Charlie was too hot and focused to stop on her way down the hill for her usual greet-and-pet session. She was intent on reaching the cool comfort of Bilberry Creek and that was that. She needed to soothe her overheated paws in the wet clay bottom, and let the water run beneath her body to stop that incessant panting panic of overwhelming heat.

As we climbed past her whizzing by us on our afternoon ravine ramble, we could see at the top of the hill, her companion seated in the shade of a large old pine awaiting either her return, or more likely, our completed ascension. He's an enormously talkative man. Wind him up and away he goes. Fact is, he needs no winding, no encouragement to embark on his endless not-to-be-interrupted soliloquies to which we have often felt prisoner as he regaled us with his memorable (to him) adventures.

But he's a nice person and it's worth while the time spent trying to inject a few comments of our own, in a futile manner, not to offend him. He obviously needs to vent, and often, and anyone he comes across represents a suitable wall on which to bounce his thoughts off. And so we heard about his breathless account of how his morning had gone. It started earlier than he had anticipated, his garage crowded with cast-off objects he was preparing to set out for a garage sale, when he discovered someone had arrived at almost the crack of dawn to prowl through his garage.

Not much offends him, but this certainly did, and he disliked the entitled air of the person who had entered without anyone being present, the commotion of his moving things about alerting the inmates of the house to an unanticipated early-morning presence. That's what signs alert people to: the excitement of an upcoming garage sale. When our friend emerged from the house into his garage the man's aggressive bargaining offended him further and a man not ordinarily given to be disagreeable, he found himself informing the intruder that his presence wasn't appreciated.

He had all manner of tools that he wanted to be rid of, including a router he had bought but never used. A ping-pong table, you name it, he just wanted to have them taken off his hands. Whenever anyone tells us about garage sales, the thought immediately surfaces simultaneously for both of us that instead of a garage sale those items could have been driven over to the Sally Ann for them to sell, and in the process contribute to their always-urgent need to raise operating funds to help the unfortunates in society. Because it might appear unseemly to outright state such things to others, and that we prefer to manage our affairs in this way reflective of our own philosophy, we abstain from actually saying anything, because people will always take it as a criticism. Which it most certainly is.

So on and on he went, effusive in his comments about peoples' greed in trying to impress upon him the need to lower prices he had originally kept to a mere fraction of the value of the items he was selling, but in the end triumphant because when all was said and done 75% of what he'd put out was sold and he was $105 the richer for his efforts.