Echoes from the Loafers’ Club Meeting

I’m willing to give up being a billionaire if it’ll help the economy.

You’re not a billionaire.

I know. That’s why I’m willing to give it up.

Driving by Bruce’s drive

I have a wonderful neighbor named Bruce. Whenever I pass his drive, thoughts occur to me, such as: I’d pulled grapevines down from a spruce tree. They were well above my head. As I pulled the plants, stuff fell. Bits of vegetation and insects showered down upon me. I was happy to be done with that job. I needed to move on. I had ants in my pants. Harvey Benson of Harmony told me that when his funeral comes around many years from now, he is going to request malted milkshakes be served at it. He wants people to be happy, not sad.

Memories of Mercurochrome

An auxiliary dog was yapping and yipping, keeping the world safe from squirrels. We talked whenever the dog took a breath. The man had been thinking about a knee replacement. I try not to think of such things. “I’ve never hit a deer,“ he said. A person should never say that. It’s tempting the fates. I worry now that he’ll be thinking about a fender replacement, too.

He claimed his talent wasn’t in remembering. It was in forgetting. He tried to remember what his mother had applied to his scraped knees. I offered “Mercurochrome,” but that wasn’t it. I said that memory is slippery and ephemeral. The best way to remember is to “fuhgeddaboudit.”

In the mob movies, that word usually followed a mobster saying, “Thanks for taking care of that thing we talked about.”

Stop chasing it and you’ll remember it.

It was a rare day when I didn’t suffer a cut or scrape. If my mother learned of my injury, she had me follow her to the dreaded medicine cabinet. There were two choices of treatment available, not counting the ubiquitous Watkins Petroleum-Carbo First Aid Salve.

Mercurochrome was a topical antiseptic used for minor cuts and scrapes. It was a trade name for merbromin, a compound containing mercury and bromine. The other was iodine, which required a cage match to get on my scrape. It burned like fire on a wound. For that reason, I favored Mercurochrome. It was relatively painless. Mercurochrome came in a little bottle with a glass dropper attached to the cap’s inside. The dropper was dipped in the tincture and used to paint the surface of a wound. I called it monkey blood because it left a reddish-orange stain on my skin, like a pre-scab sunrise. I wore monkey blood as a badge of honor as only one who’d been seriously wounded and survived could.

We talked of other things. Then as suddenly as he’d forgotten, he remembered. The man told me that his mother used Merthiolate, a trade name for thimerosal, a compound containing mercury and sodium. He said it had a definite sting factor.

I don’t recall it residing in our medicine cabinet, but we both agreed that it was important to blow on the wound after a topical antiseptic was applied.

I think those antiseptics were replaced with Bactine in most households. Petro Carbo-Salve persists.

Nature notes

I’m thrilled by all the monarch butterflies I’m seeing on the blazing stars. Their caterpillar population is high on the yard’s milkweed. Eastern tiger swallowtail butterflies wander through the air. Wild cucumber blooms. This annual vine with white flowers climbs upon fences, shrubs and trees. Goldenrod and jewelweed flower. Jack-in-the-pulpit berries are green. Prickly ash has berries that smell like citrus. Swallows gather on utility wires in preparation for migration. They join dragonflies in feeding on ant swarms. Tree swallows tend to glide more than other swallow species. I saw flying grasshoppers. These are Carolina grasshoppers. Ruby-throated hummingbirds visit feeders and flowers. The last one is typically seen in my yard the last week of September each year. A young male cardinal, becoming redder by the day, and a bald-headed blue jay are frequent visitors to my feeding stations. I saw a chunky, black cricket scurry into the garage. It was a field cricket. Not much later, I listened to the songs of snowy tree crickets. These green insects are our temperature crickets. Count the number of songs given in 14 seconds and add 40 to yield the temperature. They sound like sleigh bells. Nathaniel Hawthorne described their song as an “audible stillness,” adding this about the song of the snowy tree cricket, “If moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like that.”

Meeting adjourned

Be kind and listen to the person talking to you.