The Snapper and Me
Dealing with people can be difficult, but dealing with things can bring out the demons. At least, I find it so. Golf illustrates this perfectly. After missing the ball twice on my drive and slithering a third into a bush, I knew there was an imp on my shoulder. It did not help to remind myself of what a pro said to me one time. “The ball is never wrong. It will do what you want it to do.” A most exasperating lesson!
I have an old Snapper lawn tractor that came with the house, one of those with the motor in the back. To start it you have to take hold of the starter rope and pull and pull until it snaps back at you in decibels loud enough to awaken the dead. But once it started, it acted like a friend for life. Early on, the coil spring sprung. Having read from a do-it-yourself positive thinker that anybody can fix anything if he or she goes about it right, I took the thing apart. Hours later I learned that I needed three hands to recoil it. Before I called the repairman, I ran into an old friend in a restaurant. I told him my troubles. He smiled and said he would stop over. He did. In ten minutes, he had the mower moving and shaking again. It’s no laughing matter to see a guy who wouldn’t crack a book pull off a miracle like that!
For six years it has run well, kept together by the proverbial bailing wire. But now it wants to give up the ghost. An 82-year-old neighbor friend, who fixes almost anything, took a crack at it. First thing he did was to remove the filter and play around with the carburetor adjustments. I looked on as one watching surgery. Suddenly, the motor blared and he had me riding the mower around our back yard at choke speed which seemed like 55 mph. (That was the only way it would run.) I finished the lawn in fifteen minutes. But then it sputtered and stopped. My friend took the carburetor home, cleaned it, and put it back on again. Though the old engine did pop on and off again, it never hummed anymore. Somewhere inside that machine lies the secret, but we were unable to find it.
Golf balls, coil springs, and tractor engines just sit there waiting for us to do it the right way. No doubt about that. That is a releasing fact. Between the way to do something and the act of doing it, however, there can be a perversity that makes it almost impossible, except for saints and children. might feel a decent sense of confidence in dealing with a human problem, but when it comes to making a thing behave the way it should, I have to confess with Paul: “The good that I would do, I do not. . . . O frustrated man that I am” (my free paraphrasal)!