Assembling toy lawnmower triggers panic attack

I was deprived of that native intelligence that tells you how to put things together

Aggie road tests her new John Deere toy lawnmower

Nothing sparks questions about my competence and self-worth like facing the challenge of putting something together. If you subscribe to Harvard professor Howard Gardner’s (no relation) theory of multiple intelligences there are at least seven of them; not just the verbal and mathematical skills that I was led to believe were all that mattered back in high school.

Poring over the categories I find I’m deficient in many. For example, musical and artistic intelligence. But the ones that apply here, where nature appears to have grossly and unfairly short-changed me, are logical-mathematical, the ability to discern logical and numerical patterns; and spatial-visual, the talent to visualize accurately.

When I succeed in hammering a nail into a wall more or less straight I’m filled with a sense of achievement; even more so, when I manage to follow a set of instructions and assemble even the most rudimentary purchase.

Allow me to offer just one of my many failures and the existential self-doubt it caused. During the pandemic I bought a propane patio heater since entertaining friends, even in the cold weather months, was required to occur outdoors. I’d never previously faced such a complicated set of instructions — an inescapable sense of preordained failure only increased the likelihood that I’d bomb —but somehow I managed to put the appliance together: the brushed metal base that hid the propane canister, the long neck that led to the burners beneath the towering canopy, while securing all the applicable and potentially combustible gas connections.

The end result was a gleaming edifice that looked exactly the way it did in the instruction manual. All that remained was to push the starter, ignite the burners and bask in the socially-distanced camaraderie of family and friends, several of whom were gathered for the grand unveiling. But when I pushed the red starter button nothing happened. An explosion would have been bad but this was even worse in some ways. I was crushed but my daughter who’d witnessed similar previous defeats of mine took over. She briefly examined the manual and then the batteries that powered the igniter, discovered that one of them had been inserted backwards, remedied the mistake, and the device sprung to glorious life.

Here’s the thing: I’d already checked the batteries to make sure they were properly installed. How could I have gotten it wrong and turned triumph into humiliation? The only possible explanation is that I suffer from some undiagnosed disability, one that might have been described as stupidity in any earlier age but I prefer to blame on shoddy genetic wiring.

Which brings me to this week’s crisis. I’d recently escorted that same daughter and her identical twin girls (aka my grandchildren) to a Central Park playground and watched as they enviously followed around another toddler who was pushing a toy lawn mower that emitted soap bubbles. The toy brought back my own childhood and one of its more disastrous moments.

For my fifth birthday my parents bought me a gleaming metal toy lawn mower that actually cut grass. But within minutes my babysitter forced to me share it with the kid next door who promptly broke it. To say I was bereft is an understatement. Echoes of my sobs and cascading tears resound through the ages. I haven’t been quite the same since. Nonetheless, I’d experienced, however briefly, the sense of pride and agency a toy with adult pretensions can bring a small child.

So I bought John Deere’s yellow and green Bubble “N” Go Mower, the same one my grandchildren had coveted in Central Park, to surprise Aggie and Faye on their next visit.

As soon as I picked up the box at the post office I knew I was in trouble. It felt too small. The only possible explanation — unless it was the wrong package — is that assembly was required.

I was doing fairly well at first — securing the cap onto the bubble reservoir, sliding the handle sections into place until they locked and then connecting them to the body of the lawnmower, and finally pouring the included bubble solution into the well without spilling any.

Everything seemed in order until I realized that I’d slid the handle section, which included make believe controls, onto the lawnmower backwards. Now the speed and gas gauges (a mere decal but so what) as well as a yellow lever that also did nothing but nonetheless looked professional were facing away from the child.

I was despondent. I thought back to one of my favorite toys growing up. No, not my fifth birthday lawnmower. I associated that with misery. My hyperrealistic Sixties toy Playmobile dashboard replete with speedometer, gear shift, clock, radio and working windshield wipers. Imagine if all that fabulousness had been facing the wrong direction?

I tried to release the handle sections but they were locked in. I looked underneath the machine — which boasted its ability to make mechanical gear sounds while requiring no batteries — but nothing doing there either. The only thing I succeeded at was spilling some of the bubble solution which the directions explicitly warned against.

I don’t know what the big deal is about spilling a little soap — perhaps it would cause some hapless kid (unlike my precocious progeny) to slip, crack a rib or his fracture his skull and invite lawsuits against John Deere. But I tried to comfort myself with the notion that two-year-olds would probably be so mesmerized by the bubbles and the gear sounds that they wouldn’t notice my mistake. Besides, it’s one of those toys that you could easily imagine in a matter of months sitting at the foot of the driveway under a “free” sign.

But when I reexamined the mower it appeared that I’d inserted the handles the only way the slots allowed. So I took another look at the box the mower arrived in, specifically the photograph of a happy kid pushing the mower amid a floating universe of shimmering bubbles. I’d had it right all along! The controls were facing the way the manufacturer had intended.

That made absolutely no sense to me. The whole point is to make believe. How can you play mow a lawn when you can’t see the dials? Wasn’t whoever designed this contraption once a kid himself? At least I wasn’t to blame. I couldn’t add this to my growing list of failures. Now I just have to hope that, having bought only one Bubble “N” Go mower, I won’t spark sibling rivalry that will end in fury and tears. Just as my formative toy lawn mower experience did all those decades ago.