by
Robert LaFrance
My wife and I observe our 30th
wedding anniversary this month.
You will notice I didn’t say ‘celebrate’. How I
have suffered! From the day back in 1981 when she
begged and pleaded with me to marry her and I remembered I had promised to work
in Inuvik for the next five years and she called the company and said I had
water on the brain (not far off there) and finally dragged me to the front of
the church on September 25 the next year, it has not been wedded bliss.
I have been picked on and
victimized. For 23.5 hours a day I have suffered. And now I…
PUT DOWN THAT ROLLING PIN!
********************************
This is Bob’s friend Flug finishing
up his column. He, er, had to go away for a few days. I have wanted to write
one of his columns for years but for some reason he insists on writing them
himself. He says: “If my name is on the column and I get big money for writing
it; I have to write it.”
Too bad this time, Bob. I’ll visit
you in the horse-stable though, LOL, as they say on Facebook.
Unlike Bob’s rather boring columns,
I want to talk about something interesting. Just down the road from my house is
a chap we call The Perfessor. I stopped by yesterday to say hello and, as
usual, he was in the midst of reading philosophy, of which he had been a
professor at UNB-Tilley for many decades until they finally dragged him out
with a team of horses. Percherons I believe they were, unless a percheron is a
fish. I can’t remember, especially since it’s Sunday morning and I have had a
late night at the club.
“You know,” he began, “our prime
ministers were great philosophers. Now you take Pierre Trudeau; he was called a
philosopher-king. And what about Jean Chretien? He had the cops deposit pepper
spray in the faces of demonstrators in Vancouver and then, when they objected,
he said he didn’t know a thing about it. The only pepper he used was on
salads.”
“I read all kinds of philosophy,”
he continued. “We’re all philosophers
you know…”
And so it went, with him expounding
on the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hiram Kinney, the
Seer of Tilley. After about an hour of this interesting talk – he kept my glass
full of lemonade – I had to bid adieu and go about my business. “That’s a
closet door,” he said as I started out. “The door to outside is over there…no,
that way to the road, turn left for your house. It’s red brick.”
So after I got home and had a slight
nap until the next morning, I myself started reading philosophy. He had
awakened an interest I hadn’t indulged since high school. Actually, it was
after high school. In grade ten, my doctor found that I was allergic to books
and studying, but then that cleared up.
My favourite philosopher these days
is Hobbes. Not Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher,
but Hobbes the so-called stuffed tiger of the cartoon strip Calvin and Hobbes.
Calvin is a rather annoying 6-year-old. The cartoons were written and drawn by
Bill Watterson, who has a lot to answer for. Of course he doesn't draw them any more, because I like them.
So Calvin is in the living room. He
is holding a hammer and has already pounded a dozen nails into the coffee table
and is about to pound another. He mother comes roaring into the room. “Calvin
what are you doing to the coffee table?” she says. He looks at her, then at the
hammer and nails and says: “Is that some kind of a trick question or what?” Now
THAT’S philosophy. He is comparing the existential to the practical, the arcane
to the obvious. What a guy. Hobbes is watching and doesn’t say a word. That’s
his comment.
Calvin asks Hobbes what he thinks
happens to us when we die. Hobbes replies that guys play saxophone in an
all-girl band in New Orleans. Calvin then implies that the answer shows that
Hobbes believes in heaven. “Call it what you like,” answered Hobbes. In all my
years (64.33) of reading and studying I have never heard the afterlife broken
down like that into an uncomplicated model.
Calvin asks Hobbes where babies come
from. Hobbes takes a look at the back of Calvin’s shirt collar. “You come from
Taiwan,” he answered. Anybody who has to perform a father-son or
mother-daughter talk with a teenager would do well to remember this. It will
save a lot of stress.
Asked what a pronoun is, Hobbes
answered that a pronoun is a noun that has lost its amateur status. I always
wondered about that. My high school English teacher, the late Miss Sara
Williams, would have appreciated that knowledge. She told us some silly stuff
about a pronoun replacing a noun.
-end-
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