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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, May 12
Thank goodness for Town Trash Day TTD)…The seven old tires we rescued from the shed Thursday were properly disposed of this morning.
TTD was very well organized…The trash men were there with two trucks and a dumpster and the tire guys were there, too, and it was very well attended…I got there after work, about 0740, 20 minutes early and the line was already a couple of blocks long and driving past while heading home it was even longer.
You pull up and the Trash Tiger Team (TTT) descends on you and pulls your trash out for you…You can help if you want, but you’d just get in the way, in fact, they had my tires out before I could exit the front seat and scoot back to supervise…We bought The Shire in 2014 and I’ll be honest, I don’t remember past TTDs but The Wife did and was pretty excited I was able to dump the tires on them, gushing so much over my participation she made it almost sound like community service on my part…Driving thru town it was plain the town hadn’t been wracked with a case of landscaping fever and I thought perhaps next weekend could be designated Town Mow Your Damn Lawn Day (TMYDLD), but the town hall was closed, so I didn’t pop in to make that suggestion.
I bought some new pants last night at the retailer…In don’t usually like to buy clothes at the retailer, but they’re a leading national brand of carpenter pants – for all the carpentry I do, of course – so the quality’s the same…I bought the tanned/beige/burnt orange (it’s hard to tell) ones, and they’ll replace the green ones I bought years ago…I wasn’t really looking for new knock around town pants, but I pulled the green ones out of the dryer after mowing the lawn Thursday and there was an ink spot on them, on the left front…I don’t know how this happened…I checked the other clothes to see if they had ink and in a bit of a panic I did an immediate pen inventory to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently washed another one and, thankfully, they were all accounted for…I can’t have ink on my pants going to the diner or the market, tho, so I splurged for a new pair.
New pants was actually an inside joke Pa Sparrow and I had…He was picking me up from basketball camp one summer and while other parents wore slacks to the graduation ceremony, Pa wore his new khaki work pants, and I would point out his wearing them over the years, tho as he aged Pa Sparrow would forget this inside joke.
Busy at Hotel A this morning…I get there and I had a couple of walk-ins and a reservation showed up and the phone rang a couple of times…We had rooms, a bit pricey for the slow season at $99 plus tax and I was prepared to slash rates if they walked out, but both couples bit at $99…One guy even complimented me on the breakfast spread…He was the first one down, so nothing had been touched and while everything is microwaved I can’t help it if he came away with the impression I had slaved over a hot stove all morning.
Had a pretty good line at the retailer tonight…Pretty good…I don’t think it deserved the really big laughs it got…I mean, I’m not even considering it a Line of the Year candidate, but you’d think it would be because it certainly pegged out the laugh meter among the masses gathered at the service desk.
Here’s what happened…Connie and Carol, both of whom are nice, matronly widows who have been with the retailer since Day 1, were leaving and the exit is right to the left of the service desk…They’re all carrying assorted things and one of the things Connie is carrying is a bouquet of flowers…This draws some comment from others at the service desk, like Daniel, Keely and Maria…Comments like wondering whom they could be from and if she has a secret admirer…Connie added to the intrigue by declining to comment on the matter, which made everyone even more curious and there was a bit of quiet as they considered potential gentlemen callers for Connie…This is when I blurted out my line:
Maybe they’re from Buzz!!!
All right, Buzz is about Connie’s age, maybe a tad older, it’s hard to tell, mostly retired who I think works more for his own personal amusement than anything else…To think he might be a secret admirer of Connie’s must have been the funniest thing in history because everyone starts laughing pretty hard…They laughed so long I wanted to tell them I’d be in town all week and to tip their waitresses…Call it the instincts all the great ones have if you must, but I knew to shut up after that, and kept quiet after issuing The Line.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it was a pretty good line, the kind of line that is my stock-in-trade but, frankly, I was surprised at the laughs it got…Maybe it was in the delivery…I forgot to ask.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0930 Saturday until 1530 Saturday…Six hours, in the blue house shirt and it was all I could get, too, because of the alarm…I know I said the weekly total should be ‘about average’ but I was wrong, it came in at 42.5 hours, the lowest weekly total yet and a bit off April’s weekly average of 44.8 hours.
The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.
The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 19th-century British novel of the same name.
Read Gaylon’s latest: We The People: Making America America Again at www.GaylonKent.com
