El Matador

There’s a perfectly rational explanation. I am a scholar, a man of (social) science, I expect logic and order in the universe. So it’s a matter of faith that there is a rational explanation.

I spent most of Monday evening wrestling with El Toro. El Toro mowed one swath of my lawn with my daughter at the helm, quit, and wouldn’t start again.


So it fell to El Matador to set things right again.


I started with the usual things: repeatedly pulling the starting cord and using power words, questioning the lineage of El Toro. That only made him mad. Mad enough to offer one little “cough” out of every 17 pulls, just enough to keep me pulling and pulling and pulling again.


I checked the air filter, I used starter fluid. I completely drained and replaced the oil. I drained the gas and replaced it with new gas in case it had gone bad. Nothing.



After dark, in the safety of my house, and drawing on my extensive mechanical know-how gleaned from “Benny and Joon” I reviewed the possibilities. Either I didn’t have fuel or I didn’t have fire. Having checked the fuel (at least as much as I could) I decided to check the fire at my earliest convenience.



So this morning I was about to take out the ol’ plug and check it out when I thought (and this shows the depth of my lunacy), “I’ll just give it one more pull.”

It started. One pull. No cough, no hesitation, nothing. One pull.

El Toro had become El Ferdinand.


Not only did it start, it mowed my whole yard, including the jungle that had once been my back lawn, and started with one pull pretty much every time.

There is a rational explanation. My current hypotheses include:

1. It don’t like Mondays.

2. El Toro doesn’t like to see my children actually doing work. It likes to wait until 8 am in the morning when all my children are asleep to start. “C’mon,” it says to me, “Let’s do some mowin’!”

3. So maybe my mower likes me. Me, personally. Great. My mower has a man-crush.





4. Bad gas gummed up the jets and the good gas reversed it over the course of two nights.

5. Roughly equivalent to #4, but involves the curse of a bad fairy and the good fairy coming to undo it. But the good fairy has a second job as Lady Gaga’s guardian angel Tuesdays, and so couldn’t make it until this morning.

So science marches on. I’ll keep you posted. Maybe I’ll have the Car Whisperer give it a once-over. I hope he can get to the bottom of it. When it comes to machines, I don’t mind pure cussedness, but inconsistency drives me nuts.