By Jerry Zezima
I don’t want to beat around the bush, so I’ll come right out and say it: I should start a hedge fund.
It could have paid for my hospital stay — or, worse, my funeral — after I came close to being electrocuted while trimming the hedges.
Instead, I should have paid my wife, Sue, the going rate for being a master electrician. That’s because she restored power in the downstairs bathroom after I blew it out in a shocking display of landscaping ineptitude.
When it comes to using power tools, I am a chicken. Fortunately, I wasn’t fried.
That’s why I was apprehensive about trimming the hedges, or bushes, or whatever they are.
The ones in front of the living room windows had grown so high and mighty that they blocked the beautiful view of cars blowing through the stop sign.
The ones on the other side, in front of the dining room windows, blocked the view of birds relieving themselves on the cars in our driveway.
Still, they weren’t as large as a butterfly bush we had years ago. The floral fiend stood about 12 feet tall and its branches reached all the way from the edge of the property to the side of our two-story Colonial.
“I hope this thing isn’t really a gigantic Venus flytrap,” I told Sue. “If I go outside, it could eat me.”
“In that case,” she told me, “it would get indigestion.”
The guy we hired to annihilate the gargantuan growth used a chainsaw that must have been sharp enough to cut through concrete, although it would have been blunted by my skull.
I once had a chainsaw that I used to cut fallen tree limbs, but I was afraid of doing the same to my limbs, which meant: (a) I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on or (b) I’d have to write my own version of “A Farewell to Arms.”
Our younger daughter — braver, smarter and more coordinated than her father — has a chainsaw that she uses to cut down her family’s Christmas tree.
So far, in this digital age, she still has all her fingers.
Power tools leave me feeling powerless. That includes the electric knife I used when carving the Thanksgiving turkey. The big bird often ended up looking like it had been through a meat grinder. One year I drew blood (mine, not the turkey’s).
Our daughter is now in charge of the carving, which she does — smoothly and bloodlessly — with a large kitchen knife that doesn’t need to be plugged in.
I still have an electric drill that I used on our mailbox, whose broken door I somehow reattached a few years ago, leaving unsightly holes from my initial failed attempts.
It’s a good thing I’m not a dentist.
But back to the bushes, which I promised Sue I would trim.
I found an extension cord in the shed, but it was too short for me to reach the full length of the bushes with the electric trimmer. So I used shears that were even duller than this column.
After Sue found a long extension cord in the garage, I plugged it in and revved up the hedge trimmer, thinning the thick thatch until I got a whiff of smoke and a slight buzzing in my hands before the trimmer conked out.
I looked down and saw that the cord was caught between the teeth of the trimmer, which had almost cut through it.
“I could have been electrocuted!” I told Sue.
Her response: “You blew out the power in the bathroom.”
Because she is brighter than I am, she knew how to reset it.
“I could be a master electrician,” said Sue, adding that I did a good job on the bushes.
“At least I didn’t end up like a fried chicken,” I said. “Extra crispy.”
Copyright 2026 by Jerry Zezima
