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The Tale of Mr. MasonFeb 17 '07 (Updated Mar 05 '07) Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line Believe it or not, this one was actually inspired by someone I once knew. The routine was pretty much the same that entire summer. Mr. Mason’s grass would grow high enough to threaten his sanity about every ten days, and he’d call on me to come and put things back into balance. Not only did he supply the lawnmower and gasoline, he also paid about ten dollars more per job than anybody else, so I never really minded making the quarter-mile walk down the dirt road to his place. Mr. Mason was our nearest neighbor, and while I never really knew him until he introduced himself to the family and asked if I was interested in making a little money, I liked him almost immediately. A thirteen year old boy needs something to keep him occupied or else his mind starts contemplating activities that’ll only anger his parents and put him into conflict with the local authorities; I reckon I sweated out the bulk of whatever rebelliousness I may have possessed on the half-acre of sandspur-littered wasteland that Mr. Mason paid me to mow. If the truth be known, I always suspected that the man enjoyed what came afterward more than he did the sight of weeds and tall grass being massacred in the stagnant heat of the afternoon. It was customary from day one for me to drag my filthy, sweaty, lanky frame up to his back porch once the work was done and indulge in a bottle of soda pop from Mason’s icebox with him and his invalid mother, who had to have been at least ninety years old. As I sat there sucking down the Coca-Cola, that ancient sack of wrinkly flesh and trembling limbs would gaze at me like I was some kind of muscle-bound hunk from the cover of a Harlequin romance novel, with her eyes wide open and face all contorted from the stroke she’d had many years before, unable to form a single word. Our post-mow conversations started out simply enough, with the primary topics at the beginning of the summer being baseball, school, and adolescent life in general. I’d say no less than fifty years separated me and Mr. Mason, yet he always had the gleam of amusement in his eye when he listened to my tales of teenage trial and tribulation. He seemed to revel in the fact that things had hardly changed a lick since he and his cronies wandered the same old streets getting into the same old kinds of trouble. I could always tell that Mr. Mason was fond of me, and while I sometimes found the sight and condition of his mother so distressing that I wished he’d leave her behind in the stifling heat of the living room, the feeling was definitely mutual. One day, feeling that we had achieved a level of familiarity that permitted deeper questions, I asked Mr. Mason about his life, specifically why there wasn’t a Mrs. Mason other than his mother anywhere around. It was then I learned that behind the face of a friendly neighbor sometimes lurks a tale more complex and nightmarish than one can begin to imagine, and all one needs to do is ask in order to hear the lurid details. Mr. Mason was at first reluctant to disclose the details of his past, but a little digging revealed that my furrow-browed provider of summer income had seen enough women problems to keep a Hollywood satyr home on ladies’ night. In a way I think he was looking for a pair of young ears to unload upon, and he certainly treated mine to a tale that I’m certain I’ll never hear again. As I sat there on his back porch, with the humidity of mid-summer and the smell of freshly-cut grass competing for elbow room in the atmosphere, and that age-old piece of drooling infirmity staring at me from a mere chair over, I listened to a chronicle of love so rich in horror and loss that at first I thought Mason was telling fibs. ‘Twas the times he’d stop and briefly weep that convinced me the man was describing things no mortal would ever think to fabricate. It seems that Mason was a veteran of the Korean War, which was likely when and where he picked up his fondness for Asian girls. Having found one he thought would make an ideal wife, he sponsored her immigration to the land of purple mountain majesty, only to catch her in bed with a Negro less than a year after their son was born. As I reckon any sensible man would do, he shotgunned that bitch to death, a crime for which he served the next thirty years in prison. The judge told him that because her lover was a black man, he’d give Mason the lightest sentence possible under state law. Having learned his lesson about murder while missing the one about falling in love with chink women, he sponsored the immigration of another slant-eye after his release and practically dragged her from the runway straight to the altar. This one served him well for a time, remaining faithful and obedient until one Thanksgiving feast, when she decided to shoot his now thirty-three year old son through the head with a .22 caliber. William Mason Jr. languished in a hospital bed for several days before leaving his father childless, and wife number two was sent away forever to the penitentiary. Deciding that women from the Orient are far more trouble than they’re worth, Mason felt that his third spouse oughta be a Caucasian, and he set out to find the whitest gal to whom he’d offer up his love. It just so happened that Ida Barber sat only a barstool away, and before you could count the number of books in the New Testament, the vows of matrimony had been fired at one another like a barrage of artillery shells. It looked like Mason had finally discovered the marital happiness he sought. Of course, if things worked out that perfectly, other folks would cry and moan and lodge a complaint against Fate for playing favorites, so it goes without saying that Mason shortly thereafter lost his third and final wife. To be fair to Fate, it was Mason’s own actions that drove off Ida, specifically his insistence that she engage in activities with other men that ought to only take place between a husband and his bride, so that Mason could indulge in whatever pleasure he got from watching. Knowing how strongly he responded upon catching his first wife with another fella, Ida thought it best to hit the road and Mason was again left without a companion, this time the victim of his own strange nature. Actually, it’s not accurate to say that Mason found himself bereft of live-in company, for no sooner had Ida departed than his own mother suffered a massive stroke and was placed into his care. Figuring that one woman in the house was enough, Mason resigned himself to the role of dutiful son and seemingly gave up hope of finding a lady; after all, what female would want to spend the rest of her life with a drooling old poopie who couldn’t even slur out a sentence and a character with as checkered a past as his? I guess it’s clear how well I got to know Mason that summer, although a broken leg prevented me from attending to his property beyond the first week of August. Once school started, I got so wrapped up in homework and the pursuit of girls that I never really thought of him again until the day Mama told me that he had died from a major heart attack. It wasn’t like when Grandpa passed, but I admit to shedding a tear or two on hearing of Mason’s demise, for that tortured soul had been everything from a killer to a victim to a deviant, yet still found the strength and compassion to play the faithful mother’s son. I felt honored to have shared in his story, even if it was frequently full of tragedy and weirdness. His mother expired less than three months later in an old folks’ home, unable to even recognize her own reflection. Some time later, it was revealed that among his things had been discovered a series of letters from a woman. Thinking that he’d probably outlive his mother and want to experience love at least one more time, Mason had taken to corresponding with an old acquaintance in another state, whose husband had been carried off by cancer only a short time before. Had he survived long enough to realize his plan, I’d likely have been pushing a mower the following summer, looking forward to joining that believer in love’s power on the back porch for a soda and some happier conversation, with the new Mrs. Mason at his side. 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