Echoes from the Loafers’ Club Meeting:

What are you thinking about?

Nothing.

How can you think about nothing?

I pace myself.

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: a body at rest is probably a cat.

The cafe chronicles

The cafe was rural. The talk was cornversation. The breakfast special was cream of what. I attended a Loafers’ Club Meeting in Salina, Kansas. “Good morning to you,” one said.

“And the rest of the day to you,” I responded.

I asked one fellow how long he’d lived in Salina. He answered, “Sixty-eight years so far.”

He asked where I was from. I told him. He had spent time in Minnesota last winter. He added, “I wouldn’t want to be a cow in that weather.”

That was a good point, but I wouldn’t want to be a cow in any weather.

I told them that I take my wife to a snazzy restaurant regularly. On our anniversary, we go inside. That’s where we wait in line before being seated at their 17th to 23rd best table.

No hat trick

I was working at Kansas Wesleyan University in the Fitzpatrick Theatre. As I scanned the impressive audience, I noticed an odd thing. There were only two hats being worn, both of the baseball-cap variety. One was worn by a college-aged student and the other by a fellow of retirement age. It reminded me of my wife’s family reunion, the one with the good folding chairs. A prospective inductee into the clan wore a cap to the dinner table. Aunt Ingeborg told him to remove his cap in a voice loud enough to be heard by everyone in town except those with severe hearing loss. The young man, refusing to remove his cap, stormed off. Ingeborg said that it was no great loss.

Coach, cat, and Chevette

The coach exhorted us to get out there and bust a gut.

“Any questions?” he asked.

I had one, “My gut or someone else’s?”

What we had was a failure to communicate. It was like that cat and me. I was doing some yard work when I saw the feline. It wasn’t my cat. I didn’t want it there. I told the cat to scram. English wasn’t the cat’s first language. It watched me through eyes that saw me as a doofus with thumbs. It shared my yard with me.

The driver shared the road. Others could have everything in his exhaust fumes. His heap accelerated from 0 to 60 mph in less than a day, yet he raced from one traffic signal to the next. A dream catcher hung from the rearview mirror of his rusty, battered Chevette. He had some dreaming to do.

Life is like chasing a rainbow. You’ll never catch it. So you’d better enjoy the chase.

Customer comments

Dan Baffa of Salina, Kansas, told me that when he started smoking, he didn’t want his parents to know, so he’d make excuses to step outside to have a cigarette. One winter day, when he came back into the house, his mother said, “Cold weather can be hard on a smoker’s lungs.”

Henry Armknecht of Hays, Kansas, said that 98 percent of statistics are made up and the other 2 percent are wrong.

Roger Boatman of Champlin said his friend is such an Allis-Chalmers enthusiast that he wears orange underwear.

Jake Bursik of Wausau, Wisconsin, believes that Swedes invented the toilet seat, but it took a Norwegian to think of cutting a hole in it.

Walt Schmidt of Glendale, Arizona, told me that breaking a cookie before eating it, allows all the calories to escape.

Sharon Welch of Sturtevant, Wisconsin, said that a friend of hers from Phoenix, Arizona, carries potholders in the summer to use on her car door handles.

Don Lobitz said that Maynard Speece, one-time farm director on WCCO Radio, commented that there were six children in his family–three boys and three girls. Maynard added, “I was one of the boys.”