Echoes from the Loafers’ Club Meeting

“You’ve lost weight.”

“I started running. I don’t think anything of running five miles before breakfast.”

“I don’t think much of it either.”

Driving by the Bruces

I have two wonderful neighbors—both named Bruce—who live across the road from each other. Whenever I pass their driveways, thoughts occur to me, such as: actions speak louder than bumper stickers.

You are getting older if

1. You attend an organ recital at a hospital.

2. The image in the mirror is one of your parents.

3. You remember when there were dime stores instead of dollar stores.

Chores

One of my chores as a small boy was to walk through the potato plants growing in the peat ground of Mule Lake and pick off the potato bugs. I grabbed the pests and dropped them into a pail of soapy water. It was meaningful work and I was inspired by my love of potatoes.

One day, a bug crawled from the pail and dropped to the ground. I stepped on the escapee. It was a mashed potato bug.

Can’t coast through life

I was a whippersnapper when a friend told me that he turned off the engine of his car when he coasted into the driveway of his home. He wanted to park the car near the garage while making as little noise as possible. Parents are funny about late hours. Most of them said things like, “Nothing good ever happens after midnight.”

I thought about trying to coast into my yard, but the driveway was uphill from mailbox to parking place.

Baseball

A neighboring school had gotten a pitching machine. I’d never used one before, but when the opponents’ coach allowed us to try it; I found my way to the head of the line of batters.

“Put on a helmet,” the coach barked at me.

I did as ordered.

The machine’s first pitch hit me on the rear. I needed a bigger helmet.

A ministerial miscalculation

The pastor told me that he had been asked to visit a hospitalized parishioner who was not much of a churchgoer. He didn’t know her well, but was pleased to pay her a visit. He checked at the desk in the hospital, learned the room number, and knocked on an opened door before entering. He introduced himself and the woman seemed pleased to see him. They talked about the things you talk about in such visits—the weather, family, health. The pastor couldn’t believe how the woman had changed. She didn’t look anything like he remembered. When it came time for him to leave, he told her that he would be back and hoped he would see her in church when she got out of the hospital. The woman thanked him for visiting, but said she wouldn’t likely be attending his church. She never missed church—the Baptist church. The pastor was Lutheran. He had visited the wrong room.

The winds came early

The fellow from Glencoe shared a story of a tornado that had hit his farm. He said that he had taken down an old concrete stave silo right before the winds hit. A neighbor dropped by a few days after the storm. The visitor looked at the empty spot once occupied by the silo.

“Isn’t that amazing?” said the neighbor. “It took every block.”

The man said that he should have told his neighbor the truth and he meant to, but the subject never came up again.

Thermostat wars

The latest peace talks ended this way, “Oh, you’re not hot. You just think you’re hot.”

A sign of the times

Seen on a small-town business, “Open as many as five days a week from 9 to 5, more or less.

Nature notes

The cicada killer is a solitary wasp up to 2 inches long with a black body marked with yellow across the thorax and abdomen. The wasps appear in July and August. Cicada killer wasps dig holes in bare areas of lawns, gardens, flowerbeds, golf course sand traps, and sand volleyball courts. The males do not sting. The females can sting, but are difficult to provoke. They feed on flower nectar and sap. Cicada killer females sting and paralyze cicadas. The female wasp straddles its prey, flies off with it, and caches it in a burrow. The wasp lays a single egg in the paralyzed, still living cicada and seals the tunnel. When the egg hatches, the wasp grub eats the cicada. Cicadas are large insects, sometimes improperly called “locusts,” that drone loudly in the trees during summer.

Meeting adjourned

Make a good day. Be kind.

Hartland resident Al Batt’s column appears every Tuesday.