The Fifty Percent Man

On Friday evening, I came home from work and got out my spade and my brush and a worn-out plastic Tesco bag that I couldn’t, in all conscience, ever bring into a supermarket again. I made my way to the pavement along the front of my house, and I set to work clearing the weeds that had grown up along the verge.

This caused a minor stir in the neighborhood. One lady in a passing car showed and rolled down her window and said, “Well done.” A good neighbour came across from his house and loaned me an implement he had for the specific task I was about. Much better than my spade, I was assured. This activity didn’t really surprise me. I’m not the world’s most active gardener and general maintenance person and my unusual spate of early weekend horticultural activity was a surprise to all of us, not least myself.

This irregular burst of activity can be attributed to the man who lives up around the corner from my house. I don’t know his name but, in my head, I’ve taken to calling him the Fifty Percent Man. He is a bright, low-slung fellow who always has a cheery hello and an interested query about the progression of your day. I see him most days and he sees me. It is a mutual-apprehension situation.

The key to this man’s presence in this piece of writing is that he cleans the weeds from the edges of his own pavement very regularly. He also mows the grassy strip between the pavement and the road. We don’t have a grassy strip on our street, and I am thankful for that because heaven knows what it would look like by now.

The man can be seen regularly, out working on his pavement edge and his grassy strip. Fair enough. But regular readers will know that it takes more than that to get into the pages of these annals. A mere trimmed verge will not normally make the cut. So what is it about this guy that sets my typing fingers a-twitchin’ this rainy Sunday morning? The answer is simple. He doesn't just trim his own verge, he trims everybody else’s as well. Well, not everybody else’s exactly but, still, an astonishing percentage of the neighborhood gets their verges trimmed by this excellent gentleman.

One day last week, I was amazed to see him miles down the road of the adjoining street, working full tilt on the verges of people he could hardly know. From where I was standing, he was a mere dot on the horizon but still I recognized his low-slung profile scraping and brushing, cleaning and making good.

I met him the day after and asked him about this. I opened the conversation by telling him that I thought he should be awarded a medal for the work he did on the local verges. He said that it gave him pleasure to keep things tidy. How much did he do? I asked him. How far did he go along all the houses did he go in his quest for suburban orderliness? His answer was memorable.

He said that he was happy to do fifty percent of all the houses so long as other people did the other fifty percent.

I thought that this was as close to being a definition of an actual saint as I would ever hear in the real world. An act of pure charity combined with an act of pure faith, both in equal measure. I will do a full half of everything, if everybody else will look after the other half.

The low-slung man does not operate on my street. We live in a slightly different practical and metaphysical domain to his. We are not a tangible part of his percentage equation. Nevertheless, after speaking to him, I felt a tacit responsibility to seize the tiny percentage of the remaining work that could only be viewed as my own personal responsibility. As a result, as soon as my week’s work was done, I resolved to make good my own verge.

It's out there now in the August rain, my verge, gleaming and weedless. A seamless continuation of all the other clean verges on my street. At least some of them, I am sure, having been inspired, like I was, by the man who would do half of all the work if only we would all do our bit.

Here's to him. The low slung, fifty percent man. Long may he weed, trim, and continue to inspire me to play my own small part. By doing far too much, all by himself.