Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Echoes from the Loafers’ Club Meeting

I’m going to see the doctor.

Which doctor?

No, the regular kind.

Driving by Bruce’s drive

I have a wonderful neighbor named Bruce. Whenever I pass his drive, thoughts occur to me. I rang the bells for the Salvation Army and greeted people by telling them how happy I was to see them and hoped they’d find happy surprises in their days. I thanked those who donated and I thanked those who did not. In January, “Cold enough for you?” replaces “hello” as a greeting. I answered my landline for a week in January that way. No one said anything about me being stranger than normal.

I sat at a table with friends. As we ate breakfast, I noticed I had an elbow on the table, one man wore a hat and another looked at his cellphone. I wondered what my mother would have said. “No elbows on the table.” “Take off that hat!” “What in the world is that thing you’re looking at?”

A school custodian is a normal person only cooler

I was in a high school gym, picking up the detritus in the bleachers after a basketball game. I put the popcorn boxes, programs, etc. into the trash or recycling. I visited for a minute with the school’s custodian doing the same thing. Custodians were superheroes during my school years. They knew how to do everything. The custodian told me he hadn’t been at the job long and I asked if he’d found anything surprising about the position. He replied quickly that a bigger toilet paper is used more quickly than a smaller roll near it. I remember being in a busy restroom during a college event. A man knocked on all the stall doors, hoping to find a vacancy. When he knocked on one door, a voice behind it said, “Come in.”

Happy New Year

I hope you become even more outstanding and can spend more time with the real people in your real world. I wish you 365 days of dazzling good things.

Rodney Dangerfield classics 

I tell ya, I get no respect from anyone. I bought a cemetery plot. The guy said, “There goes the neighborhood.”

I told my mother, “I’m gonna run away from home.” She said, “On your mark…”

When I was a kid, I got no respect. When I went on the roller coaster, my old man told me to stand up straight.

I get no respect at all. When I was a kid, I lost my parents at the beach. I asked a lifeguard to help me find them. He said, “I don’t know kid, there are so many places they could hide.”

Nature notes

I did a Christmas Bird Count with Terry Dorsey of Austin. We talked about many things. Terry told me of his love of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He asked if I knew how to prevent the peanut butter from sticking to the roof of my mouth. I didn’t. He divulged the secret — eat the sandwich upside down. That might prove helpful one day—or not.

I put peanuts in the shell into a feeder for the jays. I imagined them saying, “Found a peanut, found a peanut, found a peanut just now. Just now I found a peanut, found a peanut just now.” A happy blue jay is a blue jay weighing a peanut just as a bowler does when searching for the perfect heft to a bowling ball filled with strikes. A jay flew to the feeder, selected a peanut in the shell and flew to a tree. It flew back to the feeder with the peanut still in its bill. It dropped the goober onto the feeder and took another peanut more to its liking. The bird returned the food. I suppose the best-if-used-by date of the peanut had expired.

My morning started with a shower. I hoped to clear the cobwebs from my mind. The invigorating stream of water hadn’t been hitting me for long before I noticed I wasn’t alone in the shower. What does a spider think when it finds a man in its shower? I don’t know, but I know what I did. I said, “Good morning, spider, I hope you’ll have a pleasant day.” Why do spiders have eight legs and insects only six? Because if spiders had only six legs, they’d be insects. There probably isn’t any definitive reason spiders have eight legs and insects six. Scorpions, harvestmen, ticks and all arachnids have four pairs of legs.

Meeting adjourned

“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.” — Jack Kerouac.