Diamond-Cut Life

I feel uncomfortable about my topic today; it’s not all love and light.  I have a conflict with my machine-loving neighbor here on Mount Tabor, whom I’ll call Lenny.

I like Lenny and he’s a top-notch neighbor in most ways. He volunteered to my husband Thor to change our flat tire last weekend. Lenny and his machine-loving buddy Sean whipped that flat tire off and the emergency tire on in something like five minutes flat. You could almost see them blowing the smoke off the tops of their pistols afterward. Seriously, you could see their pleasure in helping us. “Man and machine,” I have heard Lenny say with satisfaction, in the same tone of voice you would hear me say, “Forty thousand hits on my blog.”

Lenny used to edge our lawn with his gasoline-powered edger after he edged his own yard. That was back when we still had a lawn. Then, he helped Thor with the monstrous, backbreaking machine we rented two years ago to dig out the lawn. For our part, we had Lenny over for a Christmas Eve dinner the year he was going through his divorce. He helped cook the dinner, was good company especially considering his pain, and, get this, Lenny excelled at our favorite word game, Taboo, even though he’d never played it before, and his degree is in engineering. Writer that I am, this impressed the hell out of me. You have to be really articulate to succeed at Taboo.

Lenny likes Lynard Skynard, so we tried to give him tickets to a Lynard Skynard concert  when we got some through Thor’s work. He declined, stating, “Nah, I’d rather listen to him at home than around a bunch of beer-drinking rednecks.” Point taken. The Skynard tickets went unused.

You can see I’m beating around the bush, uncomfortable about the conflict — but I wanted you to get the flavor of Lenny. So here is the problem: he leaves his motorcycle warming up for ten minutes while he putters inside the house, the machine fouling the air in our yard right next to him, while also making an ungodly racket. Yesterday I was inside, not working in the yard, but the ten minutes of peace-shattering noise disturbed my concentration and brought back bad memories from warm-weather gardening days of stinky air.

“It’s an old myth that engines need to warm up like that,” Thor said next to me on the couch. “He just loves the sound of it,” I said miserably. “I need to talk to him about it. He’s polluting the neighborhood for no reason.” Thor has no desire to talk to Lenny about it. And while I’m able to have a civil conversation with almost anyone about almost anything, a conversation about a problem is stressful. Moreover, I feel pessimistic about Lenny being willing to change at all concerning his machines and their pollution levels.

Then, I worry that this problem is emblematic of everyone in the ‘developed’ world being unwilling to change, unwilling to see that their consumption and the pollution that it causes is affecting everyone else, that what they’re doing isn’t just about them. And it’s not because they’re not good people — Lenny clearly is a good person. He just loves what he calls the relationship between man and machine.

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