40 Years Ago, I Stepped on the Front Lawn of the Man Across the Street

Expecting to be punished, I was instead led into a world of emerald-hued solitude that shapes my life to this day

Courtesy of IStock

To call that approach to manicuring his front lawn meticulous would be an understatement. It was precise the way a world-class sushi chef goes about preparing sashimi.

Our neighbor on Long Road, the owner of the lone white house in a new Hovnanian development off of the famous Highway 9, the same throughway that symbolizes escape and freedom in so many Bruce Springsteen songs, was a man bizarrely possessed with the need to control blades of grass.

Having just moved into our house after my mother’s remarriage, the sparsely populated development was slowly defining itself. American flags appeared before homes, along with Irish and Italian ones, as is common on the East Coast. And because of the unboxed newness of life there, when someone lit a barbecue, everyone in the mix of 100 houses suddenly headed toward the kitchen.

Sanitary, thanks to its uniformity, the only thing that could make you stand out was the color of your home — ours was “Bluebird blue,” as it was called in the catalog — and the condition of your front “piece of land.”

Due to the southerly direction of the development, it was off 9 South, the sandy loam of the infamous Pinelands was already creeping into people’s yards making it especially difficult to grow much in the way of grass. To call the patch of dirt, sand, acorns, sticks, and weeds that fronted most houses a lawn was usually met with a chuckle and raised eyebrows — “A lawn, you say…Really.”

Homeowners like my stepfather tried to tame the wildness, and eventually, he did, but it was never more than just a quilt of small islands of grass interspersed by yawning gaps of orange, almost dust-like, powder. It just wasn’t the kind of grass you wanted to spread out a blanket onto and recreate the solidity of a Rockwellian picnic; instead, it felt more like the pointillism of George Seurat, which left you, too, feeling pixelated and unfulfilled.

Yet, just across the street from our Bluebird’s nest, an oasis of solitude beckoned us. If a satellite from space could zero in on our town, this patch of lawn, which was no bigger than ten yards wide and 15 long, could be seen. The average astronaut would ask, “Humm, I wonder what that bit of emerald-ness is?”

The emerald-ness

The grass across the street was like a thick, foamy bed. The millions of individual blades towered at a height of two or three inches and were packed closely together. A coin could be set on top and not fall through to the ground underneath. It was truly a curious and somewhat inspiring sight.

The man across the street, whose white house matched his white Corvette, usually communicated with the world around him with little more than a wave of the hand. It seemed that was how he and his wife also shared intimacy. On hands and knees, with a spray bottle and scissors in his hands, Mark would surgically remove or treat the rebellious blades.

“Mark, honey, dinner,” his pleasant wife would call from the front door. The hand would raise as if to acknowledge something had been said. She would then fade back into the house in the way the little message orb inside the Magic 8-Ball floated into and then un-floated from view. His acknowledgment didn’t mean Mark would suddenly get up and go. It just meant that while he battled the less-than-perfectly-emerald blades, the information about dinner had been registered. Food was available if it was needed.

The lawn always took precedence.

This routine repeated itself seven days a week and only let up when the lawn was snow-covered. Mark’s need for keeping his lawn pristine was a topic first of silent ridicule, but then it became like the bonging of the church bells down at the corner. If Mark wasn’t out on all fours tending to his magical carpet, then something was amiss; life had skipped a beat, and everyone began to wonder.

My trespassing moment happened one day when Mark was temporarily absent from the lawn. Tossing a Nerf football around on our prairie-like lawn, an errant throw over my brother’s head sent the ball into the street and then bouncing and tumbling right into Mark’s minefield. It was almost as if everyone around us stopped moving as all eyes shifted to the purple Nerf ball sitting so boisterously in the middle of the eloquent greenness — it was like an oversized Easter egg.

After some back and forth between my brother and me, as we tried to determine whose fault it was, I realized that I would need to go fetch it.

“Good luck,” my neighbor called without even the slightest hint of sarcasm or mockery.

Approaching the beautiful lawn, I stepped, and my foot slid through the blades to the ground, but not completely. With my foot suspended at least half an inch elevated above the Earth, I waited for an alarm, but nothing. Step, step, step, step, I looked behind me and watched as the indentation of my feet slowly tried to return the surface of the grass back to a flat, untouched state. It almost seemed like the grass was working to wash away my iniquities — to spare me the imminent punishment.

Grabbing the ball and feeling a bit cocky because I had made it to the middle of the lawn without being blown up or shot, I walked backward, retracing my steps. At this moment, Mark’s white Corvette pulled into the corner of my peripheral vision. I froze.

Parking the car in his driveway, Mark stepped out and looked at me in the middle of his lawn. Like a deer in the headlights, I was frozen. No one was sure why Mark had the presence to cause anyone to stutter. I recall men twice his size getting nervous when talking to him about how he managed to get his lawn so thick and cushy.

“Take your shoes off,” he yelled calmly over to me. Mark always worked barefoot in his grass; even in the winter, he could be seen in socks.

“I’m sorry?” I stammered.

“Go ahead. Take them off and your socks. Let the blades get up around your toes. You’re going to love it.” Fearful not to obey because I was caught red-handed at the place no one ever went, I obliged. I placed my first foot, then the second, down into the thick grass. It was almost as if I was standing on a bed of metal pins, which gradually gave way thanks to my weight but never punctured the skin.

My feet were no longer visible, and the grass was pressing around my ankles. It was like standing in a soothing pool of emerald water. An earthy coolness enveloped me, and I felt completely grounded and relaxed.

“Glorious, isn’t it?” He asked as he walked over to me barefoot. “Welcome to my lawn,” he smiled and hugged me. Mark and his wife were very religious, and I assumed the bug was some part of his religion, so I accepted it. It was a friendly hug and entirely unexpected coming from a man who everyone was sure behind closed doors was beating on his wife. We were all wrong, and after having been soothed by the grass of Mark’s lawn, we felt the same pangs of guilt.

How could we have been so wrong, we all wondered.

“You’ve been down lately. Troubles at school? Girl problems?” He was right. At 16, my first love was dating someone else, and my heartache was being soothed by hours of lying on the floor listening to Lionel Ritchie records and Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen. When I hear the Lionel Ritchie song “Hello,” I can still smell our shag carpet.

“I’ve had some girl issues, yes,” I admitted to him. I had admitted that to no one.

“When you feel down, you can come over and let your feet wander. Just take off your socks and shoes and leave them on the sidewalk. Try lying down; that might help even more.”

I was the first to use Mark’s lawn for such therapeutic purposes. I used it maybe 30 more times over my four years in high school. Mark’s lawn is now a part of my inner methods for calming myself when stressed. Others in the neighborhood began to take notice of me on the lawn barefoot, standing in place like a statue with my eyes closed. Soon, they, too, joined.

Mark’s lawn never became the go-to spot for the neighborhood’s stressed or upset, but it was a place that about half of a dozen of us would end up on from time to time. While my mother used to make fun of me for going over there and sprawling out on the lawn to collect my thoughts, I unexpectedly returned home once on leave from the army and saw her standing barefoot on the edge of his lawn, wiggling her toes.

She smiled and then crossed the street and gave me a big hug. I never knew what sent her across the street to Mark’s lawn, but it was nice sharing that with her. A few years later, she died from cancer. A nice, thick, welcoming lawn sometimes reminds me of her.