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Echoes from the

Loafers’ Club Meeting

I need an appointment.

How about 10 tomorrow morning?

No, thanks, I need only one appointment.

Driving by Bruce’s drive

I have a wonderful neighbor named Bruce. Whenever I pass his drive, thoughts occur to me. It’s been a gentle winter. January didn’t have too many days, and I could have done most of my snow shoveling with a spatula. The groundhog saw its shadow on Groundhog Day, so we’ll have six more weeks before we need to take down the Christmas decorations. I’d come to a spork in the road. It’s hard to know what to do when that happens. I had to go somewhere, so I headed west to a cafe where one size of fries fits all.

“Go west, young man, go west,” was an expression first used by John Babsone Lane Soule in the Terre Haute Express in 1851. It appealed to Horace Greeley, who rephrased it slightly in an editorial in the New York Tribune in 1865: “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.”

I enjoyed a hamburger and fries for lunch. For dinner, I made myself a cheese sandwich. Why? Because I was hungry and I knew how to make a cheese sandwich. One slice of bread had a hole in it where the baker had crawled through. Minimal flavor had escaped. It was all good.

I’ve learned

I’ve never bought a pillow.

The car you need to pay the most attention to when driving is the car behind the car in front of you.

I really brightened the day for my wife’s birthday. I changed a couple of light bulbs.

Geology rocks, but geography is where it’s at. I had a schoolmate who was so bad at geography, he could never find the classroom.

Mothers hear you when you’re quiet.

A mature alligator has 80 teeth. They have no molars for crushing and grinding food before they swallow it. Lost teeth are replaced. An alligator may go through 2,000 to 3,000 teeth in its lifetime. And they never floss.

My neighbor Crandall called the front desk of a hotel where he was a guest and told the clerk he couldn’t find the door to get out of his room. He said that one door went to the bathroom, one allowed entry to the closet, and the other had a “Do not disturb” sign on it.

Some people interpret three consecutive sneezes as a sign of good luck, that someone is thinking positively about you or that you’re about to receive a blessing.

I was traveling during a recent spring when I found angry hailstones. My car had substantial hail damage, plus it had a couple of extra dents, which were door dings given anonymously by generous people. I couldn’t include that damage in my insurance claim. I have to look at myself in the mirror each day. That can be hard enough to do without a guilty conscience.

Bad jokes department

How can I tell if there is an elephant in my refrigerator? The door won’t close.

Parallel lines have so much in common, it’s a shame they’ll never meet.

Without a doubt, my favorite movie starring Robin Williams is “Mrs. Fire.”

I put an ad in the newspaper: “Wanted: Someone to hand-feed me my Doritos so my fingers won’t become orange. No weirdos.”

Nature notes

Some horned larks spend the winter in southern Minnesota, while those that had migrated, begin returning to Minnesota in early February through late March. Horned larks get their name from the black feathers protruding above their heads. The only lark native to North America creeps along bare ground searching for tiny seeds. When flushed into flight by a car, a horned lark looks pale with a blackish tale.

The courteous winter weather makes me expect a bountiful crop of fawns in May and June. I saw a pair of red-tailed hawks perched on a utility pole. Crows stood on top of road-killed deer and raccoons. The birds posed as if they were big-game hunters. Three trumpeter swans flew over. Minnesota has the highest population of trumpeters in the lower 48 states, about 55,000. I smelled skunk and spring in the air. An amorous skunk has a 4-square-mile territory. Great horned owls hunt them. A male skunk is called a buck and a female a doe. You might recall this exchange from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

Lou Grant: “You got a lotta skunk.”

Mary Richards: “Why thank you, Mr. Grant.”

Lou Grant: “I HATE skunk.”

Lou Grant, played by Ed Asner, said “spunk,” not “skunk.”

Meeting adjourned

Make yourself useful. Be kind.