Lawn Boy by Gary Paulsen

My grandmother is the kind of person who always thinks that no matter how bad things might seem, everything will always come out all right. Her hair could be on fire and she'd probably say, “Well, at least we have light to read by.”
    She's the most positive person in the world, and amazing and fun to be around, but in a strange and happy way sometimes she seems to be about nine bricks shy of a full load.
    You can say, “You know, I think the Yankees will win the World Series again.”
    And she'll answer, “Yes, but it's still nice to put carrots in stew for the flavor.”
    And you think that somewhere inside that brain maybe a screw came loose. Then you find out that the last time the Yankees won the World Series she made a stew and forgot to put carrots in, and blamed the Yankees (she'd never liked them anyway) when the stew tasted funny. She still doesn't like the Yankees.
    “It all makes sense if you wait long enough,” she says.
    So when I turned twelve she came to the house with an old riding mower in the back of her Toyota pickup.
    “Happy birthday,” she said. “It used to belong to your grandfather. He was always working on it. I thought you might like it.”
    “A mower?” Though we lived on the edge of what was termed an upper-middle-class neighborhood— Eden Prairie, Minnesota—our house was small, a “fixer-upper” when my folks bought it four years ago. It had a yard the size of a postage stamp and the grass never seemed to grow enough to need mowing. It just sprouted, stopped, gave up and died. Over and over.
    My father and I lifted the mower down from the truck bed. “A lawn mower?” I looked at Grandma. “Thanks.”
    “My bridge club is meeting on Thursday night,” she said, getting back into her truck, “which makes it hard to watch
CSI
since it's on Thursday too. Did you know that?”
    And she drove away before I could answer her, much less wait for the part where it made sense.
    “It appears you now have a lawn mower,” my father said, smiling, as he walked back into the house. “I don't know the connection with her bridge club either, although I'm sure there is one. She's your mom's mother, maybe your mom will know what that meant.”
    I looked at the mower. Very old, low, small. It looked like it only cut about a two-foot-wide area, and it was nothing like the fancy new machines. The seat was steel, without a pad, and the driver's feet went over the top of the motor to rest on two foot pedals. One was a brake, the other a clutch that you had to push down to get the mower moving. It steered with two levers, like a very small bulldozer, and looked more like a toy than a mower.
    Okay. Since I was twelve, I didn't have muchexperience with motors. I've never even had a dirt bike or four-wheeler. I'm just not machine oriented.
    My birthday present sat there. I tried pushing it toward our garage, but it didn't seem to want to move. Even turning around to put my back against it and push with my legs—which I thought might give me better leverage—didn't help; it still sat there.
    So I studied it. On the left side of the motor was a small gas tank, and I unscrewed the top and looked in. Yep, gas. On top of the tank were two levers; the first was next to pictures of a rabbit and a turtle. Even though I'm not good with machines, I figured out that was the throttle and the pictures meant fast and slow. The other lever said ON-OFF. I pushed ON.
    Nothing happened, of course. On the very top of the motor was a starting pull-rope. What the heck, why not? I gave it a jerk and the motor sputtered a little, popped once, then died. I pulled the rope again and the motor hesitated, popped, and then roared to life. I jumped back. No muffler.
    Once when I was little, my grandmother, in her usual logic-defying fashion, answered my request for another cookie by saying that my grandfather hadbeen a tinkerer. “He was always puttering with things, taking them apart, putting them back together. When he was