread and we all looked on waiting to see how this great new idea could possibly make his lawn better. For blocks around people would walk past daily or gawk out their car windows waiting anxiously for the first sign of change.

The change came seemingly all at once and as fate would have it when Bud was out on a run. I myself remember my Old Man laughing his ass off as he perused the crop of young tomato plants rising up in the sunlight. By the time Bud got home it was quite a sight. Funny thing though...As much as Bud later complained about it, the next few weeks as he removed each and every tomato plant individually, squatting down with his trusty blue plastic bucket at his side, may have been the happiest days of his life.

Spaw