JimFormation

Riding mower. Mowing. In the dark. I hit a stump.

The mower wobbled. Sparks flew from under the deck. Something broke. Bent blade.

I tried to fix it the easy way this afternoon. I lifted the tractor on some cynder blocks and raised the deck. Crawling under and using two adjustable wrenches, I tried to straighten the blade. It didn’t work.

“I’m going to have to take the deck off,” I told myself.

This is something I’ve avoided for the three years that I’ve owned the John Deere. Removing the mower deck, my brother-in-law told me, is a royal pain in the ass. “It’s why I don’t use my plow attachment.”

Oh. Boy.

Two two-by-fours, seven quick-release pins, and 10 minutes later (most of it worrying that things were going too smoothly), the deck was off and resting on my garage floor. It’s much lighter than I thought. Carrying it out of the garage and onto the lawn was, as Randy would say, “Easy, squeezy, Japan-eezy.”

In the next half hour, not only was I able to straighten the blade, I even sharpened both blades using my handy-dandy Dremel.

The deck went on easier than it came off. No extra parts. Nothing came flying off on the test run. I’ll be damned.

Why do I tell you that story? A story where nothing happened? Because doing something like that makes me feel like a man. I feel like I really did something. Something a man should do.

I told my wife the news. I seriously expected her to rip her clothes off and say, “Take me.”

She didn’t.

I drank a beer instead.

Well. Fuck.