In hindsight, rock star should have asked for help

It’s hard to find something on the national news intriguing enough to break through the wall-to-wall pandemic coverage, but last week a breaking news story took the gardening world by storm.

The story involved the guitarist for the legendary rock band Queen.

The headline on the CNN website read “Brian May hospitalized after injuring buttocks in ‘over-enthusiastic’ gardening incident.”

Never before has a headline containing the word gardening sparked so many questions. How does one injure their backside gardening? Just how enthusiastic was this gardening? Brian May is a gardener?

May shared the news on his Instagram account, describing the pain as “relentless” but failing to disclose what gardeners everywhere are really wondering about — What gardening job can “rip your Gluteus Maximus to shreds,” as May put it?

I’m not new to the aches and pains of gardening, but they seem to have become  more frequent over the years. This undoubtedly says more about the passage of time than it does about my enthusiasm for gardening.

Such aches are standard operating procedure in spring, when gardeners switch from reading plant catalogs on their couch to dawn-to-dusk gardening. A few weeks ago I was intent on making headway on the wild raspberries and after a couple hours I had to physically pry my weed-pulling hand open. And I know I’ve been overusing my trowel if my wrist hurts when I try to hold my gin and tonic at the end of the day.

It was no mistake that I checked the ibuprofen supply a few days before a delivery of 30 yards of soil showed up at our house. Fifteen years ago I might have actually tried to tackle that with a wheelbarrow and a shovel, but now I’m smart enough to know that a job that big calls for machinery.

When our rental fell through, we called neighbors who own the perfect machine for the job — a tractor with a bucket loader. As you might imagine, such neighbors are quite popular at this time of the year, so I was surprised they answered our call and even more surprised that they said they’d help.

The four of us made short work of the massive pile with one person dumping soil and the other three raking it out. At one point I turned to my neighbor and said, “This is a good ab workout,” rather smugly considering that the activity counted as my daily exercise.

Two days later, my stomach muscles were indeed letting me know that they had been used, and a text message from my neighbor suggested I wasn’t alone.

But this was more of a reminder of working in the garden than the kind of relentless pain that the famous guitarist was reporting. “I won’t be able to walk for awhile, or sleep without a lot of assistance,” May said.

Which further begs the question of how in the world he managed to injure himself so badly gardening. May isn’t telling, but I have a suggestion for him: Next time, ask the neighbors for help.