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Echoes from the

Loafers’ Club Meeting

I defeated a black belt yesterday.

Wow! Way to go.

Thanks. Next week, I’m taking on a red sock.

Driving by Bruce’s drive

I have a wonderful neighbor named Bruce. Whenever I pass his drive, thoughts occur to me. I taught a class on birds at a college. A sock was tacked to a bulletin board among the assorted papers, advertising, travel opportunities and upcoming seminars. I watched for someone wearing just one sock.

My neighbor Crandall wants to get a bigger truck. He needs one that will allow him to stand up, throw his hands in the air and then sit back down as if he’s a one-man undulating wave in the stands at a basketball game. It’s a state law that drivers on a country road must wave as a greeting. Well, it’s not really a law, but it’s expected we acknowledge a fellow traveler. We wave at strangers and non-strangers. No one wants another to think he’s gotten too big for his britches. My signature wave is an index finger extended in a one-digit wag. My father left that flip to me in his will. I’ve tried a two-finger wave but found it a bit ostentatious. Some wavers use the entire hand to make sure people know they aren’t uppity. You get more exercise that way and that’s good, as we’re more likely to find extra fries than exercise in a vehicle. Others wave as if they’re wiping the windshield as a signal they aren’t stuck up.

The wind sighed through the trees on a day with a sky as gray as cement. Snow was coming. We snowed all year long when I was a boy. It covered the picture on our TV. We didn’t have to shovel it and you couldn’t build a snowman out of it, but we needed to move the rabbit ears antenna around to make the snow go away, which it seldom did. The reception on our old TV came in three categories: snowy, snowier and snowiest, but time flies and so do I. One of the most common dreams people have is about flying. I don’t dream about flying because I lost my luggage the last time I did. Money can’t buy happiness unless you’re flying. I walked like an innocuous zombie through first class to get to my last class seat in the airplane’s wayback (like the rear of an old station wagon but not as nice), which offered a lovely view out the rear window. I wondered what those in first class did for a living. They read the Wall Street Journal while I sat in the back, making shadow puppets with an overhead reading light.

I’ve learned

Wearing a kilt is a breeze.

A boss is put on earth to give us all hope that no matter how bad we are at our jobs, we could become a boss one day.

Those who believe in aliens from outer space are aliens from outer space, whether or not they know it.

My fear of tsunamis comes in waves.

May you live as long as you want and never want as long as you live is an Irish toast. Bread, eggs, butter, milk, cinnamon and maple syrup is a French toast.

Three thousand twenty-seven years from today, life will be either sublime or dreadful because it’ll be 5050.

Nature notes

I saw several inert bodies of wild turkeys hit by cars. The big birds can be stubborn about surrendering a road, but I’ve fond memories of spreading my fingers and outlining them in pencil on construction paper to create a make-believe turkey in grade school.

A chipmunk appeared to have impacted wisdom teeth. A chipmunk’s cheek pouches are like cargo pants and can expand up to three times their normal size to allow the chipmunk to carry food. National Geographic reports that a hardworking chipmunk can gather 165 acorns in a single day. In his book “Winter World,” Bernd Heinrich counted 60 sunflower seeds packed into one cheek pouch. In a good year, one 4-ounce chipmunk can stockpile 8 pounds of food and do it without renting a single storage unit. Caching food allows an industrious chipmunk to snack while watching Netflix on nasty winter days. A reader reported one chipmunk stuffing 31 corn kernels before taking its food to go. An interesting fact: Most chipmunks are named Chip, Dale, Alvin, Simon or Theodore.

Meeting adjourned

A shopper eating a test grape tossed money into the kettle. It was one of many acts of kindness I encountered while ringing bells for the Salvation Army.