For the Gophers

Bonnie Lynch was cool.

My mom, Bonnie Hope Lynch, passed away this week. Obviously I’m beyond sad, and obviously I’ve been thinking almost non-stop about her. One story keeps popping up in my brain’s reruns. I thought I’d share it with you, and help spread the legend.

There are two things you have to know before we begin:

1. My mom was a quiet woman. Not one to fight. Really not one to raise her voice much at all. An angry look, a glare, was usually the extent of it. That was all she needed. In our house, we called it the “Don Ho Stare”, which is what my dad received in Hawaii in 1989 when she didn’t want to go see the island’s national treasure croon his greatest hits.

Sorry, Don.

2. My mom desperately loved literally any and all animal. It didn’t matter what kind. She “adopted” squirrels in the backyard, leaving them treats. My Dad and her would create hutches for stray cats in the cold New Jersey months. Every creature in my neighborhood had a name, and a place to go.

Picture this, but less extroverted.

Okay, set up is out of the way, let’s begin our story.

We had a neighbor that we would actively avoid. He was there when we moved in, and pretty much told us “look, I’m gonna be terrible, stay out of my way, I stay out of yours. Also, I may not stay out of yours. Deal with it.” I am not going to say his actual name, because the internet is forever and I don’t want his offspring coming after me in THEIR substack, probably entitled, “I Came From Evil’s Balls”. So let’s just call him Angry Neighbor. This guy seemed about a 100 years old when I was in first grade, so he was probably, I don’t know, actually 40? He alway had a grimace on his face, a sour expression, as if he was permanently smelling the very fart that he was. Angry Neighbor had a wife that looked exactly like Angry Neighbor but with a big bushy mane. I’m glad they found each other at Asshole University.

The first couple times my sister an saw him outside, we would say hello, trying desperately to Cindy Lou Who our neighborhood’s Grinch. But he didn’t return it. He’d just stare, with that bitter face, as if catching a whiff of his rotting soul.

Soonafter, I was warned by the kids in the surrounding houses to actively avoid him, he’d yell if you got too close to the house, and if you lost a ball over the fence, that ball was gone. Let. It. Go.

So everyone in my family gave Angry Neighbor a wide berth. Why concentrate the negative, when there were so many positive things about our new home. Great new people who DIDN’T glare. And the wildlife! Wow, so many cool animals, like squirrels! Gophers! Groundhogs! It was like a zoo in our backyard! A very cheap zoo, sure, but fun nonetheless!

Pictured: Exactly this, but nowhere near as good.

One day, when my sister and I were walking up my driveway, we noticed a pair of weird metal contraptions on Angry Neighbor’s lawn. Springloaded little do-hickeys planted near our fence. I asked my dad what they were. He had an idea, but first he wanted to check with Angry Neighbor.

My Dad braved getting up close and personal with the old man’s sour-puss face, with that permanent scrunched nose, as if brought on by catching a glimpse of his lonely, shitty future. That night at dinner, my Dad reported back, with a solemn look:

They were GOPHER TRAPS.

If a gopher was travelling underground, and went under the trap, the spring-loaded device would activate, sending a metal bar through the ground, right at the gopher, snapping it’s neck.

We were horrified. My mom’s face turned white…er than usual. Who would want to kill a gopher? A GOPHER???

A GOPHER!

My Dad explained that Angry Neighbor bellowed about how they were eating his garden’s vegetables. My mom countered with THAT’S WHY YOU HAVE A GARDEN. SO GOPHERS WILL COME.

My mom didn’t finish her dinner. She couldn’t fathom WHY anyone would do this.

My Dad shrugged. Angry Neighbor didn’t like animals, save for his dog, Fella, a tiny, scruffy dog, who, I kid you not, had testicals that took up half of his body. Giant bulbous testicles that forced a back leg waddle.

Kinda like this.

Did this happen after Angry Neighbor got Fella? Or did Angry Neighbor give Fella a mixture of chemicals that forced this insane mutation. No one can be sure, except for Angry Neighbor and Mrs. Angry Neighbor, and they weren’t talking. But whatever caused Fella’s problem, Angry Neighbor wasn’t doing anything about it. Fella had those giant kickballs under belly for years. Also, is that the worst name for a dog with giant testicles? No shit he’s a Fella. Might as well have called him Bally.

So, yeah, Angry Neighbor took care of Fella, but, I guess hated gophers. And any gopher who went under his traps were going to die. My mom was concerned. But, she said, what can you do? Nothing!

Turns out, if you’re my friend Brian C. (Middletown New Jersey must have been the Brian capitol of the world. If you were a Brian, you had to add the first letter of your last name after it…so declares Brian L.), there absolutely was something you can do. You can spring the gopher traps before they kill the gophers.

Now, my friend Brian C. was much cooler than I was (no, the C did not stand for “Cool” but it should have). He had both Atari AND Intellivision (our other friend, Brian G., had those two PLUS Coleco, but I digress). And he wagered that if you thew something AT the trap, it would activate the trap, without ending the life of any adorable rodent that may live nearby.

Of course, Brian C. wasn’t quite cool enough to try this.

So I did.

Now, I never did anything wrong. That is not a lie. I was afraid to do anything. I was a good kid who never ever rocked the boat. But my mom had passed on her love of all animals to me, and Brian C. really sold the concept. One well placed rock could save all those gophers.

We saw Angry Neighbor wasn’t home. We grabbed rocks. And little first-grade me tossed them over the fence, missed the target a lot, but eventually struck the spring-loaded traps. And while it didn’t activate the spring-loading action, turns out a rock hitting something breaks it. That’s just science.

And when we were done, both traps was dented, with rocks all around them. Rocks, from their location and position, that were clearly thrown from our side of the fence. This was the perfect crime. I might as well have written FROM BRIAN LYNCH, AGE 6 on each one.

When the next day, when my sister and I were walking up the driveway to our house, Angry Neighbor struck. With Fella and his giant red balls by his side, Angry Neighbor screeched at us, pointing and shouting so loud everyone in town could hear it.

We couldn’t get a word in. I couldn’t even tell Angry Neighbor that my sister had nothing to do with it (not that I would anyway, Brian C. was nowhere to be found, and misery loves company). He was threatening lawsuits, jailtime, he’d have our allowance every week until we died. I started sniffing back tears, which he caught wind of and went even more batshit. My fear fueled him. He started insulting me.

Saying I was a bad kid.

I didn’t know what to do.

Turns out, I didn’t have to do anything.

Because there was one thing my Mom liked more than animals. And that was me and my sister. She heeded the call of the Mom-Signal and stormed outside and went right back at Angry Neighbor.

MOM: Why would you yell at them like that?

ANGRY NEIGHBOR: Because they broke my gopher traps.

She looked over at me. She could tell from my look that I absolutely had.

She then turned back to Angry Neighbor.

MOM: But why would you yell at them like THAT?

See, I know now, that Angry Neighbor wasn’t wrong, per se. It was his stupid lawn, his stupid garden, if he wanted to kill gophers, okay, sure. And I did do damage to his property. I was, again, six, but still, I broke stuff. I deserved punishment. But he was taking it out a whole new door. He was raging. He was full-on evil. He wanted to scare bad…and until my mom came out, he was succeeding.

See, up until that moment I thought I was the hero of this story. I thought I was doing a good thing, saving animals. Fighting evil.

But no, my mom was.

My normally quiet, polite mother was not about to let this guy yell at her kids. She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t have to. She simply hit him over and over again with facts. These are kids. Doing it FOR THE GOPHERS! (What did that mean? Who cares, she was on a roll) We’ll pay for your stupid traps. Don’t screech at them.

But she didn’t stop there.

And say hello back if we say hi to you. If my kid loses his basketball, throw it back over the fence. Give out candy for Halloween, don’t hide in your house, we all know you’re home. And for goodness sake, get your dog’s mutant balls looked at.

Okay, she didn’t say the last one, but she might as well have. Angry Neighbor kept taking hit after hit, with absolutely no comeback other than “But he broke my traps”. What retort CAN you have if someone says “say hello back if someone says hi to you”. Literally none.

I got in trouble for breaking the traps. No TV that night, maybe? I don’t remember. And Angry Neighbor fixed the traps, but they never ever killed a gopher.

But from that day on, we got our basketball back if it went over the fence. We were greeting with a begrudging “hello” if we saw him. They gave out candy for Halloween.

All because, for one glorious day, Fella didn’t have the biggest balls on the block. Bonnie Hope Lynch did.

Love you, Mom.

No Gophers were harmed in the making of this story.

I wrote a book. It has stories like these in them. There’s even a mom character based on my mom. But the actual one was cooler.