"Simplify, simplify, simplify" - Thoreau

Making the simple life even simpler

                        by Robert LaFrance

            One of the greatest influences in my life has been the writing of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) whose most famous book, Walden, is almost (I said almost) like a bible when I want some advice. After all, I grew up in the Sixties and now I’m in my sixties; it’s time to listen once again to his advice.

One his greatest pieces of advice was: “Simplify, simplify.”

            In 1845 he decided to do just that and last week I did the same thing. He moved from the town of Concord, Massachusetts to a cabin in the woods near a lake called Walden Pond and stayed there for over two years. A similar thing happened to me in 1980 when I left the city of Tilley, NB, moved to the smaller urban centre of Birth Ridge, NB, and then, four years later, moved to the rural community of Kincardine, which is part of the Scotch Colony. Then last week I simplified again.

            NOTE: Nobody told me when I moved here that the word ‘Scotch’ referred to an ethnic group rather than a kind of lemonade, but I’ve made do. At the lemonade store I simply (hear that Thoreau?) tell them I’m from Tilley.

            What happened last week was that I got rid of my TV remote control. “Simplify, simplify” came the voice of Thoreau as I flung (flang?) that remote control into the garbage bag. Before long I felt I was getting closer to ‘back to the land’ as I got up out of my chair—several times—and walked over to the television where I manfully and manually (digitally, you might say) changed the channel. I could feel the healthy blood coursing through my veins. It felt good.

            Then my friend Flug came over to watch the game. Manchester United was playing Chelsea FC on one Sportsnet channel and Manchester City was going to play Tottenham on another. “Got the chips and lemonade all set to go?” he asked, as he settled into his favourite chair which, luckily wasn’t mine or we would have had words.

            It was soon evident that when I had thrown away the remote control I hadn’t thought the whole thing through. Thoreau wouldn’t have made that mistake in 1845 as he sat in his one-room cabin near Walden Pond. I don’t know where he would have had his fridge sitting in relation to the TV, but I am thinking he would have been more efficient than I was. By halfway through the first half Flug and I were more exhausted than the football (soccer) players we watched. First it was walking all the way out to the kitchen for lemonade several times (I think it was 29), for chips, and then, to make matters worse, walking all the way over to the TV every ten minutes to check on the other game.

            My 2012 experiment in simplification was abject, wretched and dismal. What would Thoreau have done?

            “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” he wrote way back them, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” It seemed that I had more to learn about living ‘deliberately’, and not accidentally, which I had been doing.

            Move the fridge into the living room next to the TV? Dig the remote control out of the garbage can where I had flung (flang, etc.) it? Or turn over an entirely new leaf, appropriate enough in springtime, and get rid of TV, fridge, and even my beloved iPod Touch and its ability to listen to live radio from Saskatoon at two o’clock in the morning? Maybe even go outside and take some exercise?

Whoa! One thing at a time.

            “Simplify, simplify,” wrote Thoreau. “Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat just one. Instead of a hundred dishes, five, and reduce all other things in proportion.” That one meal a day business is the spot where Henry David and I part company, but otherwise his advice to simplify seems like a winner. Our newest car has a gauge to show us when the inflation in one of the four tires is low, but it doesn’t say which one. My son’s car shows exactly which tire is down on air, so I was thinking we could trade. That is, until I heard a distinct rumbling from the direction of Concord, Massachusetts.

            “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” he asked. “We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. By the way, I see that my wife has thrown out the garbage and my remote control. Thoreau would smirk. On the other hand, perhaps existentialists aren't allowed to smirk.
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The case of the quivering garden tool

My tiller quivers in anticipation
 

                        by Robert LaFrance

            As my late father used to say around this time of year: “That sun’s got some power to it now.” I’ve just been out enjoying the sunny weather – NOT!

            I have a cold that would make Hiram Kinney cringe and can’t enjoy anything but hot toddies followed by more hot toddies. Not two days ago I was saying that I hadn’t had a cold all winter. I never learn. Even at the age of 63.8 years, I still can’t help but gloat, and every time I do, I get whacked by the Invisible Fist of Lead.

            It could be worse. I could be sentenced to spend the spring in Syria, which just keeps on slaughtering its citizens, I could be forced to listen to “Achy Breaky Heart” for ten hours straight, or I could be reduced to selling used cars in Qatar. Imagine that – where the average citizen lights his or her cigar with $100 bills, and there I am trying to get rid of a 1991 Cavalier station wagon with a paint job done by a brush. I’ll keep my cold if those are my options.

            Spring is here; it arrived yesterday at 2:14 am Atlantic Time. Of course I am writing this column well in advance of that day, but that doesn’t stop the sun from having ‘some power’. I picked up a Vesey’s seed catalogue this morning and looked out at my tiller as it sits, lonely as a cloud, in my garden. It is up on planks and covered by lots of canvas, but did I fancy that it sort of quivered with anticipation?

            This time of year is quite a shock to a sports reporter, which evidently is what I am, not to be confused with a sporting reporter. Most of the local sports teams are done for the season and I find myself covering dart tournaments and the younger hockey teams. The surprising thing is – and I find this out every spring – those kids’ games are at least as entertaining as the more mature (?) contests. Novice and Atom – they try their hearts out, they don’t fight, and on every team are a couple of kids who you know are going to be great players in high school and beyond.

            And the parents! Wow! I covered some hockey games on March 10 and there must have been well over one hundred fifty people in the stands and watching their young gaffers out there. When there are tournaments, parents make snacks for the ‘hospitality room’ so that the other teams and their parents can have a sandwich or an orange between periods of the game. Local businesses donate and donate to minor sports; remember that when you go over to Maine to shop instead of staying in New Brunswick. I doubt if Presque Isle businesses spend a lot of money helping out our young athletes.

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            Here are a few other observations that I jotted down in my notebook as they occurred to me. (Notebook made and sold in Canada.)

            A couple of months ago we couldn’t turn on a radio or television without hearing about the starvation in Somalia. Six months before that it was Eritrea, and before that it was parts of Haiti and Niger. Does my cynical soul see a pattern here? Do I see that fundraising companies – who might send a quarter of what they raise to these poor countries – are on the move? Surely we all know that the people in these countries are starving all the time and need help all the time, not just when the Fund for African Relief decides to make a moving TV ad? Those who want to donate should look a lot more carefully than they do at who actually gets the money. Snake oil salesmen are just as prevalent today as in the 19^th century. We have to find a way for the PEOPLE to get the donations.

            It’s been a few years now since Canada Post, in its wisdom, got rid of many thousands of rural mailboxes (including ours) and replaced them with those group boxes whose locks do tend to freeze up at times. The move was part of governments’ unremitting assault on rural Canada, so it had to come; there was no use fighting it. When I moved here in 1984, we even had Saturday mail delivery. My point is, we still have our mailbox and it’s been quite useful for people dropping off aardvarks, umbrellas, and books, and I recently heard of another use: because it’s black in colour, and level, I will use it on hot summer days to fry an egg al fresco.

            Down at the club last evening I and a couple of the guys who like classical music (Ernest Tubb and Madonna) and who read music were discussing a Mozart piece in which he slipped an arpeggio in there right in the third movement. Just then Charlie Grandon came and sat down. “Hey, I heard you talkin’ about arpeggios. You orderin’ a pizza? I don’t want none a them arpeggios on mine, and I don’t want no anchovies either.”

                                                    -end-

Bad news - March came in like a lamb

Getting old is not for wimps 

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Canadian comedian Glen Foster, commenting on aging and some of the things that bother us as we get older, says in a comedy routine: “Every once in a while I look around ask myself the question: ‘Why am I here?”

            It wasn’t a religious or a metaphysical question. He went down into the basement and looked around and said: “Why am I here? What did I come down for?”

            Don’t deny it. You have done ‘the exact same thing’. Anyone over the age of fifty can empathize. You were standing in your kitchen and thought of something you wanted to get from the living room. You strode confidently in there only to find, not what you wanted, but that you have completely forgotten what you came in for. The first stage of a disease called BOF (Being over Fifty). I’m 63.8 years old, so you can imagine the problems I have. Now, if I’m going into another room for something, I say aloud what it is I am seeking, in the hope that the echo of the words will hang in the air at least long enough for me to retrieve the object. As my late friend Bob Nielsen used to say, when he was 80+ and still had a better memory than I, who was 55 or something: “Aging is not for the faint of heart.”

            Like me, and the rest of us, this winter is aging. There was bad news on the first day of this month, if my late grandfather was to believed – and he was. “If March comes in like a lion, it goes out like a lamb, and if it comes in like a lamb—well, even you, with your limited intelligence,  can figure out the rest.”

            March the first was quite a nice day here, which means that March 31, if Israel and Iran let it arrive at all, will be an ogre, a fiend, and a rat-tailed cobra. We can scoff all we like about the old sayings of our ancestors, but some of them are true. “A red sky at night is a sailor’s delight, etc.” has a firm grounding in meteorological fact. Okay, March’s going in like a lamb and all that doesn’t quite, but who’s going to argue with Grampy?

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            Other observations while I wait for March 31 and its tornadoes, hurricanes, monsoons, and like that:

            If you are in the mood for seeing a person who is totally unrealistic, naïve, divorced from the world, and one who has hope for humans to respect other humans, go on the Internet to the Toronto Etiquette Project. On that web page a chap gives suggestions to Toronto bus, subway, and transit riders and others so that everyone’s city experience will be better. We’re talking about Toronto here. Hogtown, etc. You shouldn’t preach or floss your teeth on the subway; you shouldn’t smoke near doors or swear around kids; don’t talk on your cellphone in a restaurant; if you’re a pedestrian, please ‘merge properly’; don’t be tweeting on your Blackberry, and treat cab drivers with respect. Yeah, THAT cab driver, the one who picked you up downtown and took you back downtown via Oshawa. Good luck, my friend.

            I was walking in my cousin’s icy yard and of course fell right on my ruggedly handsome face (it’s even more rugged now). She looked at the upward-facing tread on my boots and said: “Hey, you need winter tires!” Then she laughed, but only once, if you know what I mean. It seems that the tread on her boots weren’t anything to email home to mother about, especially when someone attempting to get up off the ice “accidentally” kicked out and tripped her. She’ll be home from the horse-stable soon.

            Larry Wandling and Bill Granite from the Club went on a mighty bender last week. Both were on serious medications, so that wasn’t a great idea in the first place, but late one night they were sipping away and decided they were going to try each other’s medicines. They will be missed.

            I wonder about a lot of things, not many of them in the Middle East where the fine science of Logic is non-existent, but, before Muammar  Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator, was filled full of holes, he was boss of Libya for many about four decades. During all that time, his only title was ‘Colonel’ Gaddafi. My question is, since he was the boss (in spite of saying he shared power with others), why didn’t he give himself a promotion? Maybe not Field Marshall, but surely Brigadier General, I would have thought.

I’m not sure what the Toronto Etiquette Project would say about that. I wonder if, when he was about to be shot, he wasn’t thinking: “Why am I here? I know I came here for something.”

                                          -end-

Emerging embarassed from the whine cellar

Drive your Gremlin, or carry water? Your choice.

                     by Robert LaFrance

          After the recent snowstorm that dropped 30-40 cm on Victoria County, I whined and complained about having to work so hard at scooping out the snow, and how tough things were generally (all out of crunchy peanut butter), and how hard my job is (word processor doesn’t write the stories themselves, I have to use my fingers). Once I got out of that particular whine cellar, I went in the house to find my favourite easy chair, the one moulded to my every bump. Having settled down there with a jar of my favourite libation (water), I turned on a National Geographic TV program about a girl in Burkina Faso.

          Burkina Faso is the former Upper Volta, and one of the poorer countries in northwest Africa. The documentary was about a 12-year-old girl whose entire life seemed to be work. Seemed to be? It was and is. All of her four brothers had gone away to school, because they were males, and her role in life was to carry huge jugs of water for her family. They needed water for the cattle, for washing, for cooking, in that order of importance.

          I could not believe the size and weight (50 kilograms, I am not kidding) of these water jugs that she carried on her head several kilometres each way, all day, back and forth. The only respite was that on the way to the well the jugs were empty. Her diet consisted of rice and bread and water. She fell into her straw bed each day just after dark and was awakened in the morning at first light so she could get to work. Like that wonderful Nike commercial that says “Just do it!”, that’s what she did and had been doing this for years. Not a complaint did she utter. She accepted her role in life.

A few hours later, when I had to go out and scoop out the driveway again, I didn’t complain.

          A few days later, when Flug’s nephew Billy Bob was in his whine cellar and complaining about having to do some chores around his Uncle Flug’s place, just so he could drive the Gremlin down to Bath and attend the weekly livestock auction. Little did Flug know that Billy Bob’s complaining would land him in jail before the sun went down.

          Here’s how it (the situation, not the sun) ‘went down’ as they say on those TV cop shows. Billy Bob, still whining about his tough row to hoe when he was about to get into the Gremlin and come home, clicked the electronic door unlock button. (Yup, they had them then.) By a miracle of 2012 technology and just plain old bad luck, that beeper was on the same frequency as the electronics of a 2011 Cadillac CTS Sedan that was parked right alongside the Gremlin. The headlights flashed and Billy Bob could hear a click. (I was going to say he could hear ‘an audible click’ but that would be a trifle redundant, like referring to a ‘hot water heater’ or saying ‘I first started’.)

          So there was Billy Bob who was faced with a choice: be honest and Gremlin-ish or climb into that CTS Sedan and scoot on down the road to his destiny, aka jail. He chose the Cadillac and jail.

          Flug got the call at about 5:00 pm. An officer informed him that his nephew Billy-Rob (RCMP humour I guess) was ‘incarcerated’ in Woodstock slammer, as it were. (I guessed that was police-hockey humour.) Flug could bring along some bail money and get Billy Bob out of jail. However, Flug being Flug, and Billy Bob’s being the son of Flug’s least favourite sibling (Brunhilde), he said he’d be there the next day unless it snowed more. “What about your Gremlin?” asked the officer.

          “I suppose I should go and get that,” Flug said. “At least it’s worth a few hundred dollars. As to Billy Bob, if Iwere about to sell even the rare chemicals in his body, wouldn’t bring in more than $9.43.”

          The big guy relented of course, and asked me if I would go down with him and drive back the Gremlin. I referred him to the Wikipedia definition of the word ‘gremlin’. “A gremlin is an imaginary creature commonly depicted as mischievous and mechanically oriented…their natures are similar to those of English folklore imps, while their inclination to damage or dismantle machinery is more modern.”

          “I’ll drive your SUV back,” I asserted, and all the way home I thought about that girl in Burkina Faso and how she faces life without complaint, while schmucks like Billy Bob cause all kinds of trouble because they’re idiots.

                                          -end- 

Gored by the Papal Bull

I couldn’t just relax and shut up, could I?

                         by Robert LaFrance

            As you can see by looking at the date on this newspaper, we have a February 29^th this year. I’m all excited.

            What to do today on this extra day? Should I clean out the shed, which is getting pretty depleted as to stovewood, or should I wash the car, go for a great walk, or look up the meaning of ‘spiessbürger’? Or, better still, should I relax and read a book? Or perhaps just relax? In bed? After all, this is an extra day.

            But no, I couldn’t just relax, shut up and enjoy that fact that I get an extra twenty-four hours this year. No, not me. Something in the back of my mind reminded me that the addition of that day every four years – during ‘leap’ year, because we leap for joy – isn’t quite as simple as it sounds. I jogged (in my Gremlin) over to visit the old Perfessor, a retired gentleman whose Physics classes at UNB were always a joy I am sure. I know they were in 1967 when I studied drinking at that university. Professor (as he was then) Gendron used to do things like parachute from hot-air balloons to demonstrate buoyancy.

            He was home when I knocked on the door of his cabin in Lower Kintore. Since it was already 10:00 am, he was sipping on some lemonade. Although he offered me some I refused, but then when he repeated the offer, I felt obliged, out of politeness, to accept a jar of the amber liquid.

            He cleared his throat and began the lecture. “You see, my boy, up until 1582 everybody, meaning the Catholic Church, used what they called the Julian calendar, but it had a few problems. It accumulated an error of three days about every four hundred years…”

            “Whew,” I said, accepting a second lemonade. “That sounds serious!”

            Ignoring my scrawny attempt at sarcasm, he went on. “So Pope Gregory XIII, the top gun of the day, signed a ‘papal bull’ – and no remarks from you – that decreed we would forevermore use what we’re using today – the Gregorian Calendar. Quite a coincidence, its being named Gregorian and the pope being named Gregory, what?”

            The Perfessor went on to explain that the new calendar – and didn’t THAT cause some problems around the world – reformed not only the calendar but also the lunar cycle. I never knew the pope had that much power. “One thing they did was schedule leap years so that instead of one every four years, there would be 97 every 400 years to keep things in kilter, as they say. The years 1896 and 1904 were leap years, but the year 1900 was not. Isn’t that interesting? Bob? Wake up!”

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            Now that I have dealt with this calendar stuff that I am sure absorbs many of your waking hours as it does mine, we move on to some current observations, questions and answers about everyday life in the great Province of New Brunswick:

-        Tired of high gas prices, I bought a siphon hose. My friend Flug was appalled as you can imagine. Honesty has been a watchword of his since 1998, or perhaps early 1999. He looked at me in that way that used to scare his dog, but for me he just looked like a retired Parliament Hill barber. “It’s okay, Flug,” I said. I’m not planning to go around siphoning gasoline; I plan to now take up serious drinking to forget those high prices, and the funnel is going to be a great help.” I lied of course.

-        Did you ever wonder how radio and television talk show and other hosts always look/sound so cheerful?  These people aren’t real, are they? But of course I know they are, because I met quite a few during my years working as ‘a stringer’ for a couple of radio stations (CJCJ in Woodstock and CBC in Fredericton). I could never be one of those people. If I came into the studio in the morning with a grudge against the world, that world would soon hear about it. Come to think of it, perhaps that’s why those radio stations and I parted company.

-        I’m still trying to get over the embarrassment I suffered at a Christmas concert I attended and at which I attempted to sing several seasonal songs. Someone asked me what the title of one song meant and I said clearly, so that about a dozen people heard me: “It refers to the unleavened bread they used to make in Biblical times in the Middle East. When they finally got some stuff so their bread would raise it sure made life easier.” There were a few titters, and even some scornful laughter. Someone – and I won’t mention who she was because it’s still too embarrassing – said: “Bob, it’s not ‘Star of the Yeast’…it’s ‘Star of the East’.”

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