By Jim Hagarty
1987
Every once in a while, a little boy from down the street brings me fuel for my wheelbarrow.
The other night, Bradley and I were sitting on the steps of my front porch slurping popsicles when he turned to me with a serious look and said in a man-to-man voice: “How’re ya fixed for propane? D’ya need some?”
“Well, I am getting pretty low, now that you mention it,” I answered. “You wouldn’t happen to have any with you, by any chance?”
“Yes. I’ve got some in my pocket,” he replied.
“Is it okay to carry propane in your pocket like that?” I asked.
“Ya. It’s okay.”
With that, he went over to my wheelbarrow – an implement for which he has an undying fascination – and plugged his thumb and forefinger into the end of one of the handles. While he made a sound like gas escaping from a hose, the propane travelled from his pocket, up one side of his body, down through his arm, out his fingers and into the wheelbarrow.
It’s a good thing, too, that somebody keeps the wheelbarrow gassed up and ready to go because I can never seem to remember to do it. And it gets a lot of use around my place for jobs its designers might not have envisioned when they created it. It’s plastic and lightweight and can be easily maneuvered by a child. And it’s excellent for carrying live cargo as well as inanimate objects.
Take my cat, Grumbles, for example. Without the wheelbarrow and the kids to operate it, she might have to actually walk all the way across the front lawn. That’s a lot of steps when you’re only eight inches high. Lately, she gets to ride, free of charge though she doesn’t seem to realize she’s supposed to stay in the wheelbarrow for the entire trip.
Other kids are more suitable freight as they aren’t as liable to scratch and hiss at you when you put them in and can generally be relied on to stay in for the entire journey although they have a tendency to yell, “Not so fast” a lot. I looked up once to see the riders blindfolded with towels and now and then, one of them would get dumped on the ground.
I am continually amazed at how little it takes to amuse children. Bradley’s little sister Jennifer is madly in love with three old sponges I keep in the garage. I’ve been going to throw them away but she drags them out whenever she’s over and carries them around the yard. They’re a great thing to press against your ear when you’re sucking your thumb.
“Dairz doze punjes,” she says, just before she pounces on them. Once in a while, she stops, puts them on the ground and counts them.
“How many sponges you got there, Jennifer?” I ask her. The fingers start touching each sponge, “Waaaan, twoooo, forrrr . . . and finally she arrives at a figure. “Nine!” she says. A few minutes later, when I ask for a recount, she repeats the procedure and comes up with, “Eight!”
Unfortunately for Jennifer, her mother doesn’t share her daughter’s deep interest in sponges. And so, they remain at my place and not at hers where she would like them to be.
Jennifer is also intrigued by my cats, Grumbles and Buddy. (She calls them Dumbles and Bunny.) But Margie, a toddler from across the street, goes wild whenever her parents bring her over to visit the “meow” at my place. She gets excited watching Grumbles’ tail wag back and forth and once in a while she grabs it and gives it a hardy pull, supplying the cat with a reason to demonstrate how she got her name.
Watching my little neighbors find ways to make themselves happy takes me back to the days when a wooden fencepost and a driveway covered in stones could keep me out from under my parents’ feet for hours. It was impossible to get tired of picking up stones and trying to hit the fencepost, which was about 20 feet away. No finer sound could be heard than the “crack” of rock meeting wood.
“Go on outside and let the wind blow the stink off you,” my mother used to say. And I would.
And while the stink was blowing away, I’d hurl a few dozen stones in the general direction of the post.
That was long before the age of propane-powered wheelbarrows.
