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Echoes from the

Loafers’ Club Meeting

My father never hugged me as a child.

That’s a shame.

He couldn’t. I wasn’t even born yet when he was a child.

Driving by Bruce’s drive

I have a wonderful neighbor named Bruce. Deep thoughts occur as I drive past his drive. As I drove by workers employing their skills to the maintenance of wind turbines, I asked myself if working at a wind farm was a breeze. The breeze smells like lilacs. It’s the time of the lilacs, which are native to Eastern Europe and Asia, and like other spring-blooming shrubs, develop flower buds for next year after blooming during the current year.

The brain cramp of the week

I’ve been told that the farther north I go in Florida, the farther south I get. I was in a hotel holding prom activities. I felt as if I were in Texas, where “crazy mom” and “prom” do more than rhyme. I hoped for a nice, quiet room away from everything, and I was away from everything except the ice machine and the vending machines. I spent the night listening to the rattling of ice cubes falling into a bucket and the thud of a vending machine completing a purchase. I didn’t shine like the morning sun.

I wrote something about a granddaughter graduating from college summa cum laude. It’s an outstanding achievement in a young life of shining moments. The problem was I spelled it suma cum laude. I knew better. It was a fumble on the goal line. My excuse was that I wrote late at night after a grueling workday. It’s challenging to do things that need to be done if you don’t get enough sleep. I’d been ridden hard and put up wet. The error dashed my hopes of ever graduating summa cum laude, but I might have a shot at graduating suma cum laude.

An exchange from a marriage’s laundry room

Husband: What setting should I use on the washing machine for my sweatshirt?

Wife: It depends. What does it say on the shirt?

Husband: Minnesota State Mavericks.

Bad jokes department

What’s made of brass and sounds like Tom Jones? Trombones.

Elon Musk has a twin who is much taller than he is. His name is Elongate Musk.

What did the farmer say when he couldn’t find his tractor? “Where’s my tractor?”

I’ve never picked my nose. I was born with it.

What has a bottom at the top? Legs.

Mark Twain died in 1910. Shania Twain was born in 1965. Never the Twain shall meet.

What does a giraffe have that no other animal has? Baby giraffes.

Nature notes

It rained pitchforks and angleworms. We weather storms. Birds help. I became a sunflower seed dispensary as I filled the feeders. Violets and dandelions bloomed profusely, and the flying flowers included indigo buntings, rose-breasted grosbeaks, red-headed woodpeckers, orchard orioles and Baltimore orioles. Palm warblers and house wrens foraged fetchingly. Yellow warblers provided the background music, singing about their sweetness. A mnemonic for their song is, “Sweet sweet sweet I’m so sweet.” The yard was blessed with white-throated sparrows, white-crowned sparrows and Harris’s sparrows. The Harris’s sparrows dwarfed the Lincoln’s sparrows. I felt birdified.

A Eurasian collared-dove male gave his distinctive koo-KOOOO-koo song to defend territories and attract mates. When excited or alarmed, they react with a loud hwaah, a call also given before alighting.

House sparrows have two or three broods a year and often reuse nests. They can build nests so close to others that the neighboring nests share walls.

Meeting adjourned

“I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say ‘bless you’ when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. ‘Don’t die,’ we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pickup truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, ‘Here, have my seat,’ ‘Go ahead—you first,’ ‘I like your hat.’”—Danusha Laméris. Be kind.