And for a very, very long time I did not know that. A fact that causes me no end of personal embarrassment, even now.

See, I used to like to sing when I mowed. I mowed a lot of lawns. I just naturally assumed that the lawn mower noise drowned out my singing.

I was wrong.

And I didn’t find out until many years later. I was talking with a woman and found out she was from the old neighborhood; I barely recognized her, and she didn’t recognize me at first, but then she lit up, and said: “Oh! You’re the singing lawn guy!” My heart sank.

She went on to tell the rest of the people assembled how when I was mowing, everyone in the neighborhood could hear me, and my voice was excellent. Well, maybe over the lawn mower. Anyway, it was apparently a standing tradition in the neighborhood to open windows when I was mowing, so they could hear me. Most of the time, it was showtunes, my impression of Paul Robeson singing “Old Man River”, Giorgio Tozzi singing “Some enchanted evening”, Gordon McRae singing “Oklahoma”. Sometimes it was gospel. Sometimes it was pop music. And I never knew that everyone could hear me, I just assumed the sound of the lawnmower drowned it out.

So now I have twenty years of things to be embarrassed about that I didn’t even know about a year back. Oh, she says it was good, and of course that was many years before I started smoking. But I know she’s just being kind. And now I don’t sing when I mow, of course. But I still get songs stuck in my head while mowing.