These towns of Mandan and Bismarck are good garage sale towns. Every weekend there are plenty to choose from, and in no way can we get to all of them. Each year I come away with one or two prize buys. Things have been slow this year, though, since I can only claim as my great "get" a dozen Ole and Lena jokebooks. Now, Ole and Lena are my kind of folks, and I hate to see them made such fun of, but that's the load we have to bear. I think this one shows lots of insight when Ole described the difference between modern ladies and old fashioned ladies. "The old fashioned gal darns her husband's socks. The modern gal socks her darned husband." Ole does have lots of trouble functioning in this modern world. He says that anymore he gets nervous about doing chores around the house. He says, "It seems every time I crack an egg open, out pops a pair of pantyhose."
I thought I made a really good buy today when I bought a carved wooden plate for 50 cents. The gal who sold it to me said it came from Romania; her father has been there a couple of times and brought it back. A sticker on the back is worded in a foreign language, so I believed her. What the heck, 50 cents is a small price to pay for such a treasure. On closer inspection, in the sunlight, I now see that it was mostly machine-carved with only a bit of hand-tooled work.
At another stop, I bought a set of "Snoopy" golf clubs for $10 - a wood, an iron, and a putter - for the grandson Luke. That amount was more than I like to shell out, but if we want to see him grow and blossom into another Tiger Woods, we have to pay the price.
To write a conclusion, I hope I'm not getting absent-minded like Ole. One day he poured syrup down his back ... and scratched his pancake.
