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.
*********************************
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.
-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment