Three Seasons of Jimmy

Summer

Summer arrived with the sounds of excuses. “Mow the lawn? Today? But I have baseball practice.”

“Okay. Tomorrow, then.”

“But I was...”

“Tomorrow.” Like all men, Jim senior had been a teenager once. And he'd learned that excuses don't get the lawn mowed.

Young Jimmy, as it happens, didn't really have baseball practice. And his father sensed that. But his father had once been a teenager.

And Jim senior was thirty-some pounds overweight. So, while Jimmy did whatever boys do with their friends on Saturday, Jim mowed the lawn. And he enjoyed it. But Jimmy would never learn that fact.



Autumn

Jimmy stood amid a sea of brown and red and yellow. Where did these leaves come from, he wondered. Our yard doesn't have that many trees. I'll bet half of them came from next door. And I'll be damned if I'm going to rake those leaves just because they're in our yard.

Jimmy's mother was watching from the living room window. “Two months ago it was grass,” she said, “and now it's leaves.”

Jim senior smiled. “Your point being?”

“You're not getting any thinner.”

“Or younger.” Jim smiled, and patted his stomach. But Jimmy raked the leaves. All of them.



Winter

“It's snowing again.” Jim was staring out the window as his son wandered in from the den.

“Yeehah,” cried Jimmy. “Snow.”

“You do know what that means, don't you?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy chimed. “You get a good workout, and maybe lose a few pounds.”

“Or maybe you get a good workout, and we get a nice clean driveway.”

There was no getting out of this. Jimmy knew that. He headed for the back room to grab his winter gear. On the way out, he called back, “See you later, tubby.”

His father just smiled, because he'd been a teenager once, too.