The Slice: It takes effort to age gracefully

How can you tell you are no longer young and rockin’?

I’ll tell you. You are no longer young and rockin’ when you groan every time you bend over or emit a loud “oof”-like sound when marshalling the exertion required to get off the couch.

Just thought you should know.

Rail travel: Colbert’s Bob and Pat Pedersen have seen a great deal of the United States from train windows. But they had a leg up on accumulating impressive railroad mileage totals. You see, both of their fathers worked for the Northern Pacific while they were growing up in Laurel, Montana. This entitled them to free train rides.

Bob would go see a grandmother in Bismarck, North Dakota. Pat would travel to visit her grandmother in Spokane.

How many others here remember using similar passes?

Slice answers: Wayne Sanders saw the question about which winged creature readers would add to the Inland Northwest’s lineup.

“That is a tough one, Paul. Growing up in the Midwest where the red of the cardinal was a familiar sight, it would be nice to see them on occasion to offset the various shades of brown or black most of the birds here seem to be. However, I think I would prefer fireflies, mainly because they seem to evoke many more childhood memories. Can I have both?”

Tom Stewart said that having a pink flamingo or two in our midst might be an upgrade on lawn ornaments. “But having lived in Alabama as a kid I would be delighted to have fireflies. That’s what the firefly said when run over by the lawnmower. He was delighted.”

Today’s Slice question: The young woman about to ring up my grocery purchases made a mistake when entering a code. It was supposed to indicate that I should receive a nickel discount because I brought in my own bag. But whatever she punched in resulted in me being given a price deduction of $9.04. I only noticed because she had to call over a manager to approve her erasing that inadvertent largesse.

What could I have said to convince them I should have been given the nine bucks off?