Those Little Moral Dilemmas

I’m having a moral dilemma, and I invite you to weigh in on the subject. These little fuzzy areas of sin can be quite difficult to wrap your brain around. I mean, seriously, how many Twinkies constitute gluttony? Is it sloth if I sleep past 9 am? What about on a Saturday? Sometimes the old moral compass is clear and, well, sometimes it’s just not. It’s not crystal clear, at least to me, whether seeing a man with ice cream, and thereafter craving ice cream enough to spend the next thirty minutes searching Google maps for a Dairy Queen, is covetous, envious, or just hungry. I am truly taken aback by these fringe morality questions. So, I bring to you a question of pride and the outer limit to which it meanders into something unbecoming or, perhaps, worse.

I mowed my yard this week, twice. Now, me mowing my yard once probably came as a great relief to my neighbors, who were probably having difficulty seeing my front porch for the Amazonian growth I was calling a lawn. For the record, I was busy, not lazy. Anyone with children playing sports will understand what I’m about to say. It was tournament season. Needless to say, the grass was kinda long. Then, for some inexplicable reason, I mowed it again three days later, this time much shorter. This is likely the point my neighbors began to wonder if I had lost my sanity or perhaps sold the home to someone with more of a predilection toward lawn care, someone like my next door neighbor, whose grass is usually the shortest in the southern Appalachian growing region, despite the fact I haven’t yet broken out the weed eater.

Now it’s my next door neighbor who brings me to my moral conundrum. Lovely people, but they haven’t mowed this week. Normally that would be reason for celebration for making my own personal Congo look more like a pristine prairie. But this week, oh this week, my grass is shorter than a Marine’s haircut. It’s so short, the crickets don’t know where to hide. Three pygmies stopped by just to say, “Hey, man, your grass is so short.” Here’s what I need to know: Is it wrong of me to feel like a superior lawn maintenance homeowner to my neighbor, even though I am?