What’s for supper (dinner) this evening?
by Robert LaFrance
There is a French phrase – “plus ça
change, plus c’est la même chose” – that people like me use when they want to
pretend they know a second language. People always do that sort of thing; I
suppose you could say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
I have no idea what that French phrase means, but I’m guessing it has something to
do with partridges, like the one that just flew through my living room window.
Chicken à la king for supper tonight, only with partridge.
It’s spring
again, and birds fly into windows. It was also spring last Monday up here on
the mountain, then Tuesday it was back to winter, then Wednesday it was back to
spring, and so on and so on. I’m not sure who’s running things, but they need a
plan. I talked to four people last weekend (they didn’t know me and that’s why
they talked to me) and they were all there at my fourth cousin’s garage and
getting their summer tires on. On their cars I mean. I suggested they might
want to wait until the last part of April, but they figured winter was over.
I want it
recorded that, for the first time since I got married, I was right about
something. Husbands, you know what I mean.
Let’s see,
what else is going on around this mountain? The boys at the club spent much of
the past couple of weeks helping out people in Perth-Andover. I am sorry to say
that many fine and historic houses are going to be demolished. There’s not much
talk of moving them this time as in 1993. Maybe there’s nowhere to move them
to. My old Grampy used to advise me to look on the bright side of things, but I
think the truckload of rose-coloured glasses must have been held up at the
border.
We haven’t
heard from my friend Flug for quite a while. He’s been keeping what they call
‘a low profile’. On that Monday I mentioned – the one that was in spring – he
was working in his garage and getting his Husqvarna tiller in order for the
coming season. Flug is the most amazing gardener I have ever seen because he
grows neither vegetables nor flowers. Usually people have one or the other, but
in the spring Flug tills his garden half a dozen times and just before the last
time he hand-sows – broadcasts as we say in the media – buckwheat so that all
summer he has waving plants of that fine grain. In August he goes out with his
weed-whacker and cuts that, then ‘broadcasts’ a couple bags of lime on the
garden, then tills it all under. In late September he plants winter wheat, then
in May he tills that under and begins the whole process again. His garden is so
fertile I can almost hear it moaning for someone to come and plant a food crop.
Speaking of
Flug, he was saying the other day that women were falling all over him, which
is kind of surprising because if he and a barb-wire fence were to enter a
beauty contest against each other, the fence would win. Hands down, as the
schoolteacher says. Probing this mystery, I found out later that all the women
falling him were in the optometrist’s office and waiting for serious
appointments, like seeing about advanced cataract surgery. I don’t know how he
would have taken it if a couple of men had ‘fallen all over him’. He is a
liberal thinker, but prefers gardening to that sort of thing. Thinking I mean.
Flug,
myself, and the rest of the guys at the club are dinosaurs. I know it, you know
it, and they know it. Each of us owns a cellphone, and there is not one of us
who has the smallest clue – or ‘clew’ as Nigel Naughtworthy calls it – what 99%
of those little icons mean. I turn on my cellphone in the morning and I see
things like ‘calendar’. I am told that if I press a mere 27 buttons I can see
an electronic calendar and find out the date, just like that. On my $9 watch is
a calender which not only tells me the date, but also informs me that it’s time
to get up. And get this: it tells me the time. When I bought it in 2009 I
thought it was a little obscure – just as I do my cellphone – but now, after
hours of study, I know how to use it.
I’m not
saying there’s a lot of useless crap on cellphones, iPhones, iPods, etc., but
there sure does seem to be a lot of useless crap on there. No offense.
-end-
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