smell the roses

The Alberton Papers Vol. VI, #X
By Dick Darne 6-10-08
Smell The Roses
Now for some musings from beautiful downtown Alberton. Too wet to plow. Too cold, wet and windy to cycle. Grass can be heard growing. Spring cleaning is too much work. River too muddy to fish. So it’s time to fill my faithful readers’ heads with nonsense.
Let’s start with: "the Gazebo, the real story, uncensored." Unknown to most people, the almost completed gazebo is the realization of a lifelong dream of Mayor Joe Hanson. I sent one of my investigative reporters back to his hometown to dig up the real story, right out of his childhood dirt pile, where he spent his happy childhood building little gazebos out of sticks and rocks and stubbornly rebuilding them when the other kids would stomp them into the dirt, calling him "gazebo head" in the process. Poor little Joe would scream at them: "Some day I’ll have the bestest gazebo in the whole world and you can’t stop me!" Well it took many years, life’s other demands using all his time, until recently he was able to wrest a pile of materials from Mother Nature’s reclamation process and ramrod a crew into hard labor, bringing to fruition his dream. While not completed yet, it stands as inspiration to all with dreams of the bestest, right here in beautiful downtown Alberton.
Dreams of Americans instead of The American Dream.
While resting my eyes, relaxing on a park bench in Portland I was alerted to the presence of others by Nellie the Wonder Dog. A couple of old geezers with well worn bikes had sat down on the adjacent bench. They introduced themselves.
"Lester Miles is my name and this here’s Roosevelt Smelmore. Just call me Les."
"And just call me Rosie. " said the huge man, who looked like he could play front four for the Packers. "We were just noticing your seat and handlebars, just about like ours."
"Well, I did figure out a while back that the butt gives up first." I replied
"And the next is the elbows and shoulders, it’s hard to enjoy a ride with hands and arms numb." said Les.
"Yeah, we’ve been riding many years now and it used to be a test of pain to take a long ride but we finally noticed what we weren’t noticing." added Rosie.
"What’s that?" I asked
"The roses. Take time to smell the roses." one of them said and then they were gone.
It does make sense. Ride less miles and smell more roses.
One last muse: I miss my buddy Tom.
Take the time! dd