Right-Thinking Alamedans Must Act to Stop Leaf-Huggers from Raking Havoc

Dear Roger,

As I was parking my car in front of my next-door neighbor's house (which shouldn't have to be — there is a parking crisis in my neighborhood, but that's for a different letter), I noticed a nice-looking young man with a great suntan working on the aforementioned neighbor's front yard. Normally I would be in favor of this, except that he started using an old-fashioned RAKE to clean up the fallen leaves. I was mortified!

How can gardeners be doing something so egregious as using a rake, when they know perfectly well that everybody uses the more convenient leaf blowers. For a moment there, I thought I was in the third world. What's next - hanging your clothes from a clothesline in the name of "saving energy"? I looked around and wondered if any of my neighbors saw this embarrassing display. I would have scolded the young man and told him to get a respectable leaf blower, but his rake was making such a loud scrape-scrape-scrape sound that he wouldn't have been able to hear me.

I don't want to live in the kind of Alameda where people use stone-age tools to get the job done. I hereby call upon Mayor Johnson and the rest of the City Council to pass a ban on rakes and mandating that our gardeners make use of leaf blowers. And not those wimpy electrical-powered ones, it needs to be the industrial-strength gasoline-powered ones.

Love,
Gladys Nachu