Echoes from the Loafers’ Club Meeting:

What are you doing?

I’m helping you.

I’m not doing anything.

I know. That’s why I’m willing to help.

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: There is a long line to anything that is free.

The cafe chronicles

The waitress told us that if she didn’t work there, she’d pay to get in. The food was better than eating my own cooking. I hadn’t eaten myself into next week. I’d had an elegant sufficiency. I sat back, comfortable in my food intake, and listened as a member at the table of infinite knowledge ordered everything well done. Even the green salad. He wanted all his food to be well done.

He was a worrier. He had thrown a boomerang away years ago and he still feared its return. He didn’t grow a garden. He found a supermarket more dependable. He gave up gardening the year that all the zucchini resembled LBJ. He considered himself an outdoorsman. He went camping–sort of. He takes the screens off his bedroom windows during the mosquito season. He’d found a way to make people like him. He finds out what they think about something and then he tells them that they are right. People find being declared a genius endearing.

Eating in the café is an elucidatory experience.

Syzygy

I was in the middle of three lanes headed north. The car on each side of me was of the same brand of car as I was driving. I don’t own a rare kind of automobile, but it’s not the most common either. Three passenger vehicles traveling in a parallel formation caused me to feel as if I’d won a game of tic-tac-toe. The coincidental arrangement was over faster than a dollar dinner. In astronomy, an alignment of three celestial objects, such as the sun, the earth and either the moon or a planet is called syzygy. Syzygy occurs at the time of full moon and new moon. And maybe when three homogenous vehicles journey shoulder-to-shoulder down a highway.

Part of the brunch bunch

I ate brunch with a friend. Brunch combines all of the excitement of breakfast and lunch. We shook hands when we met at the restaurant and watched others bump fists. I wondered what would be next, knocking elbows? My friend told me of the exploits of his dog Leonard as bad music annoyed the background. It was a poor version of the music played in the movies when wild horses are running on the screen. It was slightly better than static. The man said that his ex-wife had remarried. I congratulated him on acquiring a husband-in-law.

It was nice sharing a look ahead and a look back with a friend.

The next morning, I had breakfast with Pat Ryan of Janesville. We ate in St. Joseph’s where we were both teaching writing classes at a college. I waved at Pat as I drove out of the parking lot.

I didn’t look back. Many people maintain that we should never look back.

Pat’s Kia had refused to start. It needed a friend’s car to work the other end of the jumper cables. I wasn’t there.

I should have looked back.

An old coot talked about bald eagles on TV in New Orleans

Thank you to those who sent clips of my appearance on the FOX 8 News WVUE-TV in New Orleans. I was on a segment titled, “The Bald Eagle: A Louisiana Success Story.” It’s amazing to see bald eagles where once I couldn’t see them no matter how long or hard I looked.

Each eagle I see is a miracle, as is every other living thing. Except maybe chiggers and deer ticks. I’m proud to be a trustee of the American Bald Eagle Foundation that has helped with the eagle’s recovery. Louisiana was lovely and I delighted in doing the TV gig. The recovery of the bird that is our national emblem is encouraging, heartwarming and amazing.

Nature notes

Feed the monarch butterflies. There are a number of milkweed species native to Minnesota. Butterfly weed and clasping, common, fourleaf, green comet, oval-leaf (dwarf), poke, prairie (Sullivant’s), purple, showy milkweed, sidecluster (wooly), slimleaf (narrow-leaved), swamp, tall green and whorled milkweed. Meeting adjourned

Being kind to others is an easy way to be kind to yourself.