Bruno Tedeschi's personal web site

The orange and black machine sat idle in the garage, taunting me as I shoveled snow outside. Every half-hour or so, I'd go back into the garage, push the electric starter, hoping the 7-horsepower engine would turn over. Then I'd return to the waist-high snow back at the entrance to my driveway.

Progress was slow with a shovel. My Ariens snowblower would have chewed through this miniature mountain in no time, spitting out the snow in a beautiful arc.

I hadn't shoveled anything significant since high school, when my friends and I would walk around the neighborhood with our shovels, looking to make a quick buck.

The snowblower was a housewarming present from my parents. They figured it would come in handy on my corner lot, which has some 300 feet of sidewalk. They were right. Over the nine years of homeownership, the snowblower has saved me the drudgery of shoveling snow.

I looked forward to snowstorms, the deeper the better.

In just one pass, the 24-inch-wide blade cleared the sidewalks. It was so easy, I took to doing the next-door neighbors' sidewalks. It's hard to know where to stop, so I ended up doing the house next to the neighbor's and the house next to that. It was my small effort to be a good neighbor.

If I ever did anything bad requiring a reporter to interview my neighbors, I could imagine them saying something like: "Well, he wasn't that friendly, but doggone it, whenever it snowed, he'd plow my sidewalk."

During Sunday's record storm, my neighbors had to fend for themselves.

"What happened to the machine?" the next-door neighbor asked as he shoveled out his driveway. "I don't want to talk about it," I told him.

I trudged out to the garage early in the morning and plugged in the snowblower, pumped the primer button a few times and pushed the electric starter. It turned over immediately. I made a path down the driveway, getting about 15 feet before the machine started vibrating violently. Then it conked out. I took it back to the garage.

The last time I checked the oil . . . Okay, I never checked the oil in nine years of ownership. I took out the dipstick and determined it needed a little bit of oil. Okay, a whole quart.

The electric starter wasn't turning the engine over, but if I pushed on it and pulled the cord, it sputtered back. A few more times, and it finally restarted, spewing out black clouds of smoke. I let it run for a few minutes before taking it back down the previously cleared path. Then it encountered the snow.

This time there was no violent vibrations. It just stopped. Plink. That was the sound the engine made when it died.

I took it back into the garage. There would be no easy fixes. The pull cord could not be pulled, now matter how hard I tried.

So there it sat impotent in the garage, a pile of useless metal. It almost appeared to be mocking me, as if to say, "If you took care of me, I would have taken care of you."

Shoveling reacquaints you with muscles you forgot you had, like the ones on the side of the abdomen near your hips and the ones on the inside of your forearm and the ones in your fingers.

After a few hours, a neighbor from across the street took sympathy and asked if I'd like to borrow his snow thrower. It's not as beefy as my Ariens, and its wheels aren't driven by the motor. With a little effort, though, it clears a path on the sidewalk. But it's not up to the task of eating through the small mountain at the front of the driveway.

"That's all she wrote," the neighbor said. I thanked him profusely and returned to the shovel.

Every so often, I stare down the street, looking for teenagers who were hoping to earn a quick buck.