Sunbeam, that was it!

A bluish-green Sunbeam!

The question came to him from a dream he had had three nights ago, he couldn’t remember much of the dream, just that in the dream he was a kid again and that lawn mower had been in the dream. Now he knew that it had been a bluish-green coloured Sunbeam lawn mower with dual blades and two chutes for the grass to shoot out. It had a T-shaped handle with an on/off switch in the middle. What colour had the switch been? Red. The switch had been red. The power cord was yellow with black electrical tape wound round the spots where either he or his dad has nicked the yellow rubber coating, like bandages on a finger.

It has been his job to mow the lawn once a week ever since he had been fourteen, even though his mother didn’t approve, she said that he was too young to use a power mower. He was a big kid, though, over six foot and he handled the mower with ease. He even started to think of the mower as his, not his dad’s. Cutting the grass had never seemed like a chore to him, he felt relaxed and confident when he got the mower out of the shed in the back yard and the power cord off the wall in the garage. He loved the noise the electric motor made when he flicked the switch with his thumb, the noise that even now was so familiar to him, especially after that dream. His family had a corner lot and he had to mow both the front and the back yards. It was a good two hour job. Two hours when he didn’t have to think about much of anything, just the lawn mower and the summer sun on his neck. Two hours of the peaceful whirring of blades and the hum of the electric motor.

This was another morning commute that he could forget and feel no regrets about forgetting. It was another morning spent standing on a subway platform waiting for a train to take him to a large cube-shaped building that he would enter and take the elevator to the ninth floor and then swipe his card and make his way to his cube within a cube. He hoped that he’d forget this morning.

His train pulled into the station and he stepped into it as the doors opened and he didn’t even notice as the doors closed behind him with a little chime and the train started down the subway tunnel. He found a seat, the only one available, next to a woman wearing a business suit, she was holding a large bag on her lap. He glanced at her and she stared straight ahead, not acknowledging him or anyone else around her. Maybe she was thinking about a Sunbeam mower that she had had as a kid, the thought made him smile slightly. The train slowed a bit in the tunnel and he looked out the window, past the woman, seeing nothing but a dark gray blur broken by signal lights at regular intervals. Looking up at the ads in the train, he saw a picture of a golf course in Bermuda in an ad for tourism. Must be fun cutting all of that grass, he thought.

His mind wandered back to the dream he had the other night and he tried, but not too hard, to remember what it had all been about. His dreams never made any sense, they were like bits of memory from years ago mixed in with people and things that he had seen a day or two earlier; they didn’t make much sense and that was why he loved them. Past and present jumbled together, it made him happy to dream. He tried to direct his dreams, to point them in a certain direction, but he was never sure if it was working or not, he just dreamed a mixed up muddle of sight and sounds and smells. The smell of the grass as he mowed it came to mind now. The grass shooting out of the mower, especially when he went over a thick patch of grass. The sound of the motor labouring a bit as he pushed the Sunbeam over a patch of long, thick green carpet, leaving behind cuttings and a wonderful scent unlike anything he had smelled since.

The subway train pulled into the next station; he moved his legs sideways to make way for the lady beside who was getting off at this station. In her place beside him, was a man about his age who sat down and stared out the window as if he were expecting something interesting appear. There was nothing there except the face of a woman in an ad, her face made huge by the fact that they were just inches from the billboard. It seemed vulgar to him, he thought he could see the pores and pimples on her face, but that was ridiculous, the ad had been airbrushed to death. Nothing remained but perfection.

The train chimed its chime and set off again, leaving the station in a blur as it gathered speed. He was still looking out the window when the train entered the tunnel. He felt his chest tighten, his stomach twist itself in a knot and his anger rise as the train carried him, station by station, closer to his destination, closer to the cube within a cube. He began to resent the train as if it were a living thing, some malevolent entity that was doing this to him, when in reality he had done it to himself over the years. Wrong decisions, bad timing, choices made, you make your bed and you lie in it. He always felt this way at this point in the journey, just as the train was leaving the tunnel on a gradual slop upwards to the surface. When they left the tunnel, it was a beautiful day - sunny, blue sky, early summer. He could see people in the distance, just over the wall that was supposed to block the noise of the subway train - or was it meant to keep the office workers from seeing the world as they made their daily trek to their jobs? The wall was built in a slight depression in the ground, so it seemed strange to him that it had been built at all. Behind the wall, he saw a man mowing his lawn using an old push mower. What was that man doing mowing his lawn on a weekday morning? Didn’t he have a job to go to as well? The train re-entered the tunnel and the man, the lawn mower and the sunshine disappeared in a painful instance, replaced by black which turned to gray as his eyes readjusted to the darkness. Three more stops, then it was his turn to leave the train. His turn to paint a smile on his face and make useless chatter to people in his office as he made his way to his cubicle (number D-905); his turn to be a human resource for eight hours.

His mind wandered back to the lawn that he had mowed so many times, so many years ago. That had been work too but had never seemed like it. What had happened? Maybe he should have mowed lawns for a living, it hadn’t seemed like a career option at the time, but now...

The train pulled into his station and he got up and left in an orderly fashion as the loudspeaker in the station asked people to; a tinny, recorded voice that he had heard thousands of times before. He walked down the length of the platform with the crowd, made his way to the escalator, up one level and through the turnstile, out of the station. He felt like he was stuck on a merry-go-round that was going round and round so fast that he was afraid to jump off. It wasn’t always unpleasant, but the loss of control he felt was unnerving. The tightness in his chest increased, his stomach replied by twisting itself that much tighter and he thought he could feel his face turning red from anger. What a way to earn a living! Apart from Gravol, the best way to settle things down was to simplify life. Have one foot in the door; keep his other foot tensed and ready to move when his head felt like it was going to explode from the emptiness.

He reached the cube building and feeling dizzy, he sat down on a bench near the entrance. He had to sit down or he would have fallen down. He sat there, slouched like a man who has reached his limit and knew it. He couldn’t go in the building. He couldn’t do another eight hours in his cube within a cube. Anything was better than life as a beaten, bored remnant of what he had once been. So much had been taken from him yet he had no one to blame but himself; he had taken from himself year after year, now here he was, a living, walking deficit. As he sat on the bench, he watched others go into the building. Did they ever come out unchanged? Did they feel like he did? He saw a truck go by. On the side of the truck was the picture of the sun, just an ad on a truck. He watched the truck as it waited at a red light and then as it disappeared in the morning traffic. He closed his eyes for a minute, felt the sun on his face and could swear that he smelt fresh cut grass, could hear the Sunbeam as he pushed it back and forth across the lawn. He could feel the grips of the handle on the Sunbeam, he could see his dog in the backyard, he could see his bike leaning against the side of the garage, his dad’s white Pontiac sitting in the driveway. He could feel and see his family inside the house as they had once been, as they would never be again. He felt all of this in his gut, in his mind, in his soul. He felt a tear in his eye; he felt like sobbing. He concentrated his thoughts on the Sunbeam lawn mower, saw it in his mind, felt it in his hands, he heard its motor in his ears, smelt the freshly cut grass. He opened his eyes, swore softly to himself, wiped the tears from his eyes and blew his nose. It was, after all, another day.