The Slice But She Did Give His Back That Fresh Clean Feeling
Spokane’s Velma and Arthur Smith were on a weekend getaway at a hotel in Post Falls (hey, out of town is out of town) when Arthur started experiencing back spasms.
He asked Velma to apply some ointment. So she got out the tube and started rubbing.
But the stuff didn’t seem to be working its way into his skin. And it wasn’t relieving the spasms.
Velma put her glasses on and looked at the tube. She discovered she had been smearing toothpaste on her husband’s back. “It didn’t even help fight cavities,” she said.
The middle of this story remains a mystery: A few days ago, someone rang the doorbell at a house near Gonzaga University. When the woman who lives there got to the door, no one was around. But there on the porch inside a plastic bag was a purse that had been stolen from her three years ago.
The money it had contained was gone. But everything else, including some prized family photos, was there.
He couldn’t have eaten the whole thing: So this guy who was all alone was standing at the spot along the counter where you put in your order at Gibson’s Tennessee Bar-B-Q in the Spokane Valley. And he was ordering a ton of food. Pounds and pounds of this. Pounds and pounds of that. It was enough to feed a sizable group of hungry people. And it took him awhile just to go down his list.
Then, when he was done, the woman behind the counter looked up from the pad on which she was writing. “Will that be for here or to go?” she asked with a straight face.
The guy was dumbstruck. The question totally threw him. And he was about to try to snap out of his dazed state and utter the words “To go” when the woman behind the counter cracked a smile.
“Just kidding,” she said.
Top this: Lugging ice storm debris from her yard to the waste disposal facility, Nancy Cabe of Chattaroy made 53 trips in her pickup truck to the Colbert Transfer Station. She hauled 37,940 pounds of stuff and got to be on a first-name basis with the waste station’s friendly personnel.
Foreign correspondence, Part 1: Pauline Kuiper of Potlatch and Spokane’s Marie Mann praised the Dutch word “gezellig,” which describes a cozy contented feeling.
Cheney’s Larry Winters likes the Spanish word “sonrisa,” which is a lyrical way to say “smile.”
Today’s Slice question (complete this sentence): “The one thing people here tend to be snobs about is….”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Drawing
MEMO: The Slice appears Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; fax (509) 459-5098. Before we all have to wave good-bye to it, we wouldn’t mind seeing some little kids’ artistic depictions of the comet.