Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Thursday, April 19
I would not mind getting the lawn mowed sometime soon…We’ve had a lot of rain and snow and the grass is starting to get taller than ol’ Sparrow likes to look at…We try to keep a nice yard – The Shire is right on the left as you enter town – and it’s good for morale for drivers to have a nice yard – complete with The Wife’s flowers – to look at and a lousy lawn get’s your journey thru town off to a lousy start.
The problem is it hasn’t stayed dry for an extended period and the lawn is still damp and in some places downright wet…It’s scheduled to snow the next couple of day, too, so good luck getting it mowed in the next few days.
We went thru this our first spring here at The Shire…It rained and rained and rained and here’s ol’ Sparrow a new homeowner with a brand new mower he was just dying to break in…But it continued to snow and rain just often enough to foil me and as I recall the first mowing didn’t happen until early May when you needed a machete to lop off the first couple of feet of grass.
The Wife was at The Shire when I got home from work…She had a roast in the crockpot and I was grateful for the home cooked meal…Recall one day last week not all the coffee got in the pot and some spilled on top of the dryer, onto a towel kept there for that purpose….Also recall I left the towel there, neglecting to put it in the washer.
The Wife, of course, noticed and quizzed me on it…I couldn’t bring myself to blame the cat so, of course, I fessed up and, following The Wife’s instructions, cleared everything off and threw the towel in the wash.
Spent a full day at the retailer…In the afternoon a scruffy looking family came up looking to cash an old, beat up money order…They looked like they could use the money, too…I think it was a mom, her son and grandkid, but the son wasn’t a whole lot younger than me and they could’ve been man and wife tho if there was there was May/December action going on…Either way, I couldn’t be bothered to ask, even tho I was kinda curious.
Anyway, the edges of the money order were frayed, a lot, and i doubted whether it would make it thru the check reader when Mary came by and said she’s seen this before and put some tape on the edges…I was surprised it worked and the money order went thru…Usually they don’t…Usually, the folks are instructed to call an 800 number, but I was glad it did, especially when I saw the family outside and the hood of their not-too-new car was up.
One of the lessons I’ve learned is not to toss around my Spanish to people who do not speak Spanish…I had this lesson reinforced today when I spoke Spanish to someone from Uzbekistan…He was sending money to his native country and his English wasn’t all that good so throughout the process I found myself saying issuing instructions in Spanish from time to time…Force of habit…Spanish is, of course, the go-to backup language for me and I might as well have been speaking Greek for all he understood…This has happened before, too…Last week I was clocking out at 10pm and one guy on the graveyard crew was having trouble clocking in and I started to yap in Espanol and one of the Senegal guys behind me – who was also no help – said I could only help him if I spoke Ukrainian, or whatever they speak in Ukrania.
Look, I can’t I keep up with what languages people do and do not speak…I try, but you gotta meet me halfway and know at least a little Spanish.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 6pm Wednesday to 6:30am Thursday…In the Navy, on the old diesel submarine I was on, we used to call long sleeps like this equalizers, which was a term having to do with battery charges but don’t ask me to expound on that because I can’t, and I usually get equalizers in on Wednesday nights…In the Dark Ages before the Wednesday Morning Nap (WMN) I might stay up all day Wednesday and sleep as long as 15 hours, which really caused problems getting to sleep Thursday night, but the WMN appears to have taken care of that issue.
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.
