Ahh...flashbacks. Movies and books use flashbacks all the time to keep a story from getting boring - to add foresight and hindsight, to give insight into characters' motivations and to stay away from the straight "telling" method of storytelling (using "showing," instead).
My flashback is more of a regret, if you must know.
When I was a teenager, before I reached the age of 18, that is, I mowed lawns as a means to make spending money. Mowing lawns, and lawn service in general (including bush trimming, raking, bulb planting and anything else homeowners want for their landscaping and are willing to pay someone else to perform the dirty work), teaches you many business skills and knowledge, including selling, buying, price-fixing, profit, loss, etc.
My customers ranged from extremely elderly to very vivacious. The elderly I treated as special because they gave me little money in return for their homemade lemonade, and told me stories about their younger days that I would sit for hours sometimes and enjoy - business-wise, their lawns were a loss to me, but the lessons they taught me have lasted a lifetime. As far as the other customer(s) I mentioned in this paragraph's first sentence...sigh...there's where today's lesson in the definition of commerce comes into play.
Usually, when I added a new customer to my lawncare business, the gender was male. Typically a busy father who didn't have time between his job and his family to bother with lawn duties. On the other hand, the neighborhoods around me contained a small population of single women, sometimes divorced or widowed and sometimes not-yet-married professional women who'd moved out of an apartment in order to have a mortgage to deduct from their taxes (we didn't have condominiums in my hometown when I was a teenager; that has changed since then).
The majority of my female customers were sufficiently flush financially that they didn't worry about the cost of lawncare. Often middle-aged divorcees with a strong alimony.
With one exception.
I don't know if the woman is still alive but I'm sure her children are around so I'll spare you the details of the customer's life. I will tell you that she was relatively young, kept in good physical shape and always had a "boyfriend" in her house when I went inside to pick up my check after mowing her lawn.
I knew she didn't have a lot of money. In fact, one time she borrowed money from me, asking me to hold my lawncare check for a month until funds cleared her bank account. So, I shouldn't have been surprised what happened next.
Because lawnmowing takes place in the warmer months in east Tennessee, we lawncare guys wear shorts, socks, shoes and maybe a shirt. I always wore a T-shirt because I tend to sunburn easily and it was a good place to wipe off sweat and lawnmower grease during my working days.
My customer in question always sunbathed while I mowed, even if she had guys over to her place on the weekends when I was mowing, so I was used to her getting a suntan on the back deck. She'd wave at me occasionally, leaning up and showing me she had no top on. I figured it was her way of getting a cheap thrill so I'd wave back and keep on mowing.
One day, after I finished mowing, I walked the yard looking for the scrap pieces of paper, trash, dead snakes or turtles I'd run over, put them in a trash bag and headed back to the station wagon I used to cart around my lawncare gear. I knew that the customer was out of cash so I had decided to skip speaking to her and would come by later in the month to get the money she always owed me.
Just as I was opening the driver's door, she yelled at me from the back door.
"Hey, come here a minute, will you?"
"Okay."
I walked down the driveway and stood at the back door. She looked at me with a grin, her tanned leather skin glowing from her usual UV ray bath.
"You know anything about toilets?"
"Toilets?"
"Yeah, the toilet in my bathroom is stopped up. You mind taking a look?"
Now, I know what you're thinking. This is one of those really bad movies that star people like "Delta Darling" and "John Hulk." In any other story, that would be correct. Unfortunately, this is a true tale so hang on here with me another moment.
I followed the customer through the kitchen and dining room, down the hallway past the guest bathroom, waved at the customer's daughter who was watching TV in her room, and into the customer's bedroom.
It was pretty much like the rest of the rooms in the house, with photo collages leaning up against the wall because there was no guy to frame them, and piles of clothes or other junk in the floor.
The customer pointed me to the bathroom and I walked in. Sure enough, the toilet was stopped up. I got a plunger out from under the sink and was able to flush out the toilet. While I was working on the toilet, I heard a door close but didn't give it much thought, assuming that the customer's daughter had closed her door.
As I washed off the plunger in the bathtub, the customer yelled at me.
"Hey, you about finished in there?"
"Yeah." I shook the water off the plunger, put it back under the sink and walked into the customer's bedroom.
Okay, right now I'm sitting here trying to remember how many naked women I had seen in person versus how many airbrushed photos of women I had seen in my friends' fathers' hidden stack of smut magazines. No doubt, the airbrushed versions won the count. So, to my teenage mind's eye, a woman had no wrinkles, no stretch marks, nothing sagging and nothing obviously out-of-place.
Sitting on the edge of her bed, the customer looked me in the eye, while I tried to return the gaze without looking at her naked body. Out of the edges of my vision, I clearly discerned stretch marks and small sagging breasts.
"Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know you were dressing. I'll leave now." I walked toward the closed door.
"Wait a minute." The customer stood up and put her hand on my shoulder. "I know I owe you a lot of money. Give me a chance to repay you."
Repay me? Now how is a naked woman in her bedroom going to find the money to give me so I can buy gas to fuel my lawnmower and car, not to mention the weedeater strings and garbage bags I used to make the exterior of her place look nice?
I did not turn around. "Well, okay. But can you put something on?"
The customer laughed. "Put something on? Are you kidding me? I want you to take something off!"
I was so flustered, I could not honestly see what she meant. To me, I was standing at the closed door of a woman's bedroom, with a "boyfriend" drinking a beer on the patio outside, her daughter in the room across the hall from me, her son playing in the basement, my parents at their house expecting me home in a few minutes and my friends finishing up their day so we could all go out to a movie later that evening, after eating dinner with our separate families in the next hour or so. There was nothing in my life that had prepared me for a naked adult woman to be standing behind me, one hand squeezing my shoulder and the other one reaching around my waist.
I put my hand on the door handle and turned around. The customer took that as a non-neutral move, giving her the opportunity to put both arms around my waist and thrust her pelvis area into mine.
"Good. I thought we could negotiate."
I smelled alcohol, tobacco and marijuana on her breath. "Umm...sure." I let go of the door knob, reached around behind me and pulled both her hands away from me. "Tell you what. I've got to get home right now. How about I mow your lawn for a while and we can figure out some sort of payment method later on?"
The customer put her hands on her hips. "You don't like what you see, do you?"
"No, it's not that. It's..."
"I'm just an old woman to you, aren't I?" [From my recollection, I'd say she was 32 years old at the time, less than twice my age.]
"No. It's just..."
"What?"
"I don't know."
I opened the door and ran out of the house.
I continued to mow her lawn for free. She would come up with excuses for not paying me, like saying that I'd broken a window pane with a large rock that my mower had sent flying (meaning I'd have to keep mowing her lawn until it "paid for" the window (that she never fixed)) or that I hadn't picked up the trash after mowing, or left little strips of unmown grass in places, etc.
I told you I wouldn't give any details about the customer but I feel now's the time to tell you a few, since they're on the record, so to speak. The customer's first husband died of unusual circumstances. Or rather, he was known for abusing the woman and she put a bullet through the back of his head one day after she'd had enough, conveniently collecting a large insurance policy just recently issued in her husband's name, in a shaky signature that barely looked like his. She shot her second husband in front of witnesses in her driveway, coming out of her house with bruises on her face that she claimed her husband had just given her. Because all of the witnesses were drunk at the time, none of them could remember if, in fact, the customer's husband had or had not been in the house at all in the past few hours. A jury agreed that the husband must have stepped inside to urinate at some point, thus clearing the woman of a second murder charge. She collected a small insurance settlement.
Every time I stopped at her house, an assortment of guys and gals on old motorbikes were hanging around, offering me shots of whiskey, swigs of beer or tokes of marijuana. I declined their offer because I was dehydrated from either mowing a previous customer's lawn or hers.
= = =
What is the definition of commerce? Well, the Merriam-Webster dictionary gives the following:
- social intercourse: interchange of ideas, opinions or sentiments
- the exchange or buying and selling of commodities on a large scale involving transportation from place to place
- sexual intercourse
As an adult, what do I take from this lesson and tell my future students? Well, in a declining economy, people will increase the use of their bodies for commercial transactions. I have reached an age where such exchanges are uncomfortable for my wornout joints and unused muscles. It's up to you to decide if a momentary act helps build your portfolio. I haven't yet found it adds anything to mine but I am not you. For me, the act of flirting is more fun, the playfulness more fulfilling and the later unnecessary reconciliation on the books great to avoid. Again, I am not you. Only you alone can determine the definition of commerce. You can hang moral, ethical and other ideas on the act of commerce, but those are just ideas, not concrete action. It's in the realm of concrete action where I'll be teaching commerce. I won't shy away from showing you what words like commerce mean but I won't show you what to do. I can show you how to think but I can't think for you.
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