On Tuesday, July 4, 2023, Don Perewitz was trying to cut his overgrown lawn on Quincy Avenue in Quincy, Massachusetts. He was 69. He has bad hips, and surgery was scheduled for the following month. He was using an 80-year-old push mower. Soon after, six firefighters cut his lawn instead.
Some firefighters were heading back to their station from a call. Perewitz asked them, partly as a joke, whether he could borrow their mower. One of them said, in Perewitz’s retelling, “Yeah, I’ll hook you up.”
His girlfriend, Laura Klumpp, was there and described what came next.
“Next thing I know they’re not only over with the lawn mower, they’re over with the whole crew.”
Six Quincy firefighters came with a mower, a trimmer and a blower. They cut and cleaned up the lawn. Perewitz and Klumpp offered to bring food to the firehouse, and the firefighters politely declined.
The story spread on Facebook. Perewitz had one correction to how it was told. “The one problem is they said they saw an elderly gentleman struggling with the lawn mower. That’s not quite really what it was.” He also called it a “one time deal.”
“They took mercy on me.”
Klumpp called it “just an awesome 4th of July story.” The report does not say how his surgery went.
The part worth noticing
Nobody posted a request here. A man asked for a mower, half as a joke, and the answer turned out to be a whole crew with the gear to finish the job.
Most of what people need on a given day is about that size: a mower, a trimmer, an hour. Somebody nearby usually has it. What is often missing is the introduction, and in Quincy the introduction was a joke about borrowing a mower.
We like stories where the ask is small and the answer is bigger. We told another about a man in Fremont, California: Twenty strangers showed up to finish his roof. MeetaNeed is built for this kind of meeting: where needs and neighbors meet.
Where this story comes from
Originally reported by CBS News Boston (Ken MacLeod), published July 4, 2023. Retold here with the details as that report gives them. The people in this story are not connected to MeetaNeed.
