Some people think it’s pretty funny to give a tourist incorrect directions. My friend Flug is not one of those, but his brother Wizlett is. Last week a nice couple who said they were travelling from North Bay, Ontario, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, stopped by his house to ask how they could again find the Trans Canada Highway. The had taken ‘the scenic route’ that included Lower Kintore and Mack Furman’s diamond-studded outhouse with the porch. Quite famous in parts of Ontario. Flug was out behind the house and pruning some prune bushes.
“The Trans Canada Highway?” said Wizlett, as if repeating the name of an obscure animal from the jungles of Burkina Faso. “The Trans Canada Highway? Well, you can’t get there from here, but I think I can direct you to a road that will take you to a road that WILL get you there, in time.” He went on to send them on their way to Kedgwick, up by Campbellton. “Once you get there,” he concluded, “you can easily see how to get back onto the Trans Canada Highway.”
Wizlett was having quite a chuckle as Flug arrived for a visit. The Ontario car was just pulling out of Wizlett’s driveway. Wizlett told his brother all about the hapless couple who were now on their way to north-eastern New Brunswick. “That’s pretty funny, Wiz,” he said. “By the way, the man looked as if he had red hair and a handlebar moustache. Remember we saw his photo on the Internet?”
Memory and some light slowly dawned on Wizlett’s heavy features. Scheduled for laser eye surgery in Halifax in four days, he had Googled the website called http://www.eye-see-you.com. His surgeon was to be red-haired guy with a handlebar moustache. He would be back from his Ontario vacation on the 28th, the website informed.
“Well,” blustered Wizlett, “if he can’t find the Trans Canada Highway, I don’t want him working on my eyes.” Flug gave him the number of his, Flug’s, optometrist. Wizlett had been putting off his eye test because soon he wouldn’t need glasses. Now he would.
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Still on the subject of talking to people, I was thinking yesterday – as I sipped a lemonade and watched a British football (soccer) game – it seems that every year we are getting further away from each other socially. Of course all that started in the 1950s when people began buying televisions; up to that point people actually visited each other in their homes, went out to card parties, and saw each other in the post office and general store. After TV came along, they stayed home to watch Hockey Night in Canada and Milton Berle.
In our case, living as we did in Tilley – north Tilley, on what is now called Churchland Road – we almost had the first TV in our neighbourhood. But no, it appeared across the road at Rose and Fraser’s place. Ours was to arrive a few months later when my brother, who was wealthy from his woods job at a dollar an hour, brought home a $525 Sylvania 21-inch TV. How he managed that I don’t know, but he did. It could be he has been making payments on it since 1961.
Back to the TV across the road. Coincidentally, every Sunday evening our family would arrive at Rose and Fraser’s just before the Ed Sullivan show came on. Mum would bring some cookies and I would bring my cookie appetite. And those days, my friends, were the last days when people would routinely visit one another in their homes. Once every house acquired a television, there was very little visiting. Today some people refer to that nostalgically as ‘social interaction’.
Which brings me to one of the latest devices apparently designed to curb ‘social interaction’. I refer back to the beginning of this column, when those two people stopped and asked Wizlett for directions. Rare as asking for directions has been, it’s now pretty much non-existent. The reason? The GPS, or Global Positioning System.
Just think: if that couple had had one, Wizlett wouldn’t have had to cancel his laser eye surgery. Funny how things work. In this one case, a little less ‘social interaction’ would have been a good thing. Glasses aren’t so bad anyway. Without them, I’d have to drink lemonade out of the bottle.
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