Nuclear fishin'

The ones that didn’t get away

                                        by Robert LaFrance

          Finally, FINALLY, I got fishing this spring, and did I ever haul them out of the brook!

          If you want to be picky, no, I didn’t catch any fish but I caught, among other things, 256 bushes (and lost 243 hooks), a fishing pole someone had lost or threw in the brook, an old and holey winter sock (remember winter?), a computer printer cartridge still in its plastic wrapping (Epson 338TX), a tin plate full of holes, what might have been a phone book, various ballpoint pens in a plastic bag, and a partridge in a pear tree.

          I was just kidding about that other stuff, but I did catch the partridge.

          It is nearly official summer, and now it’s time to do all those summer things we all looked forward to when it was February and the January winds Marched through on their way to April. For the past few weeks we’ve all seen more and more of the damage wrought by that December flood. Muniac Stream looks as if the Luftwaffe has been bombing it for weeks, and now all those roads washed out or partially washed out will have to be repaired.

          But here at home are the lawns. My friend Flug’s nephew Cruzer is supposed to be in charge of Flug’s front lawn, but he has developed a curious allergy disguised as a strategy. His ‘strategy’ is to mow every last blade of grass on every other lawn BEFORE he mows the front lawn, which is really the only lawn that can be seen from the road.

Lawns are supposed to be just for show, right? Cruzer agrees with this theory, but he says: “If I mow the front lawn first, I will say to myself that I have done the most visible lawn and am likely to not bother mowing the front of the orchard, behind the house, beside the house, around the raspberry patch, so I do those first.”

I did use the word ‘theory’. You can guess what happens, right? Cruzer will mow every flat green space in the Colony, and by that time he’s so tired he can’t mow the front lawn, the only one that really matters if one wants to impress people driving by – and really, isn’t that the whole idea of lawns? Guess who always gets to mow the front lawn.

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Some further notes on spring, summer, and other things:

They say that one swallow doesn’t make spring, and my friend Flug, still sweating from his forced lawn mowing, agrees. We were sitting in the club and sipping on lemonades (“The finest drink of summer AND winter!” – Ed the Barkeep) when he started expounding on the subject. “See, I’ll show you!” He took several swallows of his drink, then several more. “See? That was about eight swallows, and spring is getting nicer all the time.” I’d like to say he had a designated driver, but he didn’t. On the other hand, his house is next door to the club and he doesn’t own a car. (I guess if you think about it, very few of us owns a car.)

It’s odd how one used a word all his life and still doesn’t know it exists. Shopping at a local grocery store last week, I found I was in somebody’s way because they used one of those words to which I just referred. “CHOUT!”

          Email addresses are weird birds at times. Someone might have as theirs: siddhartha@greenouthouse.net and if they were telling someone else that address, they would say for one part: “green outhouse – all one word – dot net”. I was thinking, one day when I obviously didn’t have much to do except read the Eaton’s catalog: what if a person’s email address was charley@alloneword.com? How would you tell that to someone and expect them to understand? I guess you’d just have to hope for the best. As they say in gardens and in church, lettuce spray.

          And now for a bit of nostalgia, to which I am getting more and more susceptible as I get ancienter. The only way to get to the Aroostook Valley Country Club, New Brunswick, Canada, is through Fort Fairfield, Maine, USA, and since I wanted to get to AVCC for an interview, I had to pass through the fort as it's called. It has been quite a few years since I’ve been there. Gone now are the Plymouth Hotel (and don’t try and say you don’t remember being there), Joe Ossie’s (as he was known) grocery store, Puddledock store, the Boundary Line Drive-In, Lenny’s Restaurant – you name it. The places I used to frequent are now part of the ether. When I was fourteen (and looking 12) I bought beer at Joe Ossie’s and Puddledock, and drank it at the drive-in. Later, when I was rich, I drank whisky sours at the Plymouth and had breakfast the next morning at Lenny’s. All gone now. It’s just as well. I was usually hitch-hiking and the driver was by no means designated.