Theresa was telling me a story the other day about a conversation a group of her friends had. I decided I need to share it here because, like her 1 friend who lives upstate, most of you probably never met the Sharpener Man.
Her friend runs his own lawn business during the summer and one of the old ladies he works for gave him a bunch of tools that belonged to her husband. He was telling the group that he needed to get them sharpened.
“Why don’t you get the Sharpener Man to do it.”
“What is a Sharpener Man?”
“You know, he drives down the block and rings a little bell just like an ice cream truck. Everyone runs out into the street with their knives and tools and he sharpens them.”
“Uh, I have no idea what you are talking about.”
A few days later, we saw one of the trucks on our way home from the nursing home:
That’s about the only truck left from my childhood who still comes around along with the ice cream trucks. When we were kids, aside from the milkman, we had the fruit truck (“Water-meloon! 3 cents a pound!”) and the ride trucks.
Oh, and on a totally different subject, Theresa had a picture on her camera of Steve getting ready to go back to school:
This is only a small portion of his stuff. The rest of it is in the car already. That crucifix in the background is the one I cleaned for him. You can’t really see how clean Jesus is but look at that wood shine.
I think I LOVE the Sharpener Man because I could definitely use the Sharpener Man’s services. I don’t know if I have even one knife that would cut something; and I’m always using my kitchen scissors inappropriately…
On a completely different note, that crucifix is beautiful. I want one. And, thanks to you, if I get one, I already know how to clean it.
We’ve got a sharpener-guy in my neighborhood, too. He comes every weekend, ringing his bell, like a demented Good Humor man with weapons.
We don’t have a sharpener man but we do have a guy who comes around about 3 times every summer in a jeep about 30 years old trying to sell snow cones. The problem is we all know where he lives and his trailer sits on a lot with about 50 tons of garbage in the yard so very few people have faith in the cleanliness of his snow cones.
By the way, our snowcone man has a loudspeaker on his jeep and the sound that comes from it reminds you a cat getting strangled or something.
Okay, the snowcone man needs to be stopped! When I was a little kid, our ice cream/popsicle man came around on a three-wheeled bike with a two sided freezer rigged onto the front of it. That was about 1959, though, and I always got an orange popsicle. I wonder if he ever upgraded to a van…