"Now here is something I don't understand,"
Ivan said. "When I was in the 7th and 8th grade, the senior high school girls were all good-looking. Then I got in high school and somehow I found that not to be quite true. But now we have come full circle. Them senior girls in high school are all good-looking and they got builts - all the right body parts all in the right places."
"You know I was considering quitting the Echo," Ivan said. "And no one seemed to care. Then there was this elderly but stubborn lady here in town who said she wanted the Echo and she would absolutely not take no for an answer. So I told her I would make her one. Then I got to thinking, if I'm gonna make one, I might as well make a couple of dozen or so. So guess that is that I'll do."
"I owe Waverly Scott a dollar I lost to him on a bet," Ivan said. "No problem. He always shows up at the As the Bladder Fills club at 7:55 and leaves at 8:15. So I figgered the way to get out of paying that buck was to delay my entrance to the Second Cup til 8:25. Would you believe it - When I walked in he was sitting there with his hand out. Whatever we bet on had something to do with Dick Stroup. Dickie let me down. Story of my life."
"Jack Benn planted 19 tomato plants," Ivan said. "Delores Stroup wants to know if it is too early to begin saving paper sacks."
"Dick Stroup had the Buick out instead of the pick-up and he was wearing a clean white shirt. I asked him where he was going and he said to a track meet. I didn't hardly believe him because he was dressed more for a doctor's appointment than a track meet."
"Like the wife said to her husband," Ivan said, "if you're talking to me keep your mouth shut."
"Claude Gripp had one rain gauge on the one clothesline pole," Ivan said. "And he had another at the other end of the clothesline. One gauge showed 80 hundredths. The other end showed 50 hundredths. That's like the guy who leaned his double-barrel shot-gun against a barb wire fence. A spotty rain came. It was so spotty that one barrel was empty and the other showed about half an inch."
"I've had bad days before," Ivan said, "but how about a bad week. Wednesday we struggled out of bed before dawn cracked. Went to aerobics. No aerobics that day. So we chalked it up to 'forgot we had been told.' Then on Friday we made arragements to go to Beloit to the Pike Trail Track meet to watch our Granddaughter run. Went to aerobics on Friday morning. Got home and the answering machine was blinking. The message read - the message was from our daughter-in-law - the message said, 'we missed you at the track meet yesterday.' Wouldn't it be awful if I forgot to go to my own funeral."
"Arloa Barnes says something has been eating their tomatoes off at the stem," Ivan reported. "Her husband Joe says it is probably the cats. Joe blames everything on the cats."
"I just read something," Ivan said. "It said, 'When the chips are down that means the buffalo is empty.'"
"Golf is a young man's vice," Ivan said, "and an old man's penance."
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