The discovery of my doppelgänger (July 27, 2011)

At last, I have found my twin

          by Robert LaFrance

“They” say that in each of our lives there exists a doppelgänger and this morning about ten-thirty I found mine.

For those of us who don’t use the word ‘doppelgänger’ very often, like never, I should mention that it is a twin, an evil twin to be exact. Here’s how I found mine. I was dozing on the couch, potato-ing with pop and chips, when I happened to glance up at the screen. A show called the Jetsons was on.

I know what you are thinking: that 1960s cartoon show featured a guy named George Jetson and he is my doppelgänger. No, I’m talking about the commercial that appeared during the show. It was advertising a modern movie that stars the actor Brad Pitt. Since I don’t get out much, I had no idea who he was or is, but if he’s not my twin, I am a ring-tailed snorter, and I’m not.

And he is evil.

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That was just for your information; now on to another and less scary subject, my cousin Vinnie, who is pretty much the same age as I am, and who also grew up in Tilley, sent me a list of words and phrases we don’t use much any more. You know you’re ancient once you realize that you’ve grown another language in the past four or five decades.

          “Icebox” is what we now call a refrigerator. The idea in both cases is to keep food cold so it doesn’t spoil, but otherwise the fridge is pretty much the opposite of what it was. I remember in the summer going with my parents to an ice house along Little River in Tilley, and buying a big block of ice that had been stored in sawdust since winter. Once we got it home we would scrape off the sawdust and put it in the icebox.

Now, with electricity, we make the ice in our houses, then carry it out, probably to a comfortable chair on the porch, and probably the ice can now be found in a tall glass full of lemonade.

          To carry this comparison even farther, those with fridges that don’t defrost themselves have to take the built-up ice out of the fridge and throw it on the lawn, there by the lilac bush. See where all the weeds are growing? They like fridge ice.

          “Be sure to shake the milk bottle to get the cream mixed in before you pour a glass of milk,” my mother said. That was back in the good old days before pasteurization. That never made sense to me; the cow was already in the pasture, so the milk was already pasteurized, wasn’t it? Anyway, I did what I was told. My sister told me later that some French guy named Pasteur had figured out that boiling milk made it safe to drink and that’s where the name came from.

          Speaking of cream, I remember the days when farmers in rural Tilley would milk their cows and separate the cream, then put it in big cans. On Thursday mornings, the truck from Carleton Co-Op in Florenceville would come along and pick up the cream cans. A few weeks later the farmers would receive small cheques in the mail.

          Raymond Sisson of Arthurette used to come by once a week with his grocery truck and stop at Grampy’s house. People from the nearby homes would go in that truck—a grocery store on wheels—and buy some of their supplies of food, and we kids would get a chocolate bar or two with money that we’d earned picking returnable bottles from the ditches. We got most of our groceries from Lila Goodine’s store ‘down in Tilley’, meaning the metropolitan area of the hamlet, but Raymond had some things that were different.

          In later years, when my daughters were small, the Fuller Brush man, Avon lady, and the public library bookmobile used to come around regularly. Now there’s no bookmobile and no grocery truck, and the government is trying its hardest not to deliver mail to houses. My daily newspaper comes in the mail—the group box located three kilometres away as opposed to my former mailbox at the end of my driveway—and Mr. Fuller must have married Miss Avon and moved to Saskatchewan.

          I remember Mum saying to my brother: “There’s a two dollar bill in my purse; would you take the car down to the store and fill it with gas? But first take this Eatons catalogue out to the toilet. We’re almost out of paper.” No comment required. Brad Pitt wouldn’t make any.

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Are we all dunces? (July 20, 2011)

Still crazy after all these years

by Robert LaFrance

I don’t know why, but the sight of a teenager smoking still fills me with amazement. After all these decades of information that smoking causes everything from lung cancer to sybaretic hemophilia and hangnails, some youngsters still grab onto tobacco as if it were the answer to all their questions. Even though they’re sneered at, cajoled, and otherwise assaulted, teenage smokers – and smokers of all ages – continue to stick burning leaves into their mouths. Why?

It can’t be peer pressure; their peers are the ones sneering at them. (Interesting phrase—sneering peers, what?) It can’t be any particular desire to look cool – burning leaves can’t very well look cool. And it can’t be that they are making a statement, unless that statement is: “Look at me, I’m doing something dumb!”

I suppose they could be making the statement that they have a lot of disposable cash, but a non-shiny old pair of jeans with the knees ripped out would say the same thing. It is said that those items sell for $300-$500 in Russia and parts of Kosovo and if that is true, I am sitting on a gold mine. That rag box I just put into the garage is worth roughly $2,230.

School authorities and parents who are paying attention have tried for years to persuade their young gaffers not to take up the noxious and expensive weed, and have often failed miserably, but, as usual, I have a plan. However, the downside is that in order for it to work, some big bucks must be spent.

First, the parents of a school-age smoker—especially one who is just starting the habit-forming practice—must invest in some of those jeans I mentioned above. Four or five hundred dollars worth should do the trick. Then they (the once-wealthy parents)  must start smoking. I will guarantee that within two weeks the young student will not only give up smoking—tobacco at least—but he or she will start wearing Brooks Brothers suits with Armani ties -  perhaps even some Italian shirts.

I mentioned the word ‘downside’. By this time, the parents are not only hooked on nicotine, but they are broke, and none of their friends will speak to them. They will be living their lives in a noxious hell—a cloud of acrid, filthy, and smelly blue smoke. Their house, their cars, and their clothes will stink. Their children will now scorn them, their friends will eschew them, and their health will suffer, but hey, if you want to break an omelet, you have to take a stitch in time, if you gather my moss.

At least there’s no danger of their becoming chain smokers. In my 63.18 years on this planet, I have never seen a person smoking a chain.

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Here’s item I have dragged out of my sweaty notebook:

When we moved here to the Scotch Colony in 1984 (Flug moved next door in 1987) there were a pair of bobolinks nesting in the field just up from the house. They were there for several years and then, perhaps because of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, they disappeared. About three weeks ago, I was hoeing some beans and looked into a nearby Yellow Transparent tree to find – guess what? A pair of nesting robins.

Just kidding—it was a pair of bobolinks. I talked to a few birders in the area and they said bobolinks weren’t that uncommon, so why am I making such a fuss? I asked when was the last time they had seen a bobolink, and not one of them had seen one since 1995.

Which brings me to the real reason I brought up the subject: On Monday evening I was reading a book on word origins and found that the word ‘bobolink’ has a very interesting pedigree. It was originally called ‘Robert of Lincoln’ and went on to half a dozen other names. Now doesn’t that just make your day to find this out? Robert of Lincoln became bobolink.

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One more subject and your suffering is over for this week. Also in the matter of word origins in our interesting and ever-changing language, I looked in a mirror this morning and, for some reason, thought of the word ‘dunce’. I looked into a book I often consult—“An Irreverent and Thoroughly Incomplete Social History of Almost Everything” by Frank Muir and found the word’s origin explained.

Don’t tell my wife about this (she wears a kilt at breakfast), but the original dunce was Scottish. His name was Duns Scotus. A 13^th century schoolteacher, he led a movement that was against any form of progress or innovation. His followers, called Dunsers, were always upset about newfangled ideas “so that the name indicated an opponent to progress and to learning. Hence they were dunces”.

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People laugh at different things

What IS a sense of humour, anyway?

by Robert LaFrance

Somebody told me this morning that I had ‘a wicked sense of humour’. I wasn’t sure whether to grin or grimace, but it seemed as if that person were giving me a compliment, as in: “That Bobby Hull sure had a wicked wrist shot.” I have been wrong before though. Once, in a bar in Flin Flon, Manitoba….but that’s another story.

A sense of humour is a delicate thing. In his essay ‘Humour As I See It’, Stephen Leacock said that, according to a friend, his humour was ‘a rather ingenious mixture of hyperbole and myosis’, which would pretty well explain it to me if I happened to know the meanings of those two words.

Reluctantly I turned to my dictionary, which wasn’t much help, so I asked the bartender. “Well Bob,” he said, polishing a wine glass (as if anybody ever drank wine at the club), “I know that hyper-bowl is a big bowl—that’s obvious—and myosis refers to the disease you get from drinking brook water in the spring. We call it ‘beaver fever’ in these parts. Maybe you add them together and get senseless humour.”

I have never had people accuse me of hyperbole and myosis, but people do say that I am able to find the funny sides of things—but only if they happen to OTHER people. If I slip on a banana peel—or an apple peel for that matter—and fall heavily on my keister, I am unlikely to break out into gales of laughter even though bystanders might. The old pie-in-the-face trick is only funny when somebody else’s face is the recipient of the whipped cream or meringue.

As Leacock said, I have as good a sense of humour as anybody else, but the fact is that everybody else says the same thing when talking about themselves. Even people so dour that they can’t force a smile at the jokes of Derek Edwards, John Wing or Don Rickles will insist that they have a good sense of humour. I can’t figure it out. I know people who haven’t cracked a smile since 1977 and who still say that.

They will readily admit they have no skill at sports, can’t dance worth beans, wouldn’t know J. S. Bach from Don Messer, couldn’t boil an egg without burning it, and have no more artistic skill than a gnat, but nobody will ever admit they have no sense of humour.

The ‘practical joker’ is probably the first person to brag about his sense of humour, but, as we know, there is nothing but malice behind practical jokes. People who place the proverbial banana peel on the sidewalk aren’t jokesters; they are felons. A broken hip would be the funniest result of all, unless the victim broke two hips and a wrist. That would be REALLY hilarious to some people.

It must have been two weeks ago now that someone pinned me in between the cans of fruit cocktail and boxes of pre-mixed pancakes in one of the grocery stores I frequent, and insisted on knowing the answer to the following question: “What’s the funniest thing you ever saw?”

It was either come up with an answer or become part of that store’s inventory, so I phrased it like this: “I was grocery shopping one day when a guy came up to me and asked me what was the funniest thing I ever saw.” I could see him looking a little wary. “I was in quite a rush, being about to visit a friend in the hospital, and I accidentally knocked down a whole shelf of (I looked behind me) fruit cocktail cans.” He started to edge away. “The cans rolled into the aisle and under his feet.” He was backing away quickly now. “He slipped on a couple of them and fell heavily into some bottles of pickles beets, breaking two of them with his face. I know it was wrong, but I couldn’t stop laughing.”

By this time he was running out in the parking lot where he slipped under the wheel of a tractor-trailer. I felt bad.

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A spouse with good teeth

Some of the high school grads seemed young

by Robert LaFrance

"Dear Mister LaFrance,

Thank you so much for all your hard work in writing your informative and entertaining column. I intend to read one very soon. (Signed) Your Aunt Marilla.”

So much for my adoring public. I decided to go fishing. The summer has now officially started, I am told. I am also told that the days are getting shorter on their inexorable drive toward snowdrifts. I wasn’t depressed before.

My gardens are burgeoning, the animals are burrowing, the moose are bellowing, the sheets on the line are billowing, the nearby brook is babbling, the badgers are badgering, the bread is baking, the businesses are bankrupting, the boys are belching, the bruisers are bench-pressing, and my brain is biodegrading as I try and come up with information to make a reasonable column for my faithful and long-suffering readers.

Last week I attended the SVHS graduation and noted that quite a few of the graduates seem somewhat young, like eighteen or so. Quite a few of them looked like deer caught in the headlights, but many are facing the years ahead with aplomb and even fervour, whatever that might mean. (I read it on a Canadian Living recipe for chili.)

Man, was I scared on my own graduation night, in 1965. I had just turned seventeen and had about as much idea of what I wanted to do with my life as an aardvark has knowledge of macramé. Probably far less if the truth were known. Deer in the headlights indeed.

And now I look back on those 46 years since I graduated and ask myself if I would have done anything different if I had a chance to do it again. Not a whole lot, except I should have found a way to learn French even if it meant going to Quebec City and taking a job as a ‘regardant de ciel’ (sky watching technician). We call it ‘bum’.

Those were the days, my friend. The Sixties in Quebec. They say if you remember the Sixties then you weren’t there—and I don’t, therefore I was—but I am sure it must have been a great time to be young in Quebec. The Quiet Revolution was at the top of its form back then, and it was anything but quiet. THAT’S where I should have been.

Instead I found myself in the spring of 1967 on Vancouver Island and cutting bushes with a dull axe. A bunch of us gangsters from here and from various parts of Ontario—and one guy from India, go figure—were working to make a park, now called Strathcona Park, just out from Campbell River. There were five of us there from Victoria County, NB, and four of us got fired for having axe-throwing contests on company time.

I know what you’re thinking: I was one of the miscreants, but this time the Great God of Tooth Decay (Merlin) saved me. I was home that day in our trailer and waiting for a dentist to arrive and take out an aching tooth when the rest of the NB boys came in and said they were heading for Calgary. At the prospect of hitting the road, my tooth healed itself, and away we headed. I sold an old Kay guitar for $20 to an RCMP officer in Campbell River and with that nest egg I headed east, sort of. Other than by jet, there weren’t no east from Vancouver and Vancouver Island if you’re going to Alberta, so we headed north up the Fraser canyon—two groups of hitchhikers.

          I won’t bore you any more with details of that trip, except that we slept in a few all-night laundromats between Vancouver and Calgary. We did finally get back to Victoria County, NB, only to head back west within weeks, at least as far as Ontario.

          Those 2011 graduates probably won’t follow my path. Not unless they are completely bonkers. On the other hand, they have cellphones, iPods, iPhones, and a host of other devices to call home and get Mum or Dad to transfer a few hundred into their account so they can put up bail, buy a plane ticket, or eat another meal or two. I shudder to remember that, on my second trip west where I lived in Vancouver almost two years, I had zero backup. I’m not even sure Dad had a phone at that time.

          This is going to shock everyone I know, but times have changed. High school graduates today, while being no more assured of success that we were in 1965, will be facing the same challenges as we did – find a spouse with good teeth and a good-paying job with a medical plan.

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