Echoes from the Loafers’ Club Meeting

“My cousin is having his tonsils put back in.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because his insurance will pay for it.”

Driving by the Bruces

I have two wonderful neighbors — both named Bruce — who live across the road from each other. Whenever I pass their driveways, thoughts occur to me, such as: Congress is where someone speaks, says nothing, nobody listens, and they all disagree.

Things I’ve learned

1. I don’t believe in astrology. I think it’s because I’m a Pisces.

2. I had all of the answers once. Now I have all of the questions.

3. If you want someone to hear his or her name, whisper it.

You’re getting older

1. If by the time you get used to a change, it has changed again.

2. If you’ve never forgotten an important thing — at least not that you can remember.

3. If you carry more than you should because you worry that if you make a second trip, it might not be a round trip.

The perils of painting

I remember when “don’t let the bedbugs bite” was a cute saying not a warning. My mother said that before tucking me in each night. In the winter, I nestled comfortably under an aged quilt the weight of an army tank in a room nearly as cold as the outdoors. The windows in my bedroom grew frost so thick that they made better doors than windows. I grew up in an old farmhouse built without such niceties as insulation or central heating. My mother didn’t see a new house in her future so she painted the old one repeatedly. After a restful night’s sleep, I would stumble downstairs to a living room of a different color than it had been the night before. I’m not sure when she slept. She was perfectly capable of coloring her own world, but I sometimes helped my mother paint a room. She favored a white paint of one of 2,143 varying shades of white offered at Einar’s Hardware. I wore white clothes to match the paint. I needn’t have done that. I wouldn’t have employed a brush for long before whatever color clothing I was wearing would have become white. I was an enthusiastic but sloppy painter. I needed flesh-colored paint to match me.

Café chronicles

I ordered the special and drifted off into a pleasant state of salivation as I waited for the meal to arrive. The waitress returned with bad news. They were out of the special. I was Charlie Brown about to kick the football. She was Lucy, pulling the football away at the last moment. She recommended another meal. The replacement food was divine and I enjoyed epicurean delights of the utmost degree while other diners talked on cell phones. Jimmy Fallon said, “A new study found that the average child is more likely to own a cell phone than a book. I guess that would explain why he’s average.” I am a cell phone user and a book lover. A woman in the booth adjacent mine was talking on her cell phone when it slipped from her hands, fell into her coffee cup, and dumped the hot beverage into her purse. I felt sorry for her, even after I heard her exclaim, “Oh, no! Not again!”

Nature notes

“What are those webbed things in the trees?” Eastern tent caterpillars construct silken webs in the forks of deciduous tree branches, especially fruit trees such as apple, plum, crabapple, hawthorn, chokecherry, and cherry. The hairy caterpillar is bluish-black with a whitish-yellow stripe running the length of its back and is two inches long when fully grown. Eastern tent caterpillars normally emerge in April or May. During the heat of the day or in rainy weather, the caterpillars remain within the tent. They emerge to feed on leaves in the early morning, evening, or at night when not too cold. The feeding disfigures trees but typically doesn’t result in permanent damage unless the feeding is severe. Populations fluctuate with outbreaks occurring every few years. An easy non-chemical method to manage eastern tent caterpillars is to wait until evening or rainy days when the caterpillars are in their webbing, then pull it and the caterpillars from the tree. Then destroy the insects. The adult moths appear in June and July.

“I’ve seen mosquitoes as big as eagles or at least an inch long. Are they dangerous?” They may resemble them but they are not mosquitoes. They are crane flies and do not suck your blood or kill mosquitoes.

Meeting adjourned

The kind word that could change a life or settle a dispute is often unspoken.