The doorway effect

ECHOES FROM THE LOAFER’S CLUB MEETING

  My wife says that I can be an idiot sometimes. That’s good to know.

  Why is that good to know?

  Rather than as an accusation, I take it as a permission to be myself.

 

DRIVING BY BRUCE’S DRIVE

  I have a wonderful neighbor named Bruce. Whenever I pass his drive, thoughts occur to me from the land of the tall yellow corn. I have a fear of speed bumps, but I'm slowly getting over it. There was a dead chicken on the road not far from our humble abode. I hope it hadn’t been trying to show the opossum that it was possible to cross the road.

 

I’VE LEARNED

  I hope gravy has a lot of vitamins.

 

  Psychologists believe that walking through doorways resets memory to make room for a new episode to emerge. This is the doorway effect. It involves a liminal space, a place of transition, a threshold between two points, signaling the end of one space and the beginning of another.

 

  The man said he was a good ventriloquist, and he wasn’t the only one saying it.

 

  The Anchorage, Alaska, Zoo has wolverines and polar bears. It isn’t a petting zoo. A polar bear can eat 100 pounds of seal blubber in a single sitting and would destroy Joey Chestnut in a hot dog eating contest.

 

  Gov. Wally Hickel of Alaska, also Secretary of the Interior under President Nixon, wanted to be buried upright and was buried vertically and facing toward Washington, D.C., so he could keep an eye on it, at the Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery.

 

  Seeing a Bigfoot is no small feet.

 

  When I step onto a scale, I remind myself that wisdom is heavy.

 

  The Magic 8 Ball was an early version of AI.

 

  You can’t be a geezer if you don’t know how to geeze.

 

  The world’s shoe-tying championship ended in a tie.

 

THE NEWS FROM HARTLAND HAROLD

  My wife and I attended the funeral of Shirley Sibilrud, matriarch of the family who operated Sibilrud's Cardinal Grocery Store, formerly Sibilrud's Jack Sprat Grocery Store, in Hartland. The Benson family (Peter, his wife and five children) provided the music. Peter is the son of Tom of Tom’s Barber Shop and Pat Benson of Pat’s Beauty Shop, both Hartland enterprises. The officiant was Mark Larson, the son of Burton Larson, who was a pastor at Cross of Glory Lutheran Church back in the day.

 

  Andrew Carnegie said, “Libraries are the free universities of the people." It was a joy for me to volunteer at the Friends of the New Richland Public Library’s Book Sale during Farm & City Days.

 

  Congratulations to Caldyn Huper of the USC FFA Chapter, a finalist for the American Star in Agricultural Placement.

 

NATURE NOTES

   A squirrel was giving a rousing stump speech as I stumbled through the treacherous phalanxes of mosquitoes. The air was flavored with the odor of skunk. Depending upon the environment, conditions and the sniffer's nose, one can detect the smell of skunk from 1.5 miles to 20 miles. As Pepe Le Pew said, “If you have not tried it, do not knock it.

 

  Crows flapped shadows in the welkin. They made flight announcements. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “What a delicious sound! It is not merely crow calling to crow, for it speaks to me too.” I love seeing crows walking in a bandy-legged gait.

 

  He wanted to follow me on my walk to the mailbox. He was a fawn. I called the little buck “Fawnzie.” It was a happy day.

 

  I sat on a deck with friends and watched birds, each a stunning beauty, visit the busy feeders. It’s impossible to be unhappy around friends with bird feeders.

 

  At home, a talkative eastern screech owl, all beak and eyes, perched on our deck rail at midnight. It wasn’t the first night it’s done that. I see it flying out of a shed, but I never see it flying in.

 

  Juvenile cardinals resemble adult females but have gray-to-black bills. A chickadee feeds on a sunflower seed feeder each morning. No matter how many chickadees there are in this world, it needs one more.

 

  It’s the time for tiny toads in our yards and gardens as they hop from water into a terrestrial life.

 

  Julie Knutson of Hartland said one of her sons had 4 pounds of honeybees on the outside of his mailbox. Bees swarm as a natural way for colonies to reproduce by splitting in two. The old queen and a portion of the worker bees leave the original hive to establish a new colony elsewhere. Overcrowding combined with the availability of resources like nectar and pollen can trigger swarming.

 

MEETING ADJOURNED

  “Every student needs someone who says, simply, ‘You mean something. You count.’"—Tony Kushner. Be kind.