Echoes from the Loafers’ Club Meeting

“I hear someone stole gas from your place?”

“Yes.”

“You should have put a lock on the gas pump. You have no one to blame but yourself.”

“Maybe so, but I’m still blaming the thief.”

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: gratitude is what makes what I have into what I love.

Things I’ve learned

1. I can save money by using a facial tissue twice — first to clean my glasses and then to blow my nose. It must be in that order.

2. If I’m doing something that requires me to be on my hands and knees, I should find something else that needs doing while I’m down there.

3. If I can think of it, there is a website dedicated to it.

Don’t let the library burn

I was visiting a 98-year-old friend in her nursing home room. I was writing down some things she was telling me. She asked me why I was scribbling away. I told her that she knew things that nobody else knew and each time a person dies, it’s as if a library had burned to the ground. Some things need to be written down. She admitted to knowing about things that few alive had experienced. Then she added, “But I could tell you anything. Who is going to call me a liar?”

Our changing landscape

I drive about the countryside and remember farm places that are no longer there. Small farms that have become part of large farms. I recall families and names that lived on farms that have disappeared without a trace. I come by such recollections naturally. I can remember riding in an old Pontiac with my father as he waved a hand toward a shopping mall or housing development and said, “I remember when all of this was nothing but farmland.”

I remember old farmhouses that made way for more farmland.

From the neighborhood

My neighbor Marcus Absent teaches Political Science 101 at the local community college. He covers the two-party system like so, “There once were two cats of Kilkenny. Each thought there was one cat too many. So they fought and they fit, and they scratched and they bit, till excepting their nails, and the tips of their tails, instead of two cats, there weren’t any.”

I want patience — now

I wanted things I didn’t have. That was because I didn’t always want the things I had. I didn’t just want things, I wanted instant gratification. Bertrand Russell wrote, “To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”

We were without things, but we had plastic silverware. We had the good plastic silverware when I was a boy. It came with purchased dinners and my mother thought the plastic utensils too good to throw away. She washed and reused them until better silverware appeared. She had perfected deferred gratification.

Walter Mischel is a psychologist who offered a marshmallow to each of a group of preschoolers. If a child could resist eating the marshmallow, he or she was given two marshmallows instead of one. Mischel discovered a correlation between the marshmallow experiment and the children’s future achievements. A child who waited for the second marshmallow was more successful in school and career.

I’m going to wait for the second marshmallow and eat it with the good plastic silverware.

Nature notes

“Is it a good idea to burn a tick off my body?” No. Removing the tick promptly is crucial, since the likelihood of contracting a disease or infection rises sharply after 24 hours. Traumatizing the tick with heat carries a risk of making it regurgitate, increasing the chance of infection. Instead, grasp the tick close to the skin with tweezers and pull it gently straight up. Then clean the area with a disinfectant.