CAROLINE'S CORNER: EXPERIENCED REPAIR PERSON SEEKS BROKEN LAWN MOWERS

Have you ever had a Bad Hair Day combined with a Bad Car Day and a Bad Lawnmower Day? Last Saturday was a Triple Whammy Day for me.

It all started when I walked outside in the morning and beheld a wondrous day with a delightfully cool temperature of 90 instead 100. It seemed to be a perfect day for cutting the grass. I tripped merrily along and cut enough grass to fill my mower bag and stopped to empty it. When I attempted to restart the mower, I gave one mighty pull and there I stood with the pull cord in my hand.

Not one to be that easily defeated, I jumped in the car, still dressed in my clothes decorated with grass and paint stains and headed to the lawn mower pull cord store. With my hair waiting to be washed after the lawn was mowed, I looked like some wild woman who had just come to the city from her hermit home in the mountains. Since I planned on seeing no one except the man at the counter at the lawn mower pull cord store, that was okay. Little did I know.

As I approached the busy intersection at the corner of Kingshighway and Cape Rock Drive in Cape Girardeau, my car went kerplunk and died right on the spot. Everything was gone, including my hazard lights.

With all the juice gone from my car, my mobile phone would not work. I had no recourse but to go into the bank on the corner and call AAA. Now it seems that half of Cape Girardeau was in the bank getting money for Labor Day and the other half was on the street going to get groceries for Labor Day. I ran like the wind and pretended that if I didn't look at them, they wouldn't see me.

"I'm tied up for 20 minutes," the AAA man said. "See you then."

"I'm not going anywhere," I assured him.

I ran back to the car and tried to wave from the window to indicate to people behind me that I was stuck there for at least 20 minutes and if they did not wish to sit there that long, they would have to find a way to go around me.

When that didn't work and quite a traffic jam was developing, I had to get out of the car, stand in the middle of the street in my wild woman hair and outfit and direct traffic. If there had been a bucket in my car, it would have been the perfect time to beg for money for a new outfit.

The wrecker finally came and towed me home, and now I was really determined to cut the grass. Since Boulware was working on my car, I enlisted the aid of Cara, my engineering student daughter, to quickly attach the pull cord to the mower.

We soon found that was easier said than done. It is not as simple as taking out a few screws and there is the thingamajig to wrap the cord around. After removing layer after layer of mower, we finally uncovered the thingamajig and wrapped the cord around it.

Now we had a lawn mower in five piles with six piles of screws. After much ado, we finally got the thing back together and it worked!

I felt so proud of Cara and her mother that while I mowed the rest of the grass I whistled a happy tune. As I was on my last row, I noticed a little black thing on the ground that had obviously fallen off the mower. I thought that since I could help take a mower completely apart and put it back together, I could certainly put that little black thing where it went.

There was a contraption sticking from the side of the mower, so I carefully stuck the little black thing on it. Boy, was it hot!

I ran into the house to run cold water over my burned thumb and returned to the mower to find the black thing melted.

About this time Boulware came out and said in his calm manner, "I can't believe you put the wheel cover on the muffler!"

"Just a teeny mistake," was my not-so-calm reply. "I'm in charge of the mower and I do not recall asking for your assistance."

I told Minnie Mae Marble about my day and that I have the house for sale and am planning to move to a city where public transportation is readily available and buy a condo with no lawn.

"You'll have to buy a gun," she said.

With that thought in mind, I promptly took the house off the market and went to the bookstore to buy a book on lawn mower repair.

My neighbor, Mack, said I could have really been hurt.

"The mower was off," I said.

"So were you," was his neighborly reply.