Echoes from the Loafers’ Club Meeting

That guy spends his days looking for something to be offended by.

It takes all kinds.

Yeah? Well, I’m offended by that.

Driving by Bruce’s drive

I have a wonderful neighbor named Bruce. Whenever I pass his driveway, thoughts occur to me, such as: I bought gas. It wasn’t for me. It was for my car. I went into the convenience store to pay for it because I don’t come close to trusting credit card readers on gas pumps as much as I should and a large share of them refuse to produce receipts. I paid with a card and signed my name on a screen. Have you looked at your signature on one of those credit card machines? As I peered at my scrawling signature, I knew it wasn’t mine. Oh, it was my name and it appeared to be spelled correctly, but it didn’t resemble my signature. Had there been an earthquake? Were my nose hairs on fire? Had someone else signed my name? That was it! It was signed by the same creature whose photo has taken the place of mine on my driver’s license.

The cafe chronicles

I’d see him at a local cafe when I was a boy. He was missing a couple of fingers. I assumed it was the result of a farm accident. I tried not to stare at his hand. I’d heard about phantom fingers and wondered if he could still feel the missing digits. He caught me looking at his hand and told me that he’d received a bad manicure at the butcher shop. That stuck with me. I’ve never once gotten a manicure in a butcher shop.

I had a speaking job in Red Deer, Alberta. I went to a cafe in that fine city. Sadly, I don’t recall its name. There were three men seated at a table, each nursing a cup of coffee. I asked if I might sit with them, adding that I didn’t want to intrude or drink their coffee. They welcomed me. One said, “Not many people want to sit with us.”

They asked where I was from. One asked if we had rats in Minnesota. I thought, “Oh, no! We’re going to talk politics.”

Instead, the three fine fellows insisted Alberta was free of rats. Alberta has waged a lengthy and vigilant war against the rodents. The province’s Agricultural Pests Act had made it an offense for property owners not to eradicate every rat they encountered. Private citizens may not keep white rats, hooded rats or any of the strains of domesticated Norway rats. White rats can be kept by only zoos, universities and colleges, and recognized research institutions in Alberta. There is a hotline to report rat sightings. I had the feeling they called that hotline the minute I’d left the cafe.

In local news

Man donates a kidney to his brother, who now has three of them.

The world’s smallest ball of twine discovered in local man’s shed.

Dry cleaners celebrates 50 years of working on the same spot.

Nature notes

I gazed at a wood duck box. Paul Peters of Ceylon told me that he’d seen wood ducklings jumping from a nest box. It’s an amazing thing to witness. A double-crested cormorant was perched with its wings spread on an open branch in order to dry its feathers after fishing. Cormorant feathers become soaked rather than shedding water like those of a duck. This is thought to help cormorants hunt underwater more effectively. Cormorants regurgitate pellets containing undigested parts of their meals such as bones just as an owl does.

Molt migration is when nonbreeding Canada geese and those that had failed at nesting fly northward in late May and early June, heading to remote waters, where they molt their flight feathers and feed on vegetation in an earlier state of growth to fuel the molt. They summer there and fly back here in September and October. Five weeks after the goslings hatch here, the adults molt, which renders them flightless until the goslings can fly at 9 to 10 weeks of age. That’s usually during the second half of July. Goslings are precocial. They hatch with eyes open, covered with down and leave the nest promptly. All passerines, such as robins, hatch with eyes closed, wearing little or no down, incapable of departing from the nest and are fed by the parents. The chicks of most songbirds (passerines) spend less time maturing in the egg and must spend more time developing in the nest.

Meeting adjourned

“Happiness is a byproduct of an effort to make someone else happy.”

– Gretta Palmer