Will sudden wealth spoil Bob? (Number 2)March 3/21 By Robert LaFrance I mentioned in my column two weeks ago that after my wife found a 10-share Microsoft certificate (from 1984) in our attic I was now able to make ends meet. Its real value was something like $887 million, so now I could afford to put new tires on my 1984 Gremlin. Anyway, we are now rich, except for that phone call I just received from the Canada Revenue Agency. It seems that I owe them $879 million. Still, I’m richer than I was three weeks ago. Surely we can struggle along on $8 million. In spite of this extra cash in the kitchen cookie jar, I am envious of those New Brunswickers who are now receiving minimum wage for their paycheques. They just received an increase of FIVE CENTS AN HOUR. In a major announcement ten days ago, Premier Higgs (Salary about $150,000 a year) said that the government had hiked the minimum wage a whole nickel an hour, and there was dancing in the streets of Tilley, I will tell you. What the heck are the workers going to do with all that extra money? Many possibilities come to mind. A new Rolls Royce, with digitally operated ashtrays, and possibly a paving job on the driveway or maybe going out for supper at a takeout? But wait, don’t you think that we New Brunswickers are getting a little spoiled? ********************* Yesterday morning about 7:10 I was awakened from a satisfying nap - and a dream about Diana Rigg – by the insistent blast of my bedside telephone. By the time I had found the phone and pushed the right (wrong) button, the voice at the other end turned out to be someone very worried about my credit rating. It seems that somebody or something had ‘breached’ my Mastercard and I was about to lose millions to Nigerian criminal gangs. Don’t criminals ever sleep? It took quite a while to get the cobwebs cleared out of my head, but finally I woke up enough to say thank you for their concern. “By the way,” I said, “I don’t own a Mastercard, “but I appreciate your taking the trouble to look out for me this way. Now if you would kindly give me your phone number and name I will announce this in my newspaper so everyone can have the opportunity I have had. At 7:10 am.” Click. In other news from around the county, the village and around the world: A certain Donald J. Trump is now back in the good graces of…some people anyway, but there’s still a bit of a minor problem with something like 27 criminal charges including fomenting a riot, interfering with the Georgia election results, money laundering for the Russians and even ripping off various cities and towns for various reasons. I think he just might be a crook, but then I thought that about Richard Nixon too. It was funny the other evening at the club in Lower Kintore where the Perfessor commented that Trump was “a cheap con man”. Many of us disagreed with the Perfessor on that score, because however much a con man and a grifter Donald Trump was, has been and is, he is not a cheap one. One recent New York Times story estimated that Trump made $1.6 billion profit while he was president. That ain’t cheap. Still on the subject of money, profits etc, I should mention that last week while I was typing, a small delivery truck arrived at my driveway to deliver some courtesy airplane tickets to me. Large (and I have been overeating lately) Microsoft shareholders are supposed to get five free tickets a year for international travel, and they’d been holding them for me. Of course many of the tickets were for airlines now gone bankrupt, but there were lots left. Online, I chose a luxury flight from Montreal to Singapore, where my daughter and her husband used to live and it wasn’t long before I was on my way. Hitch-hiking to Montreal was a problem in February, but I put my thumb right up on bust and was there in 12 hours. I am typing this from Hong Kong where the Chinese government is being bureaucratic. In fact I spent a few hours in jail before I got through to the authorities that I was a millionaire. ********************* Back in Canada after a nice visit to Singapore, I am finding that Victoria County, New Brunswick is experiencing spring. Wanna know how I can tell? Driving from our estate in Kincardine to Perth-Andover, I was surprised – astonished – to see a D.O.T. crew leaning on their shovels along Muniac Road. One guy was spraying orange paint on the road, which was odd because there was still ice and even some snow on that road. I stopped and rolled down the window of my Gremlin (funny what a millionaire will drive). “What’s going on?” I asked a bevy of workers. They looked at each other before answering, as if to get security clearances, but nobody seemed to know the answer. “I think it’s some kind of code,” said a broad-shouldered chap wearing a green helmet (part of the government’s new Green attitude). “I never did know. We used to have a Bulgarian backhoe driver and he knew, but he moved to Inuvik. Nobody else knows, even the guy doing the spraying.” My old friend, the late Bernam Morrell, used to wield a spray paint can with the best of them, but he would never tell me. “I’m the best banjo player in Four Falls,” he used to say, “but I can’t tell civilians what that government code means. Let’s just say it’s got nothing to do with banjo playing.”

Drag out the old bitcoins (Feb 17/21)

 

Will sudden wealth spoil Bob?

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            I was sitting in an uptown restaurant day before yesterday when my allegedly smart phone rang.

            It was my wife. Although I hadn’t finished my breakfast muffin, tea and home fries I answered, as I tend to. They’re tired of seeing me come in to the ER with contusions and lacerations from various arguments.

            “Bob, are you sitting down?” I allowed as to how I was indeed sitting down. “You know what I just found in the attic?”

            Since the attic contains approximately three tractor-trailer loads of assorted junk, I gave the obvious answer: “A green coffee mug full of bat sign.”

            She said it was not a green coffee mug full of bat stuff, but a small briefcase I had put into the attic in 1984 when we moved here to Manse Hill Road from our Birch Ridge estate near Maggie’s Falls, or Robinson’s Fall which I am told is the original and proper name.

            I tried again: “A deflated summer tire from the 1960 Impala I owned when I lived in Tilley.” Surprisingly, I was wrong.

            She had a blockbuster: “In a brown briefcase, in a little side pocket, was one stock certificate – ten shares of Microsoft, dated June 17, 1984.” I remembered buying that in Perth-Andover from a stockbroker who had been practising there before 1990 when he had moved into government housing at Dorchester. We had bet during a footrace across the river and he lost, or more correctly I had won, but he didn’t have the $15 to pay me. With a little financial maneuvering I was the proud owner of ten Microsoft shares worth over $12. I put the certificate in that briefcase, put the briefcase in the attic and forgot about it. Now it looked as if I were a wealthy man indeed, possibly a millionaire.

            Still, I finished my breakfast and left my usual 15-cent tip. Ignoring the waitress’s glare, I headed for home and my newly recognized millions. I, Robert LaFrance, was worth (as the expression goes) ‘mucho dinero’. It wouldn’t be long before I was hobnobbing with Bill and Melinda Gates at their estate out near Seattle.

            Trembling with excitement, I headed north to consult with my accountant. I would be the greatest millionaire in Canadian history, I would feed the hungry, I would buy expensive vehicles, give my family financial independence and donate hundreds of millions for research into the worst diseases like scurvy, mumps and sickle cell anemia. No more homeless people along the streets of Kincardine.

            By my calculation, after checking Microsoft’s share value on Google, my stock certificate nestled on my front seat was worth something in the range of $887 million  dollars. I doubt if Bill and Melinda Gates had that much in cash. If I ever visited them at their $800 million bungalow out there in Washington State, they would have to move aside, away from their indoor swimming pool, and make room for me and my antique Falcon to be parked by the diving board.

            At this moment when I’m typing away on my word processor, I know exactly what you, the reader, are thinking. You think that on my way to town, I will open my passenger side window and the stock certificate would fly out and land under the wheels of a tractor-trailer that would demolish it. Back to poverty for old Bob.

            Au contraire, that did not happen. I arrived safely at my accountant’s house near Arthurette, but he wasn’t home. His wife Gretchen came to the door and said Clyde was out tapping trees. Which I thought was a trifle early in the year.

            “Oh no, he’s not tapping maple trees,” she said. “This time of the year is perfect for tapping alders. Their sap is delicious and their syrup is out of this world.” At this point I looked at Gretchen and thought: “Alder sap is not the only thing out of this world.” I thought for a few seconds about showing her my $887 million stock certificate but decided to leave it in my pocket. She said that Clyde was out on the old Morales Farm above Four falls and I could go there to see him.

            I got just above Aroostook when I remembered that Covid rules prevented me from going there because the area just above Four Falls was in either the red, white or blue zone (coulda been chartreuse) or lockdown and I couldn’t go there until 2023 – or maybe tomorrow morning.

            But wait! The Morales Farm was in the Edmundston Zone and that meant that Clyde was liable to be (a) arrested, (b) fined, (c) shot, or all of the above, or any combination. Just then, as I came to the road that could take me across the bridge spanning the Aroostook River, a Covid Police car came flying down the road and there, in the back seat and looking as if he had just been arrested by the Covid Police, was Clyde. He waved out the window at me and in his hand were two or three tiny sap pails. That was Clyde all right; he wouldn’t waste alder sap, or anything else.

            I quick rammed the old Falcon into gear and took off after the Covid Police car that was still merrily flashing its lights as it zoomed (88 k/hr) down the Trans Canada Highway. It was an odd looking vehicle, a 1995 Red Lumina, rusty as a 1981 Ford.

            Well, I see I am out of time and space for this column; I hope the editor’s not mad, but I will be back in two weeks with the rest of the story. Let’s just say it involves Bitcoins.

                                        -end-

Covid-19 confusions (Feb 3/21)

 

A school to teach Covid-19 rules

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            People are saying that spring is on the way. I am not one of those deluded fools who say this. I’m a deluded fool who says we will get out of this pandemic before fall.

            There are a lot of deluded fools like me, and possibly you - if you are a resident of the planet Earth. There are people who think the Earth is flat and those who think Covid-19 is a hoax, thanks to a bloated orange demagogue now residing in Florida.

            Treasure hunters are deluded. I read about a team of them who found about $3 million worth of pirate gold and then had to give it all up to the government of Peru. Or was it the government of Tilley?

            I had a cousin – no, I HAVE a cousin since he’s still kicking – who thought that Turkish government jail cells couldn’t be that bad, but they are.

            Last week my neighbour the Perfessor and I happened to meet at the bottle redemption centre last week and enjoyed a 2-metre separated conversation. The thing is, neither of us was there to get money from empty bottles because I give all my empties to the food bank and so does he. He was there for metaphysical reasons.

            Driving along the street, he saw the big sign that read “REDEMPTION CENTRE” and thought he saw his chance to atone for various mistakes over the years. The man who ran the centre used words and phrases like: “crazier than a cut cat” and “nut job, probably from Tilley”. The Tilley part wasn’t an insult, but ‘nut job’ couldn’t be counted as a compliment.

            I mentioned the concept of 2-metre distancing and earlier I mentioned Covid-19; the government has its hands full there, partly because of the weird array of conflicting information we are hearing every day. In my 72.7 years I haven’t seen anything like it except from a girl I used to know in Orillia, Ontario. I never knew where I was with here, probably because I never got anywhere.

            But that’s another story for another day.

            Referring to Covid-19 rules, I notice that many signs in many stores and establishments have signs that ask customers to maintain a “6-foot” social distance, and other signs order a “2-metre” distance. They’re not the same thing. A metre is 39.37 inches, and a yard is 36 inches. Whosoever keeps a distance of only two yards (6 feet) from the person to whom he is speaking is too close, according to government rules. Six and two-thirds inches too close.

                                                ******************

            The point I am slowly getting to is that the whole gamut of Covid-19 rules and restrictions are…I’m going to use the word confusing.

            On Saturday, January 30, New Brunswickers were introduced to the concept of a 10-person bubble, which sounded to me a lot like: “Well, we can’t persuade you to follow all the rules, so we’ll just loosen them until you’re comfortable.” There followed a long list of revisions to the rules of orange zones (which we are in as of today).

            Even the phrase “10-person bubble” is baffling. Whereas on Friday anyone who skated or jogged within two metres (NOT six feet) of another human being would be shot on the spot and fined $800, now we can attend an orgy as long as no one has a birthday in a month whose name contains an ‘s’, and there are ten or fewer at the orgy.

            Last week if two persons who lived in separate residences were in the same car, they would both be summarily shot, but now there’s no problem. What changed? We’re still in orange zone. It’s all a mystery to me, as well as to my neighbour Claxton Fenety. I know this because Thursday he had said to me: “Hey it’s all a mystery to me.”

            It is said that the pandemic has resulted in a lot of depression and other mental problems, leading to more enthusiastic drinking and partaking of ‘nose candy’ as well as  legal drugs, but I can’t agree.

            Oh, wait, I do agree. I had forgotten those two tractor-trailers that backed into my driveway yesterday morning. The same thing happened a day later at Claxton’s place, leading me to believe that perhaps we may be on the verge of dependency. Well, why not? As long as no one drinks and drives, especially those truck drivers.

            I should quickly insert a sentence here to say that the foregoing was all lies. The only thing I know about the price of liquor and beer is what it used to be, back in the days when I used to over-indulge.

            I am so much out of the loop (as they say) that I don’t even know where the regular spots are that people can return their empties, other than the food bank where I take mine twice a year. (Four beer cans, found in a ditch; it’s embarrassing.)

            On Sunday morning I was driving by a place that boasted a big sign that read Redemption Centre (as I mentioned above) and I screeched to a halt, assisted by a slippy (as my cousin says) road. I almost went into the ditch where I might have needed serious redemption, but stopped in time so I could warn the Perfessor.

            The little establishment was indeed a redemption centre but the proprietor, a wizened man of about 99, soon explained to the Perfessor that he saved bottles and cans, not souls.

            After all my complaining, I just turned on the radio in time to hear a government announcement. The 10-person bubble is still in place, but the government has decided that the main problem is that people just don’t understand it. No kidding. Therefore the province will be setting up a school in Miramichi “because of its central location”. A 2-week course and Bob’s Your Uncle.     

                                                          -end-

The frosty Miss Sara Williams (Jan 20/21)

 

Bob was the Teacher’s Pet

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            It just so happens that my column falls on the same day that Donald Trump slinks out of town and off to Florida – the ultimate Snowbird. May he go to jail by next Tuesday afternoon, about four.

            Enough about that.

            Sitting in front of my computer keyboard and watching it snow, I am thinking of the frosty Miss Sara Hilda Williams, my high school English teacher. Some people, students and teachers alike, really hated her but she was my favourite.

            How many Blackfly Gazette readers remember Miss Williams? (Even now I do not dare to call her Sara.) I graduated from what was then SVRHS – the letter R stands for Regional – in 1965 and I remember Miss Williams congratulating me and slipping me an envelope bulging with ten-dollar bills to help my further education.

            I became her Teacher’s Pet in 1961 when I was twelve. My mother died in May of that year and when I returned to school after the funeral in Lerwick I found myself the envy (or object of hate) of my classmates because I was a TP. She gave me extra help in her English class and even drove me home to Tilley a few times, usually because she kept me in for extra help.

Her first school in Victoria County was at South Tilley. From that beginning in this area, Miss Sara Williams went on to teach at several other small schools, including Block X School in North Tilley (I attended there from grade one to five) and the South Tilley School. A look at some Block X records from 1939 shows that Sara Williams was designated a 'Class II' teacher at a salary of $280 per annum for teaching 33 students ages six to 15. (What could she possibly have done with all that money?)

            After teaching at various schools she took a job in September 1953 that was to

last the rest of her career, until she retired in 1966. The newly built Southern Victoria Regional High School in Andover had opened its doors for the first time with G.E. Malcolm MacLeod as its principal and Mrs. Maybelle Titus, who was to become one of Sara Williams's lifelong friends, as vice principal.

In the morning Miss Williams would always ask how I was and if I answered "good" or "fine" she would say: "No, Robert, you are neither GOOD nor FINE. You are WELL!"

Everyone had a story or an anecdote about her. The late Vaughan DeMerchant had three stories that he said were not printable, and they weren't, about things students had said to her in class.

"She used to sing - or try to sing," said my late cousin James LaFrance of North

Tilley. "What I remember most was that my seat was right in front of her desk and when she got mad at someone behind me she'd push her desk back hard and push mine right into my stomach every time."

My sister Joan (LaFrance) Laverdiere, of Welland, Ontario, said: "I liked Sara. The funny things she used to do like throwing the books. You just had to duck in

time. She'd get so mad, but it might be for just a few seconds. I think most of the kids liked her."

            Turning the clock forward to the late 1970s after I had built a cabin in Tilley: I had spent years saving money for an early retirement after working in Ontario, BC, and the Northwest Territories and was settled down to my savings bonds and garden.

            One summer morning my phone rang just as the sun was peeping over the hill by the Murray and Minnie Paris house. It was 5:35 am and I immediately recognized the voice on the line. It was the voice of Miss Sara Williams, whom I hadn’t heard from for a dozen years. She wanted to talk about figures of speech and sentence structure, namely subject and predicate. In four minutes she had said what she wanted to say and abruptly hung up.

            Next morning, and for many mornings afterward, this 75-year old lady and I, a 28-year-old bachelor (same as my son is today) and I discussed the English language and every possible ramification and nuance until I moved to Birch Ridge where I still had the same phone number, but she didn’t call any more. I guess I was a foreigner.

            The next thing I heard about her was that she was a resident in the Victoria Glen Manor when it was still in Perth. I resolved to go and visit her there. She didn’t know me. Not a glimmer. I talked to Betty and Jane at the nurses’ desk for that wing and they said she was back teaching English spelling to her students at SVHS. Whenever one of the staff went near her she might start explaining the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs or describing what a gerund was.

            Miss Sara Williams lived to be 99.95 years old. I mentioned one day to one of the staff that it was a shame that Miss Williams wouldn’t realize it when she became a century old and that (unnamed) staff member said: “She knows how old she is and said she refused to become that old.” Sure enough, Miss Williams died in early July 2003, five days short of that century.

                                      -end-