Queen Vic's Day

Queen Victoria’s day is long gone

                                        by Robert LaFrance

          When I was a young gaffer, the holiday weekend just past revolved around Victoria Day (or, more important, my second mother Minnie Paris’s birthday) but the main thing was that we students got the long weekend off so that we could read philosophy and recharge our batteries – maybe go fishing.

          Nowadays it’s not so often called Victoria Day, except by people of a certain age. I told a grade ten student that he had a long weekend coming up, Victoria Day, and he said: “Is there a Carleton Day, or a Westmorland Day? How come we have a holiday just to honour one county?” Needless to say, he was joking. He knew that the day was named for that city on Vancouver Island.

          In French, Victoria Day is called Fête de la Reine, which means it has now moved from being a celebration of Queen Victoria’s birthday to being a celebration of the reigning monarch’s birthday. No matter what that monarch’s birthday is, the holiday is always May 24, or whatever Monday falls conveniently close to May 24, old Queen Vic’s birthday.

          In Quebec, of course, it’s something different. It’s National Patriots’ Day. In that province the word ‘national’ means ‘in Quebec’, and the word ‘patriot’ does not necessarily mean patriotic to Canada.

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          Since attaining (against all odds) my 63^rd birthday on May 11, I have received many congratulations and cash-filled letters and I suppose it’s now time to tell everyone to desist. It’s become a bit of an embarrassment. I bought a new Rolls Royce and some steak, although I’m not sure I can afford to eat steak.

          “How did I get here?” I have been asking myself. It was only about two years ago (1967) that I was working on a beer truck on Vancouver Island, delivering Lucky Lager and similar brews from Campbell River to Gold River, and only a few minutes after that when I looked into the face of my first darling daughter, who just turned 26. What? There must be some mistake.

          In 1970 I motored down to Columbus, Indiana (almost to Tennessee) with a bunch of guys from Montreal and that was only about ten years ago. I saw one of the guys last month and he looks OLD. In 1982, after she begged and pleaded for months, I consented to marry my lovely bride who now says it’s been almost 29 years since that fateful date in September. And how I have suffered!

          “You wake up and you’re seventy-five and you wonder how you got there.” – British poet Stephen Spender. That’s about the size of it.

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          To his shock and that of his wife, my friend Elbert J. Finnegan was elected to the House of Commons in the recent national frenzy we called an election. He ran for the NDP in an Ontario riding where his party had received 198 votes in the previous federal election and now he’s getting fat in the subsidized parliamentary restaurant. Filet mignon at $3.45 and Baked Alaska for the price of a

crosstown bus ticket. “Gastronomic opulence breeds corpulence,” I once wrote.

The late comedian Victor Buono said it best in this short poem:     

                    "I think that I shall never see

                     My feet."

"Is there a diet that will make me lose forty pounds in a week and still feel great?" Elbert panted as he ‘jogged’ by one day, on his way to the club and some lemonade.

"Stop having those intimate dinners for two unless there's someone else present," I suggested.

          "I just need to lose enough so my belly isn't out to here," he gesticulated vaguely in front of him with his third bottle of lemonade. He rolled away, and then I started thinking about all the people I knew who had weight problems. I'm big boned, so there wouldn't be any point in my cutting down on calories, but many others need only push themselves away from the table and go for a walk now and then. Losing weight is easy; I've done it a hundred times, but there’s no need of denying it, I may be in the same (sinking) boat as Elbert, which means I will soon have to ‘hit the road’ again.

Now where did I put those jogging shoes? I just had them in 1977.      

Aloha to a passionless election

         I doubt with all my heart and elbows if anyone, anywhere, would have used the word ‘passion’ when describing the recent federal election. It was a passionless election, a passionless campaign except for the NDP’s rise in Quebec, and a passionless announcement that Stephen Harper had finally won the majority government. He had been playing the piano for over the past half dozen years in hopes of that night, but still, it wasn’t as if Meech Lake had started boiling over.

          After all that lack of passion, look at the other results that occurred. The Liberals, the party of Laurier, Mackenzie King, Trudeau, Chretien and Martin were reduced to fewer than three dozen seats of the 308 up for grabs, and Le Bloc Quebecois disappeared except for four members from Jacques Bleu’s Pool Emporium, Richelieu-Dorval, Méchant-Duval, and the Plains of Abraham riding.

          So Le Bloc lost 43 of their 47 seats. All those separatists who lost their seats now have to lie back and collect their pensions from us, the Canadian people. On the other hand, perhaps out of principle they will refuse those pensions…wait! What’s that flying overhead? Les cochons.

          Separatists can take heart though. In a short while there will be a Quebec election which the Parti Quebecois expect to win. Back to the old threats of a referendum (neverendum?) so they can blackmail Ottawa into keeping the money rolling into La Belle Province.

My friend Flug, who has been a Liberal since Louis St. Laurent trod the boards in Ottawa, still does not believe that the Liberals lost so badly. Remember after the first moon landing in 1969 when all those conspiracy theorists kept insisting that the pictures of the moon landing were all shot in the Death Valley desert of California? Flug is like that about Liberals.

The day after the election, he tuned in to every newscast, twice an hour, because he thought that it all had been a hoax. Michael Ingnatieff and the Liberals had won the election, and as soon as that tractor-trailer load of ballots was found out behind a warehouse in Barrie, Ontario or behind Jack Blue’s Pool Emporium in Quebec, all would be as it should be. It took a lot of lemonade to get him to calm down, but about 3:00 am on May 3^rd he finally relented and accepted that ‘Charlie Harper’ was prime minister until at least 2015.

          Something else I noted about the Canadian election coverage, and especially about the coverage of CTV, was enough to make one laugh if it didn’t make one weep. CTV – and don’t be thinking that the letter ‘C’ stands for ‘Canadian’ because it doesn’t – had a newscast the next day that I found quite amusing, even for this most American of all the Canadian networks.

          Leading off the newscast was a 7-minute report on the assassination of Osama bin Laden, who had bitten the dust several days before, and following that the talking head said this: “…and now to the other big story. Conservative Stephen Harper won a majority,…etc.” This news report took less than three minutes THE MORNING AFTER THE CANADIAN ELECTION. They wrapped up the newscast with a 2-minute report about a horse jumping through a picture window in Montana. O Canada!

          Just to digress a minute, and speaking of Osama bin Laden, some people (everybody) have speculated that the Pakistani government knew about his hideout and that their intelligence service, ISI, was in fact harbouring him. Considering where he was found, I would have to say that if the Pakistanis DIDN’T know he was there, I would like to play some poker with them. “Oh no,” I would say. “A pair of sixes beats three aces. Two times six is twelve, you see? Yours only adds up to three.”

          Here is a comparison: suppose Osama had pitched a tent on Senate lawn in Ottawa; would anyone notice he was there? Poor example. We’re talking about the Senate; probably he wouldn’t be noticed for weeks. Half the senators would think that Osama bin Lager was a new kind of beer from Holland.

          At least Saddam Hussein had the class to hide in a cave.

          The point is, all the hoopla about our exciting election (as it turned out) and the demise of Osama bin Laden is now over and we can go back to our humdrum lives. Come to think of it, I shouldn’t assume YOUR life is humdrum just because mine is a bit boring. However, I resume skydiving lessons tomorrow morning, interview the prime minister in the afternoon, fly to Washington on Tuesday to play eighteen holes with President Obama, and then fly an experimental jet to Cape Canaveral where I’m scheduled to take the next shuttle flight to Mars on May 29^th. Luckily I won’t miss the Gathering of the Scots at Perth-Andover, NB.

Birthday blog

My birthday and the truth about the PM

                                        by Robert LaFrance

          Today, May 11, is my 63^rd birthday. I know, you’re thinking I don’t look a day over 62, but there it is.

          Every time I manage to somehow make another birthday, I think about ‘the good old days’ when I was so deliriously happy living the single life. My days were full of fun, my evenings with joy, and my nights with the ecstasy of everything the single life had to offer. Once I even went to a craft exhibition in Bristol and another time a singing group from Minto was appearing at the local theatre. Those were the days, my friend!

          My sister Joan and I were recently reminiscing about our early school years. She started school when she was five, two years before I was born, so that by the time I was five she knew everything and had taught me most of it. I started school at the Block X Academy of Science and Technology in Tilley on my fifth birthday, and about five weeks later finished grade one, then started grade two that fall.

          A lot of people think it’s a great idea to ‘skip a grade’ but it is not. I was always a year younger than everyone in my classes; it would have been better to wait that extra year.

          Because it’s my birthday, I am sure that by the time you are reading this column my mailbox will be crammed with birthday wishes – and lots of cash. Canadian dollars if you please. And I should also mention that I haven’t received any bequests since January, so let’s get down to the law offices and redo those wills, leaving me lots of cash - and land. I like land too, especially woodlots, and I promise not to clear-cut. As to the cash, I am hoping for at least $100,000 this month, because I would like to write and publish “A Readable History of Perth-Andover and Area”. I await your largesse. (LaFrance is spelled with a capital ‘F’.)

          It would be an entertaining book, one of many Canadian history books that are fascinating – and true. Unlike the south of the border legends we were brought up watching on television, and even learning in our Canadian schools, OUR history is true. When I was a kid I thought Wyatt Earp had been a hero, but in reality he was nothing more than a thug. The list goes on and on.

          One of my favourite Canadian heroes over the years has been Jerry Potts (1840-1896) who guided the Northwest Mounted Police across and around the prairies. He was the only child of Blood Indian Namo-pisi (Crooked Back) and Andrew R. Potts, a Scotsman I believe.

       As one history book puts it about Jerry Potts: “A person of mixed blood, he had to prove to both Indians and whites that he could cope in their respective cultures, and was well served by his quick wits, reckless bravery, and lethal accuracy with both a revolver and a rifle.” The Canadian government formed the NWMP in 1873 and the first police travelled west in 1874 and met Potts at Fort Benton. Potts “soon gained the admiration and respect of the NWMP for his frontier skills, bravery, remarkable sense of direction, and his detailed geographical knowledge of the area.” For 22 years he guided every major NWMP patrol. As that same book says, he: “…made it possible for a small and utterly insufficient force to occupy and gradually dominate what might so easily, under other circumstances, have been a hostile and difficult country. Had he been other than he was, it is not too much to say that the history of the north west would have been vastly different to what it is.”

          This was a guy who was real, not a Wyatt Earp, who was his own historian, or a character played by draft dodger John Wayne at the local theatre.

          Speaking of western Canada, it hasn’t been many days now (as I write) since Canadians decided to give Prime Minister Stephen Harper a majority government. We now have to watch his every move, because there are two things we have to remember: he is a right-wing ideologue, and it’s well known that he’s the brother of Charlie Harper, the supposedly fictional character of the show show “Two and a Half Men”.

          Not fictional at all. Charlie Sheen, who used to play Charlie Harper in that show, was really born Charlie Harper in Toronto in 1961. He’s Stephen Harper’s younger brother. Although their careers took SLIGHTLY different courses (one a straitlaced economist and politician, the other a drunken, drug-addled womanizer) they’re brothers all right, and don’t let Charlie Sheen deny it, even though having a politician in the family must be embarassing to say the least.

Stephen, Jerry and me

Reading ‘Candy’ instead of ‘Candide’

                                        by Robert LaFrance

          What do Bill Clinton (former U.S. president - that guy), Donald Trump (businessman and professional buffoon), the cost of our dollar vs. the American one, and our own Highway 105 have in common?

          I got this story from an acquaintance of a guy who knows the janitor at the Algonquin Hotel in St. Andrews so I know it’s accurate. It seems that a certain Saint John company that specializes in bringing ‘big-name’ (translation: American) speakers to southwestern New Brunswick had been trying for quite a few months to get Clinton and Trump to address a gathering of rich businessmen (called entrepreneurs) but the two movers-shakers were reluctant.

          After many weeks, the company asked Bill Clinton right out: “What’s the reason you are hesitating? We are offering you multi bucks.” Bill, who became famous after encounters with Monica Lewinsky and cigars, replied that it wasn’t enough money because of the exchange rate, and furthermore, he wanted to stop in Bristol and see an old friend, which meant he would have to travel on the notorious Highway 105 for a short distance.

          “I’ve read Bob LaFrance’s scurrilous comments about that road,” Clinton said, “and I don’t have enough spare vertebrae to risk riding on it. And then there’s the difference in our dollars. I would take quite a beating.”

          “Bill, Bill,” said Alfy Levesque of the company. “The Canadian dollar is now worth more than the American one. Don’t you read the papers? And two, I happen to know that your friend in Bristol has now moved to St. Andrews, only two blocks from the hotel where you would be speaking. She is looking forward to seeing you.”

          Well…according to my sources, it took Bill Clinton only seven nanoseconds to tell Alfy he could, possibly, he there by breakfast time the next day, although he might be as late at 9:00 am. Donald Trump, once he heard Bill Clinton would be there and scouting out the territory, as it were, quickly agreed to speak at a banquet. “I have a friend in Bristol,” he said, “and I’d like to see her again.” It was quite a coincidence: turned out she had recently moved to St. Andrews, only two blocks from the hotel where the estimable Mr. Trump would be speaking.

          What is it going to cost to bring these inspirational speakers to St. Andrews? Somewhere in the vicinity of eighty trillion dollars, but I’ve always found that, no matter what kind of doldrums the economy is in, the money will always be found for such things. Food banks, that’s different.

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          A few thoughts as a late April freezing rain ‘event’ is making the road like a Smirnoff bottle:

          I don’t know why it is, but after a winter of looking out at only chickadees and common redpolls at my bird feeder, it seems as if other birds have read an announcement somewhere, maybe on Facebook. “LaFrance’s bird feeder is there for all to peruse and partake.” Yesterday morning when I arose at the crack of noon I looked out on the porch and in the big tree on the lawn to see two Downy woodpeckers, four mourning doves, a whack of purple finches and American Goldfinches, nuthatches, slate coloured juncos, and a partridge. Pity it’s not a pear tree, but a European White Poplar.

          As I cooked my dill pickle omelette, I listened to CBC World Service on my short-wave radio. A big story out of Shantung, China was that several were killed in a shootout at a kitchen utensil factory. The newsreader called it the ‘Gunfight at the WOK Corral”.

          After I snarled at a neighbour’s cat, my sister-in-law said I should go have an operation – or go into therapy - to get rid of my ‘Grinch-ness’. The Grinch was the guy who stole Christmas because his heart was two sizes too small. Can I help it if I hate yappy dogs and cats? My dog Kezman just patrols the porch here in hopes of a dervish’s visit. He likes their flavour and is eager to taste another but he doesn’t yap about it.

          Flug’s nephew Eddie Finch is home for the summer from university, and Fredericton is the better for it. This semi-literate chap is now in his second year of an Arts degree course, an endeavour no one around here can figure out, since he has not the least interest in the arts. His classmate, my own nephew Billiam, said that once during the year the English professor, Dr. Strangelove, asked Eddie why he was reading the pornographic novel ‘Candy’ by Terry Sothern when he was supposed to be reading ‘Candide’ by Voltaire. Eddie said he wasn’t sure, but he sure wished Candy lived next door. Candide, not so much.
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