[July 9, 2026] Last night, while I was trying to fall asleep with a stuffed-up nose and under medication, my mind wandered a bit, and a question popped into my head. It was an odd question. It went something like this: What tool best describes you? Or me?
What tool have I used that has given me the greatest advantages in my life? The following morning, I asked my wife what she thought it might be. She knows a good bit of my upbringing and adult life in the U.S. Army, and how, when I was growing up, I went hunting, camping, fishing, and running around with my young friends (and, miraculously, didn’t get murdered or eaten by an alligator). She knows that my guns are important to me.
She said, knowing she had the correct answer, that the answer was surely the shotgun. Her explanation was based on the story I often tell about receiving the best birthday present ever when I was very young. It was a shotgun given to me by my father, who had received it from his father when he was also a young boy in the years leading up to World War II. My namesake, my paternal grandfather, passed that gun along to my dad in the 1930s.
And she knew that I loved to hunt with that shotgun, and she could repeat many of the stories I told her about it, the only shotgun I ever owned to this day. Her memory is excellent, and I learned not to waste ammunition because that J. Stevens Arms Company Model 94A single-shot shotgun is in my gun cabinet to this day in our home.
But what tool best describes me?
The answer I gave was totally unexpected. My answer was the lawnmower. Specifically, a manual push mower. It was a rotating reel of blades powered entirely by pushing it across the lawn. I put a lot of sweat into pushing that mower across many of the lawns in my hometown.
What did a manual lawnmower do for me? It was mine. The mower was given to me by my maternal grandfather (we called him “granddaddy”) and used by both him and my grandmother to mow the very large yard where the Smith homestead sat. Somewhere, I have photos of them both posing with that mower, a powerful symbol of their strength and endurance.
“A lawnmower?” My wife asked, incredulously. “How could it not be a shotgun?” I could hear it in her voice; she didn’t believe me. The shotgun would certainly be a second choice, but nowhere near that lawnmower. Behind that mower was an enormous amount of sweat, frustration, and tired, sore arms. But it was also a symbol of my ability to never give up, to work beyond what I thought were my limits, and to take full responsibility for a difficult job and never give up on it.
Where is that old, rusty, wooden-handled push lawnmower today? Sadly, I have no idea. By the time we moved away from my childhood home, it had been replaced by a motorized lawnmower. I was quick to switch to a gasoline-powered model and to discard that old push mower. One day, I might buy an old one just to keep in my garage as a reminder of the old days.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that the push mower helped shape who I am. I was blind to the fact that being happy was not the goal of a good man; the goal was to make something of myself, and the path would always be difficult. Perhaps that is why the local families who paid me to mow their lawns always seemed to give me a tip. Maybe they were rewarding me for doing something other kids would never dream of doing.
So there is the answer: a manual lawnmower. I understand that that very lawnmower became the symbol of suburbia after the end of WWII. People moved out of the center city and into the surrounding towns, and they began to own their own homes. Maintenance was what all men had to learn to do, and a neatly mowed lawn was one of the things that showed how successful you were.
Today? I don’t even own a lawnmower. I hire someone to care for my lawn. Those old days are gone for now, but I’ll never forget them.
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To read a full accounting of Letters to My Granddaughter, read the following (link here).
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Please read my books:
- “55 Rules for a Good Life,” on Amazon (link here).
- “Our Longest Year in Iraq,” on Amazon (link here).
Sir, that manual push lawnmower fits me too from childhood yard work. For me, it built responsibility. Shotgun ranks high for hunting lessons. Hammer for building fixes. Wrench for repairs. Level for balance. Saw for cutting through problems. Drill for precision. Shovel for digging in. Axe for tough decisions. These tools shaped persistence. Family legacy drives it all. Keep pushing forward.
5 things picked: lawnmower, shotgun, hammer, wrench, shovel.
A CAR … DOES THAT COUNT?
I’m not sure Sweeney, if that is what Gen. Satterfield was getting at, but I gotcha. Maybe I would say that power boat could be one of the choices if we were going big. Personally, I am going to chose something relatively small. I would choose a broom. I got to sweep the house, sidewalks, and front of the street at my house and I got to thinking that I might have used up one or two of them during those “formative” years.
Well, what can I say about this question? The question is getting at what we are as a man or a woman. And, I know all about the mental illness of the recent “trans” phenomenon, so I will ignore their ignorance and illness for my purposes here (and I believe General Satterfield is in agreement with me, even if he doesn’t say it). I would be a paint brush. Growing up, I was painting fences on my grandfather’s ranch out in Montana. The sun is harsh. The fences are many. The way to prolong the life of a fence post was to paint it. That’s why I choose the paint brush. Others can chime in, but I think that’s a pretty good tool to describe me. 🫡. A salute to our veterans and their families and those, like me, who support them. 🇺🇸