by Robert LaFrance
Adam, there in the Garden of Eden, must have found life easy. He may have been lonely, but there was nobody—at least at first—to criticize him. One day last week, I had three people tell me that one reference I had made in a recent column was one they’d heard before. I was a plagiarist. I looked that up, and it wasn’t what I had thought all these years (one who gets up close and personal with farm animals). A plagiarist is one who copies other people’s writing.
I had stated clearly in the column that what I was saying wasn’t original with me. Referring to New Brunswick weather, I had said: “If you don’t like it, wait a minute.” We’ve all heard that for decades, so it was clear that I was quoting an unknown someone.
When I referred to Adam, I was thinking this: Whatever he said was original, since he was the only one there, and if there had been anyone to read his newsletter from the Garden of Eden, it would have been clearly the first time anyone had ever said those words.
That is, there was no one else there until one day Eve came along and started ribbing him about his column. “You’re plagiarizing yourself,” she snarled. “You said the same thing in your July 17 newsletter. And by the way, when are you going to fix the bathroom cabinet? It’s been like that for months.”
The good times never last, do they?
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On another topic altogether, I feel that I should announce that the next time people at a supper table go on and on about disease, pestilence, death, sickness and their downright grubby lives, I am going to do a Moose Thompson and throw the table, people and all out through a window.
It is an amazing phenomenon. When a crowd of people—in-laws, outlaws and the totally lawless—get together around a table groaning with roast beast (See ‘The Grinch Who Stole Christmas’) the topic inevitably goes to injury, death, disease, etc. It can’t seem to go anywhere else. People compete to come up with the goriest stories.
My usual method of dealing with this, after my patience is exhausted, is to say: “Hey, how about those Leafs?” Or: “Pass the pomegranate-rosehip salad, willya?” Of course we won’t have pomegranate-rosehip salad so that will shut them up for a while, and what are Leafs anyway? Don’t they mean Leaves? That’s not original, by the way.
Like any antidote, this only works for a while, until the immune systems kick in. The first time I ever did it was at an Arbor Day supper at the Kilburn Church of the Intrepid Traveller. People were talking nicely about the coming baseball season, the spring weather, planting their mussel crop, and all of a sudden Aunt Freda said: “Poor Misty McHayla. She’s still in the hospital you know after her attack of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.”
Fifteen minutes later almost everyone around the table had added their own example of a dread disease and, worst of all, seemed to revel in other people’s misfortunes. I believe the Germans call this ‘schadenfreude’. I had made a couple of feeble attempts to change the subject to something pleasant, like taxes or the 1958 Edsel, but everyone pretty much ignored me and continued on their tales of woe.
Finally, I had had enough. In a loud voice I said: “Hey, how about those Leafs?”
The shock was enough to halt Aunt Fannie’s recitation of her dog’s lingering death from Sickle Cell Anemia, which he had caught from her neighbour’s mutt. It even rendered Old Man Rivulet speechless. Other faces around the table registered some consternation as well.
They tried; I’ll say that for them. Aunt Fannie mentioned crocheting, but soon drifted on to her niece’s accident with a crochet hook, the infection, etc. and Aunt Freda started talking about the nice spring weather, but that soon evolved into a story about her pet cat being drowned in last December’s freshet. The fact that Uncle Henry had also drowned trying to rescue that flea-bitten feline didn’t come up. Collateral damage.
Finally I grabbed a case of Alpine lemonade and went out onto the porch to talk to my dog Kezman. I asked him how he was doing and I swear he answered: “I’m recovering now, but I was sick for quite a while. My brother Rover had it even worse…” I went inside and looked for the dog pound’s phone number. One of us had to go. Too bad I couldn’t do that with the human purveyors of doom.
-end-
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