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 19th 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.”
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