"Look Who's Walking"

By Jerry Zezima

My heart surgeon told me to take a hike, so I bought a pedometer. Then he told me that my surgery was canceled and I didn’t have to take a hike. But I already had the pedometer.

So I took a hike.

It was a walk in the park — or, actually, around the neighborhood — compared to the excessive ambulation I would have to do each day while recovering from the surgery I never had.

But since most of my walking is done in the middle of the night (to and from the porcelain convenience), and it’s a good form of exercise that isn’t so stressful that I would need heart surgery, I decided to get outside on a sunny morning and take my pedometer in stride.

According to the diminutive digital device, for which I spent the whopping sum of $9.49, sparing no expense for my health, I took only 47 steps before I was almost run over by someone backing out of a driveway (in a car, not on foot).

It was an inauspicious start to the first leg of my journey. (The second leg followed or I would have fallen down.)

Around the corner, I encountered two people, a young man and a young woman, walking their dogs, each a young husky, on the other side of the street.

“Good morning!” I chirped.

No reaction from the humans.

“Woof!” I barked.

The pooches reacted excitedly.

“Woof!” each one replied, almost yanking their two-legged companions off their feet and dragging them, face-first, across the road.

I wasn’t sure if the dogs wanted to kiss me or bite me, which in either case would have required them to get shots, so I picked up the pace, wondering as the foursome lurched away if the dogs were taking the humans for a walk.

While trudging up a small hill, my bad breath coming in short bursts, I checked my pedometer and saw that I had taken a thousand steps.

I also saw Arnie the mailman.

“I thought you were in the hospital,” he said from his truck.

“I may end up there after this,” I replied, explaining that, contrary to what I had told him a couple of weeks before, I didn’t need heart surgery after all.

“That’s amazing,” Arnie said. “By the way, I put some bills in your mailbox. I hope they don’t affect your heart.”

“Do you see a lot of walkers?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered. “Everyone is health-conscious these days. But there are a lot of people on bikes, too. One guy, Bob, rides around the neighborhood. He always whizzes past my truck. I can see him coming in my side mirror. I’ll yell, ‘Bob, what are you doing? Be careful!’ One day he ran into the back of a bus.”

“Was he hurt?” I wondered.

“No,” Arnie said. “And he’s still riding. Maybe he should walk.”

“If I get too tired, will you drive me home in your truck?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said with a smile. “You don’t know how many walkers ask me that.”

Up the street, I stopped to chat with Lillian, 86, who was using a walker to get the mail Arnie had left for her. I told her about my canceled cardiac surgery.

“You’re lucky,” she said. “I have a heart problem. In fact, I have to go to the doctor this afternoon. It’s my social life now.”

“Do you walk?” I asked.

“Only around the driveway,” Lillian said. “A pedometer wouldn’t do me much good.”

But it worked pretty well for me. After walking past a house where the sprinklers had just come on, I arrived home, damp and winded, with my heart beating fast in anticipation of seeing how many steps I had taken.

The count on my pedometer: 3,552. It amounted to about a mile and a half.

“How do you feel?” my wife asked.

“Not  bad,” I said. “But if I can’t make it back tomorrow, check the mailbox. Arnie’s going to make me a special delivery.”

Copyright 2024 by Jerry Zezima

"A Pain in the Grass"

By Jerry Zezima

According to an old saying, which can probably be attributed to my neighbors, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

But now that my neighbors have installed a new fence, and a landscaper has worked turf magic on my once-barren property, I can happily say that the grass is green on my side, too.

For the past several years, I had lived in the Death Valley of the neighborhood. The front and back yards looked like they had been manicured with a flamethrower. The place was so desolate that I was afraid of attracting rattlesnakes and vultures.

When my wife, Sue, and I bought our house in 1998, the property was luxuriant, like a fairway at the Masters Golf Tournament or the top of Brad Pitt’s head.

Then I became the chief groundskeeper. Using an asthmatic power mower, I had to cut what was becoming the grassy version of a receding hairline.

Not only did I do a spotty job, but I left clippings all over the yard. Even worse, I didn’t trim the edges of the property to Sue’s satisfaction.

So she fired me.

“But I was working for free,” I said incredulously.

“It wasn’t even worth that,” she responded.

Our next move was to hire a landscaping company that since then has cut the grass, picked up all the clippings and trimmed meticulously. They’ve also done the spring and fall cleanups.

It’s been well worth the money.

We also hired a lawn service, ostensibly to enrich the grass by dropping seed, spreading fertilizer, applying weed killer, sprinkling lime and, once a year, aerating the entire property.

It was not worth the money.

As the yard began to develop more bare patches than the Bonneville Salt Flats, I asked various representatives of the lawn service what I could do to improve the situation.

“Do you water regularly?” one of them asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “And that’s not counting the times I get up in the middle of the night.”

He said I should run the in-ground sprinklers for a short time every morning. Another rep said I should run them only twice a week but for a longer period of time. A third guy said I should run them every other evening for however long I thought was right.

The field manager suggested I rake up all the brown spots and do my own seeding.

“Isn’t that your job?” I said curiously.

“No,” he answered bluntly.

So, as Sue did with me, I fired him.

Then I called Vinny Pitre of O’Connell’s Landscaping, the Long Island company that had been cutting what little grass we had left.

Vinny came over, surveyed the pathetic landscape and gave me his expert assessment: “Your yard looks like hell.”

The solution, he said, was to thatch the entire property, cover it with topsoil and cover the soil with grass seed.

“It’s the right time of year to do it,” Vinny said, adding that I had to run the sprinklers twice a day, at dusk and overnight, for 30 minutes in each of our five working zones for about six weeks.

Mother Nature failed to cooperate because it didn’t rain for the first three weeks. And the sprinkler in the sixth zone was broken, so I had to water the side yard by hand with a garden hose twice every day, all while imagining a gargantuan water bill.

But eventually, like fuzz on a teenage boy’s cheeks, little green blades began to sprout from the earth.

“You’re doing a great job,” Vinny said when he came by for an inspection.

“Will my yard look as good as yours?” I asked.

“No,” Vinny answered flatly. “Nobody’s yard looks as good as mine. But you’ll have the best one in the neighborhood.”

Sue was happy to hear it.

“Finally,” I told her, “the grass will be greener on our side of the fence.”

Copyright 2024 by Jerry Zezima

"Weather or Not"

By Jerry Zezima

I was born during a blizzard, I am all wet even during droughts and, perhaps a contributing factor to global warming, I am full of hot air.

This alone would qualify me to be a television weather expert.

But I have made it official by buying a rain gauge and an outdoor thermometer and hygrometer. I also have the world’s most impressive meteorological instrument — a Vermont weather stick — which is why I am now a proud if somewhat foggy CBS-2 First Alert Weather Watcher.

My job is to alert the weather team at Channel 2 in New York if it’s raining, snowing, sleeting, misty, drizzly, sunny, cloudy, partly sunny, partly cloudy, windy, breezy, cold, chilly, mild, warm or hot here at the Last Alert Weather Center, which happens to be in my backyard.

I also have to record how much precipitation we got during either a rain event (using my trusty rain gauge) or a snow event (using a less trusty tape measure that keeps snapping back before I can get an accurate measurement).

Whatever it’s doing, in modern weather parlance, it’s an “event.”

Another important piece of meteorological information is relative humidity, which I can see on the hygrometer. My closest relative, even when it’s not humid, is my wife, Sue, who thinks I’m balmy, no matter what the weather is.

“Welcome to the team,” meteorologist Justin Lewis, the weather producer at Channel 2, told me over the phone after I signed up.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’d like to report that it’s partly cloudy here.”

“Did you have a shower?” Justin asked.

“I took one this morning,” I told him.

“No, I mean, did it rain?” he wondered.

“I didn’t notice,” I answered. “I’ll have to check the rain gauge.”

It was agreed that I have to be more observant to be a good Weather Watcher.

“Sometimes,” Justin confided, “all you need is a window.”

Of course, the First Alert team at Channel 2 — including veterans John Elliott and Vanessa Murdock, new guy Tony Sadiku and my weather hero, Lonnie Quinn — have much more sophisticated equipment.

“We use satellites and computers,” Justin said. “And we have different forecasting models, like the GFS model and the European model.”

“My favorite European model is Heidi Klum,” I said. “Is she on the team?”

“No,” Justin replied. “She’s from Germany, which is a little out of our coverage area. But when she’s in New York, I hope she watches us.”

Channel 2 has about a thousand Weather Watchers (registration is free), although I am probably the only one with a Vermont weather stick, a thin piece of balsam fir from the Green Mountain State that rises or falls depending on moisture in the air.

“It’s low-tech but pretty impressive,” said Justin, who added that one of the most outstanding Weather Watchers is a woman named Elena, who sends in her meteorological observations with pictures of her dog.

“My late pooch, Lizzie, was a good forecaster,” I said. “She could tell if we were going to have a thunderstorm long before it arrived. She’d hide under the coffee table.”

Justin said his dog, Daisy, could be a Weather Watcher.

“She never used to react to thunder, but now that she’s 5, she does,” said Justin, who’s 40.

“My boyhood dog was named Daisy,” I told him. “She could have been on your team, too.”

Roosters could also be Weather Watchers. That’s because Justin has to get up at 1 a.m. so he can be in the studio at 2.

“Do you get up with the roosters?” I asked.

“No,” Justin answered. “They get up with me.”

One human who’s not an official Weather Watcher, because she has direct access to the forecast, is Justin’s wife, Caitlyn.

“Every now and then, she will say, ‘Hey, you said it was supposed to rain and it didn’t.’ She’s tough,” Justin said. “But she appreciates what I do.”

“My wife thinks my head is in the clouds,” I said. “Even when it’s sunny.”

“If you really want to be an accurate Weather Watcher,” Justin said, “you should get another dog.”

“I have a better idea,” I told him. “Let’s call Heidi Klum.”

Copyright 2024 by Jerry Zezima