Sunday, October 11, 2015

SQUARED UP

SWMBO hates what I call "Beverly Hills" yard care.

She thinks shrubbery should grow in a natural state, with only occasional trimming of the wild or outlying branch.

She hates this:


Like many plantings around our library and city hall, these have been trimmed into these square shapes.

I must agree with her: they don't look natural.

But still, they're kind of neat.

I call them Beverly Hills yard work because of a walk I took in that tony area of Greater Los Angeles once many years ago.

I was in town for a convention but decided one day to take a walk around in the residential enclave to see what was there.

(At the time I had lived all of my life in the Dakotas and this Beverly Hills was pretty strange in appearance to me.)

I was walking along, checking out the big mansions but also marveling at the lawns and the shrubbery, all of which looked to me like they had been manicured with a nail clippers.

Imagine the surprise of this naive North Dakota boy when a police car pulled up beside me and an officer asked me just what I thought I was doing.

We had a conversation, I think he looked at my driver's license, saw that I was from Dakota and politely informed me that this was an exclusive conclave and people got nervous about some stranger walking around looking at the big houses.

Even though I was dressed in a suit and tie.

But I guess my attire and manner pegged me as . . . . . a square.

Some times it's good to be a square.

5 comments:

  1. That is hilarious! Good post!

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  2. So the cops were profiling "squares?"

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  3. Ah yes, those were the days when police had carte blanche to do just that.

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  4. Good to be a square you say, unless you are a shrub.

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  5. What an adventure that was. I have a memory of driving around a Beverly Hills neighborhood. Well, actually my dad was driving but, we were doing the same thing, admiring the houses and those manicured lawns. I guess we were lucky, we didn't get stopped by police that time.

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