Echoes From the Loafers’ Club Meeting
An anonymous stranger paid for my lunch yesterday.
I’ll bet he did it because you dress like a bum.
I call it dressing for success, like someone who is getting a free lunch.
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: People are fond of saying that they don’t make cars like they used to. That’s true and it’s a good thing. Automobiles are made so much better that they used to be. Putting 100,000 miles on a vehicle was once a reason for a great celebration. Now it means that a car is barely broken in. I have driven many portable junkyards in my life. They were battered and rusty hulks that no one in their right mind would want to park next to. One was such a rattletrap that while sitting at a stop light, people would run up to the car and ask me if anyone was hurt in the accident.
The cafe chronicles
I grew up eating tongue. Tongue sandwiches weren’t common, but they weren’t rare either. I come across it at some meals at churches and typically eat a bit of tongue at those feeds. My wife tried tongue once. She wasn’t fond of eating something that might taste her back. Tongue can be chewy. I thought of that while watching a patron of a cafe as he used a knife to saw away at his steak with no effect. He called the server over and complained about the tough piece of meat. The server looked at the customer's plate and announced, "I’m sorry, but I can't take it back because you have already bent it."
I ate prime rib. It’s not my favorite food. It was pretty rare. I’m not saying it was raw, but had I been a veterinarian, I think I could have saved the cow. The prime rib ate my corn.
Men who stare at toilet paper
One year, for our anniversary, I took my wife to a giant Costco store. It was supposed to be a surprise and she was surprised. The Costco store was as big as an imagination. The big box store stretched from here to way over there. We weren’t members, but I had obtained free passes for one day. We could look, but we couldn't buy anything. That was my kind of shopping trip. I did spend some time admiring the mountain of toilet paper there. It was impressive and would have been a challenge to climb.
Recently, I talked with a spokesman for Costco who told me that their biggest seller was toilet paper. Toilet paper makes up nearly 0.4 percent of the total revenue of the large warehouse chain.
A scene from a marriage
I asked, "Have you seen...?"
"It’s in the middle drawer on the right," my wife replied.
"Did you...?"
"Yes, I did."
"What time is...?”
"You need to be there by 4:30,” she answered.
We’ve been married a long time.
The dog was at the door. It wanted out.
I was at another door, trying to remember why I’d come into the room.
I remember when we had a puppy that insisted on chewing up my wife's shoes. One day, the pup was caught red-handed chewing on one of her high-heels. My wife asked me, "Can't you do something about that?"
I could.
I did.
I chewed up her other shoe so they'd still be a matched set.
School daze
"What is this?" asked the teacher.
"It's a drawing of a cow eating grass,” responded the student.
"Where's the grass?"
"The cow ate it all."
"Then, where's the cow?" wondered the teacher.
"It left because there was no more grass to eat."
Nature notes
Flowers look happy, don’t they?
A flock of flowers makes a heap of a view.
One of the happiest of looks is provided by the oxeye daisy that was brought over from Europe in the 1800s, escaped into the wild and became an aggressive, invasive breeder. I see it in roadsides, trail edges, fields and other disturbed soils. The flowers are white with yellow central discs that bloom all summer. The plant spreads by horizontal stems growing below the soil surface, called rhizomes, that form roots and produce new plants, and by tufted seeds dispersed by the wind. It’s one of the parents of the Shasta daisy. Maybe that's what the flowers are so happy about?
Meeting adjourned
Treat everyone kindly. Don’t do it because they are nice, but because you are.