Another Saturday morning. Time for the critical yardwork, the kind one does not do every week, but does as-needed to manicure the grounds.  As clouds heavy on the mountain darkened, I shaped the bushes, clipped their low runners, collected hundreds of twigs the arborist left behind in the bushes, and trimmed the dead branches out of the dwarf pines—we thought the pines were dying, but the dead belonged to just one spreading branch.  Rain began to fall, pleasant, a summer shower.  How nice, I sighed after a week of high-90s temperatures.  Though I had finished the most important chores, I removed my hat and found other chores: I wanted to stay in the cool wet grayness.  If I were to lie down on the grass, every passerby would stop to see if I were dead, so I reclined behind the brick wall, on bark chips, and would have been under the pear canopy but for the aggressive arborist, and now looked up into a uniform gray blur.  I became aware of the raindrops gently tapping every inch of my body.  I giggled to myself as raindrops tickled my upper lip, where I once had a mustache, and, in the decades that followed, every Roger that saw the old Roger pictures thought the mustachioed Roger look ridiculous.   And I chuckled at how my closed eyelids blinked involuntarily with every drop that found them.  Receiving the delicate moist massage, I felt my tension melt away.  A vague worry came to me about what Mom would think if she saw me lying on the ground in the rain—she would think I was dead, and might call 911.  I entered the house dirty but cheerful and relaxed, and called out a casual “Hi Mom!”  She, indeed, had seen me lying motionless on the ground in the rain, and had wondered if I were dead or hurt or sick, and had resolved to brave the rain to check on me after just a few minutes more had passed.  “We need milk, and I need poster board for my weekly schedule,” she mentioned.  And I needed curry powder and cream, for French cooking.  At Smith’s, I rode the electric cart from the store entrance to Dad, who waited at the car, and I wondered what people might think seeing me ride when no impediment to walking was visible, and I contemplated the nature of unjust judgment.  Dad called out in the produce department, “Rog, do you think we need some grapefruit?”  How endearing for my father to begin every pronouncement with my name, until at the 117^th daily instance I slip into serious irritation.  My answer was to grab a bag and move toward the grapefruit.  “Don’t get any squishy ones,” he admonished.  In a fraction of a second I thought, In the year I have lived with you I have never brought home a squishy grapefruit, in fact in my whole life I have never brought home a squishy grapefruit, and do grapefruit even get squishy?  I did not roll my eyes or glare of quip, I simply handed him a grapefruit, then two more.  “This one’s good.”  “Okay.”  “That one will do.”  For dinner I fried turkey patties, and mashed steamed parsnips, a most aromatic tuber, mixing them with a tablespoon of butter, a quarter cup of cream, a sprinkle of salt, and a healthy pinch of nutmeg.