Echoes from the Loafers’ Club Meeting:

Take a look at these lovely stamps I got at the post office.

Nice. I wonder what you have to do to get your picture on a stamp?

You need to have a really tiny head.

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: If you don’t know where you’re going, every road will get you there. It’s too bad junk food doesn’t taste like junk. Good things come to those who wait, but the line could be long.

Where’s Waldo the woolly bear?

I’d spoken at one thing and was driving to speak at another a couple of hours away. Farmers were busy in the fields and woolly bear caterpillars crossed the roads. They do cross the roads, seldom traveling down a road. Woolly bears have long been used as winter weather forecasters. The darker the caterpillar, the harsher the winter is supposed to be. The bands on a woolly bear are more of a measure of a caterpillar’s age and of past weather than a prediction of an upcoming winter, but I enjoy looking at them anyway. I’d decided to take a photo of one of the tiny travelers. I pulled over on a quiet rural road to snap a picture.

I quickly noticed that the quiet road had combines coming towards me in two directions. I needed to move before the combines made it impossible. I made an executive decision and grabbed the woolly bear to photograph later. The woolly bear curled into a ball in my hand. I placed it into a cup holder, planning to pull into a rest area for the photo shoot. I watched the little thing struggle to get out of the cup holder. It was unable to escape. A radio show about the 1945 World Series between the Tigers and Cubs distracted me. By the time I saw the rest area sign, the woolly bear was no longer in the cup holder. I searched the car. I did so twice more when arriving home late that night. I used a powerful flashlight, but couldn’t find the Houdini of woolly bears. I hope it escaped from the car. I feel terrible about the lost woolly worm, but I hope it means that we’ll have a nice winter.

Don’t give any beer to the donkey

I was in Hungary. I stopped at a place to eat. I opted for outdoor seating on a lovely day. The waitress was harried but happy. Her English was good and before I ordered, she told me, “Please do not give beer to the donkey.”

I hadn’t considered doing that. I looked at the donkey standing under a tree. The donkey looked at me seated at a table. I’d had experience with donkeys, trying to ride them while playing donkey baseball and basketball for fundraisers.

I ordered goulash. What else? I was in Hungary. I like goulash. The goulash of the school lunch program of my youth was delicious.

The Hungarian goulash was sublime. While I ate, I watched a fellow get up to refill his glass. While he was gone, the donkey ate his goulash.

He’d probably given the donkey beer.

The cat cemetery

When I was a boy, I shared the caretaker duties of a cat cemetery located near our outhouse with Georgette, my niece. We also shared an age. My family milked cows, which meant that people thought we could never have enough cats. There were people who presented cats to us proudly. There were anonymous givers who dropped felines off at the farm. Add the ability of the resident farm cats to be fruitful and multiply, and we had countless cats. We were kids, so we named the cats. The outdoors isn’t kind to cats. There are critters, cars, hunters, dogs, diseases, and cat haters willing to kill cats. Cats died.

Whenever a cat tipped over, there were funeral services. I presided over many a feline funeral. Georgette’s role was to shed tears and inscribe the tombstones with a proper epitaph. She’d find something nice about the deceased to chalk on the red bricks from an old chimney. Things like, “Here lies Fluffy. He always shared his milk with others.” There was always a cat named Fluffy somewhere in our herd of cats. I called the rows of small bricks Fluffy Field.

Meeting adjourned

Now is the time to say all those nice things you should have said.