Close Cut Things

I haven’t had to mow a lawn in a long time. For some of that time I was a grad student, and the administration gets all tense when grad students are allowed near sharp objects. They’d rather we stick to harmless stuff like grading essays about the symbolism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I was in grad school for math; I still don’t know why I was grading Uncle Tom’s Cabin essays. They were very protective about their lawns, which they buried in concrete back in the 70’s. Then I was in Singapore, where the lawns weren’t my concern, and they have special equipment anywhere where people go around with vacuum cleaners to suck the grass up to the correct height. You can see where you don’t want that falling into average civilian hands, ever since that accident in Choa Chu Kang (old town) where someone left the machine unattended for a couple hours and they got grass stalks up to 8.5 miles high, menacing navigation and making Malaysia think Singapore was trying to pick a fight.