Echoes from the Loafers’ Club Meeting

“How do you like the pie?”

“Filling.”

“Thank you.”

“No, I mean that I just lost one in the pie.”

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: I’m happy when an antsy driver zooms past me. I’d rather he be ahead of me than behind me.

Things I’ve learned

1. Boarding an airplane makes a person need to go to the bathroom.

2. Into each life a little rain must fall. Especially if the roof leaks.

3. Wife isn’t fair.

Those thrilling days of yesteryear

I came into the house as a boy who loved exploring the world by getting as much of the world on me as possible. I’d been investigating one of the sloughs that dotted our farm and it was impossible to do that without becoming covered in mud.

Mother had guests as I tramped into the kitchen. I looked like a wild boy raised by crawdads. Apparently, a guest raised an eyebrow because my mother said loud enough for all to hear, “Dirt doesn’t hurt.”

Café chronicles

It was nearly noon when I walked into the restaurant. Once seated, I became all too aware of the fact that I was the only customer in the establishment. Did everyone else know something I didn’t know? Maybe the cook went out for lunch. A waitress took my order. Time passed and the waitress returned with a plate and asked me, “Are you the turkey?”

I didn’t know how to answer that question. Everyone else knew what I did not, so I qualified as a turkey, but I didn’t order turkey. I had ordered a beef commercial.

I waited alone for my beef commercial.

Destructive forces at work

I stepped on an anthill the other day. I didn’t mean to. There were so many of them that it was hard not to step on one. I felt guilty about it. They are such industrious creatures, poring over blueprints before laboring long and hard in building a home. Then along I come and step on it. I could almost hear tiny ant voices saying, “Oh, man!” I suspect that once an anthill is completed, the ants begin worrying about the Big Foot in the sky.

The underdeck zoo

My wife and I have a deck on our home. For those who live in the country, a deck is a word meaning “zoo.” One day, there was a chipmunk, groundhog, skunk, and raccoon under the deck. True, the raccoon was dead, but it still made its presence known. The star of the show was the chipmunk. It scurried up the downspout of an eaves trough in order to escape humans. There it could have hid unnoticed by human eye. Except that once inside the spout, it chipped loudly. A chip amplified by the downspout.

Nature notes

The boy told me that hotdogs were growing in a marsh. Cattails grow in wetlands. The spikes resemble hotdogs, but each one is thousands of tiny flowers. Native American tribes used them for bedding, pillows, bandages, and diapers. Modern Americans have used them for insulation, lifejackets, and soundproofing. The leaves of cattails are used to weave baskets, mats, and chair seats. Cattail marshes provide nesting habitat for rails, bitterns, coots, wrens, sparrows, and blackbirds. Muskrats feed on and use cattails to construct their houses that Canada geese often use as nest sites. Cattail marshes act as natural water filters.

From the mailbag

Alan Walter of Carrollton, OH writes, “While widening an entrance to an abandoned field at my farm, I got into old woven and barbed wire that was installed in the 1960s. It was smashed to the ground and rusty but still too strong to break by hand without considerable effort and multiple back-and-forth bending cycles on each strand. Why is it that things that you’d like to rust away won’t and things that you don’t want to (like your truck) do?”

Meeting adjourned

Henry Ward Beecher wrote, “Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.” Be kind.

It’s on my resume

I was a college student during the day and worked at a gas station nights. It was a full-service enterprise. I pumped the fuel of choice for happy motorists. I checked the air in the tires, measured the engine’s oil level, inspected the radiator, gave directions, told jokes, and washed the windshield and the windows. That’s how I got the job. The fellow before me was fired because he wouldn’t do windows.