Echoes From the Loafers’ Club Meeting

When I was a boy, we got only a couple of TV channels.

That’s a shame.

It was a good thing. We didn’t have a remote control.

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 watched a family eat at a highway rest area. Nasty weather had forced them to dine in the car. I counted six kids in the SUV, each eating French fries with ketchup. The restaurant couldn’t have had enough napkins. It’s a rare car that doesn’t hide a stale french fry. This has nothing to do with French fries, but I’ve found that I learn the most when I say that I don’t know.

My crowdom for a spatula

I watched five crows looking at flattened fauna on a highway. They seemed concerned as they stared at the roadkill that had been run over by many tires. It was obvious that the crow that was supposed to bring the spatula had forgotten it.

I quoted Red Green in the hopes that the crows found it helpful. “Remember, I’m pulling for ya. We’re all in this together.”

We all forget things.

A voice crying for peace

I was driving a tractor hitched to some implement that was changing the landscape. My mother brought lunch out for me. I was pleased. She seemed pleased, too, as she said, “I hope something is hot and something is cold and that they are the right things.”

I was in a packed Perkins wishing Mom could bring lunch. We had ordered. As we waited, I considered shooting a sanitary drinking straw wrapper across the table, something I do with uncanny accuracy. I’ve a compulsion to shoot straw wrappers because I’m a knucklehead.

A baby cried. I lowered my straw cannon. The baby kept crying, proving once that a baby’s cry is louder than 100 adult voices.

A bibliotaph

“The cat does not offer services,” William Burroughs wrote. “The cat offers itself.”

I write for a living, which means that I must write.

The cat sits next to me on the chair. She makes a sound whenever I sigh or groan. She is my mews.

A bibliotaph is a person who caches or hoards books.

I might be one. I’m trying to reform, but I love books.

Too many books and too few shelves put me on a book tour from my basement to the Friends of the Public Library Bookstore. The problem is that I greet books as old friends and reread them before donating them. I read of Christy Mathewson, a great pitcher in the early twentieth century. Mathewson won 373 games in 17 seasons and was among the first inductees into Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame. His memory was so sharp that he’d play eight teammates at a time in checkers. I don’t know anyone who takes on one other in checkers.

Perhaps the cat would play me?

Tales of a traveling man

I learned that the road to Hell, Michigan is paved in asphalt.

I felt guilty that while standing at The Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, believed by many to be the remains of a great Jewish temple, I thought of Emo Phillips who said, “So I’m at the wailing wall, standing there like a moron, with my harpoon.”

I stayed in Wood River, Nebraska. The owner of the place where I holed up had a Jack Russell puppy. Someone had wound up the canine. Around and around it ran. The carpeting was tattered from all the wear and terrier.

While visiting friends, Jim and Mary Lou King, in Juneau, I learned that their daughters had been born in Fairbanks on days when the temperature never got above 50 degrees below zero.

The news from Hartland

Echo Point goes silent. Name changed to Good Listener Point.

Man honored for 25-year career as sneezeguard security at buffet restaurant.

Winery received complaints about product. Owner said, “It sounds like sour grapes to me.”

Nature notes

Is the robin the harbinger of spring? Robins are seen here throughout the winter, sturdy survivors dependent upon fruit, berries and open water for sustenance. Overwintering robins look worn after battling the elements. Like us. The new migrants, mostly males, are noisier, fatter and look tan.