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.