Cantcha just wait a few days more?

The longest journey begins

with but a single step      

 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

            Some companies and stores just couldn’t wait until after Remembrance Day, or as they call it in the U.S., Veterans’ Day, before they started their Christmas advertising. Would a few days really make that much difference?

            I asked this question of the boys at the club and the answers I received ranged from the professorial to the downright blasphemous.

“Deer hunting season is over November 17^th,” said Bernie. “If I was hunting white-tailed deer on November 19 and a ranger came along, would he say: ‘oh, a couple of days shouldn’t make much difference’? Of course it makes a difference. During those few days, a store – a BIG store if you know who I mean – could sell many thousands of dollars worth of merchandise just because people – females – wanted to buy their Christmas presents early.”

“That’s a bunch of &%$#*&,” pointed out Leroi in his polite way. “No offence Bernie, but you don’t know your aspect from a hole in the cold hard ground.”

And so it went, with the only one gaining anything – certainly not knowledge – was Clyde the bartender and his employers, our club. So we all felt good, contributing to the well-being of our Scotch Colony Bar and Grill. If anyone were to ask my opinion on the matter, I would have said (as I implied in the first paragraph) that a few more days wouldn’t make or break any store, and the thanks they received from their customers would return to them in spades, as the Bible says in Ecclesiastes 11:1-2. or was it John chapter two?

            Whichever one it was, what happened was that the old guys cast their bread upon the water and it turned into wine. No, that’s not right: they cast their bread (rice, in other words) upon the water and it returned to them after a while. Either that of the water turned into wine and then…never mind.

 

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            On to another subject: This is the month when we of a certain age remember where we were when John F. Kennedy was killed. I was fifteen years old at the time and in grade two and my classmate Judy Inman came in to the classroom and said: “President Kennedy has been assassinated!”

            People a lot younger than I, and people a lot older than I, don’t realize today what this meant to people my age. JFK represented hope, a change from the stodgy values of the 1950s when the main thing one could ever hope for was a bungalow, 2.3 kids who mostly stayed out of jail, and a job that lasted. I guess we got out of that routine quickly enough. We who grew up in the Sixties were happy with a tent and a cell phone. That is, a phone in or near our jail cell after we got arrested for protesting whatever the government was doing that day.

 

              ***************************************************************

            Don’t you just love November? It’s the time of year when that first ‘common cold’ hits with a vengeance, and, as we know from Romans, Chapter 12, that vengeance stuff belongs to you-know-who. As I write, my son and I here in New Brunswick and my daughter in Calgary all have some version of a cold or flu. Here in the Picture Province, our colds have lasted about a month now and by my calculations and history, they each have 11 days to go.

            Other than the early Christmas shopping that I mentioned earlier, I have everything bought for the big day on Dec. 25. Because of my gender and its obvious handicaps, I will not buy any presents until Dec. 23 at the earliest, but this year I may wait until Dec. 27 or so. What bargains! And you can buy a Christmas tree for about 98 cents then. It’s like buying a turkey two days after Thanksgiving; the grocery store owners meet you in the parking lot and practically force you to take the turkeys at a dollar each. Oh, I love capitalism!

            I and a gang of high-end (they were sitting on stools) community economists were talking about what needs to be done for the present New Brunswick ‘economy’. Harold F. said that governments cutting jobs is exactly the wrong thing to do because they’re just ruining the rural areas.

 

            Then I said we should cut down on our buying of Christmas presents, which of course was just wrong because that hurts the stores. The consensus? About 1:14 am we decided that drinking more lemonade and spending all our money on ‘foolishment’ was just the answer. Next morning I made my first purchase – aspirin. You gotta start somewhere.        

                                         -END-

Dealing with those suppertime phone calls

Another sensible way to deal with telemarketers       

 

                                                       by Robert LaFrance

 

            There lives in this neighbourhood a lady who is in her ninth decade and who is the most feared person in Canada, at least in the minds of telemarketers.

            Her name is…well, let’s not say what her name is, because telemarketers aren’t the only ones who fear her. If she glared at me, I would run to the next county, then catch a plane to Timbuktu.

            One poor telemarketer – I think it was Megan from Cardholder Services – recently called Bertha (not her real name). It so happened I was there getting her husband to sharpen two axes and a bucksaw. The phone rang.

 

            She sighed and said: “I’ll answer it, Fred. If it’s that nice man pretending to be a bank inspector again, I will have to have another talk with him.” The week before, one of those fraudsters called her and by the time she got through with him, he promised to turn himself in at the nearest RCMP detachment – as long as she stopped talking.

            “It’s Megan, of Cardholder Services,” said Bertha, holding her hand over her phone. “I’ll just talk to her a few minutes.” At that moment I began a fairly significant prayer for Megan’s immortal soul.

            “Well hello Megan,” said Bertha, “and what can I do for you this evening? I believe my husband usually answers when you call four or five times a week but he’s busy. What’s that? You say your company had detected a problem with my credit card and computer interface? What can you mean by that? Oh, you say you don’t want to waste my time with a lot of explanations?

            “That’s all right, Megan. You go ahead and waste my time. I would like to know what problems I have. An older person – I’m in my eighties you know – an older person has to be careful. You’re not a bank inspector too by any chance are you? Oh, you’re not? That’s too bad. The last one said I had too much money in my account and should draw some out so he could check if it was counterfeit. That was good news.”

            After a few minutes, Bertha put the phone on ‘speaker’ so I could hear what was being said.

            “Would you explain what the problem is dear?” she asked sweetly. Megan seemed to gain a little confidence by the grandmotherly tone and started explaining. “We have found there’s a problem with your computer, and – “

            “What problem is that, Megan? By the way, I have a niece named Megan you know. She’s studying to be a nurse in Halifax – or is it Saint John? I can never get those two straight. Anyway, my niece Megan is studying to be a nurse because she wants to help people you know. She wasn’t always like that; she used to tease her little brother something awful. Why I remember the day…”

            Bertha went on like this for some time and every once in a while, poor helpless, hapless, outnumbered Megan of Cardholder Services would try to get a word in, but the flurry of words coming from the other direction was constant.

            “And then there’s my third cousin Arnold,” Bertha was saying. “He tried planting a garden one year – that’s the year he was out of work for eight months after losing his job at the potato processing plant. No, it was almost nine months, because his wife Ellen had the baby just as he started working for the fertilizer company…Oh, I’m so sorry Megan. You were mentioning about my computer?”

            There was a pause, perhaps a pause of shock at this invitation to actually speak. “Well, Mrs., er, Bertha, I just wanted to say that we have found that your computer might have a problem that might make it susceptible to a virus and our software would fix the problem and would keep your credit cards safe too.”

            “And what would it do? Would it kill this virus? Because one thing both Fred and I are very careful of are viruses and things like that. I remember his cousin Vincent over in Renous – he lives there in a barracks building with a lot of other men – Vincent caught a virus from stepping on a rusty nail - ”

            “Oh no Bertha! It’s not that kind of a virus. This is a virus that affects your computer and you can lose all your data. By the way, what kind of computer do you have? What brand is it? So we can send you the right software you know.”

            “Computer?” said Bertha. “I don’t own a computer. Or a credit card either. We wouldn’t have either one of them in the house, what with those viruses and things hanging on to them. I told Fred only last week when he said we should have a credit card…Hello? Megan? Hello?”

                                     -end-

Communication is better today

Snail mail (1967) vs. email (2012)    

 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

            “Can it be that it was so simple then, or has time rewritten every line? If we had the chance to do it all again, would we? Could we?”

            Those are lines sung by Barbra Streisand in the movie ‘The Way We Were’. Every day, as I grow more and more ancient, I wonder about that. Would we do the same things we did back then, like in 2008 or even earlier? (That’s as far back as my memory goes and even then it’s spotty.)

            ‘The good old days’ is not a phrase I use often. After all, what would I do without email, the Internet, and those spring-loaded dog collars that are the only way I can possibly keep hold of the giant mongrel Kezman who lives here?

            The reason I started thinking along these lines was that I was recently talking to a hockey coach who said he had several young players and several who will graduate next June. He said it was a good mixture of the young and the old.

 “The old?” I thought to myself (which is my favourite way). “So age seventeen is old now?” I continued talking to myself, which they say is a sign you have money in the bank, which I do. Tonnes of it.

 

So I talked to a few students around that age about whether they felt old at their age.

            “Well, yeah,” said one. “I read in a book – on the Internet, Wikipedia actually – that sometimes even young people felt like ‘elder statesmen’. I’ve been a student for a dozen years now, which is a long time to be in one job. People nowadays have eight or ten careers in their lives because things are changing so fast. A computer program that was brand new five years ago is like ancient history now, like as old as you are.”

            He didn’t really say that last part. I put that in just to add some conflict to this otherwise uninspiring column.

            To him, the Beatles are part of ancient history as well, as are the Soviet Union, Brian Mulroney, and common sense – all gone before he was born. To me, ancient history is the 1950s when we children expected to be nuked any minute, World War II and certainly World War I, the days without computers in every house, and people who could remember the 19^th century.

            Probably the biggest change of all is today’s instant communication. It’s amazing. A university student in Vancouver can send a text message to his dad at 2:00 pm and say he desperately needs money for a vital set of books (beer) and the dad can email or otherwise electronically transfer that money to him by 2:05 pm.

Here’s what it was like when I was attempting to attend post-secondary school in the late 1960s:

            Attending UNB Fredericton, I needed fifty dollars for two geology books. I had three cents in my bank account and my father had no phone. I phoned the neighbours who had just had installed the first phone on our road in Tilley and asked them to get father to mail me $50 in cash.

 

          Four days later no money. I phoned the neighbours again (Don’t ask me how I, with three cents, managed two long-distance calls from phone booths – remember them? - because it wasn't strictly ethical) and they said he didn’t have my mailing address, so he had to drive to Woodland, Maine (near Caribou) to ask my aunt for the address. She wasn’t home, so he drove to Grand Falls to see my other aunt who gave him the address.

            He had sent the money four days earlier. Right after I had hung up that second phone call, I went to the mailbox of my rooming house. Sure enough, my face lit up to find an envelope with the return address Tilley on it. Good old Dad! I knew he would come through.

 

             I quickly tore it open to find nothing but a single sheet of writing paper. “Dear son, I had five 10-dollar bills ready to put in this envelope and then by mistake I sealed it. I am very sorry and will try and send it by next weekend if I can find your address again. When I put it on the envelope, it was the only place I wrote it down. I’ll have to drive to Grand Falls again to get it, but I don’t have any money for gas right now.

            “Wait a minute,” he continued. “I just found five 10-dollar bills in my pocket!” Just about then I was in despair, but since I had just gotten paid $60 for working part-time in a small grocery store, I decided to use that money instead of the cash good old Dad would have sent if he hadn’t sealed the envelope already.

 

             Since the Riverview Arms tavern (long since demolished) was a good spot to buy secondhand books, I decided to go there for a while. I woke up a week later in Campbell River, BC.

                                       -end-      

Finally got rid of that turkey!

Right down to the turkey’s lips and elbows  

 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

            There! Finally! (Columnist licks his chops.) I have finally eaten the last possible morsel of that Thanksgiving turkey, and you know what? I also finally figured out one of the things we are being thankful for – not having to eat turkey again until Christmas.

            Last year I listed the many dozens of mealtime treats that can be made from leftover turkey, and I won’t bore the faithful and long-suffering reader with those, other than perhaps Turkey Tarragon Pickle Pudding, but this year I want to extol the virtues of the fabulous avian treat we call turkey.

            It has nothing to do with the country Turkey of course; it wouldn’t be English if it were logical. It was domesticated by the Aztecs in Mexico. Too bad they hadn’t refused it an exit visa.

            From a book of definitions collected by a chap named Frank Muir I quote: “The turkey has practically no taste except a dry, fibrous flavour reminiscent of a mixture of warmed-up Plaster of Paris and horsehair. The texture is like wet sawdust and the whole vast feathered swindle has the piquancy of a boiled mattress.” – William Connor, the late British newspaper columnist.

            That pretty much covers the turkey.

            We have a lot of traditions - like Thanksgiving turkey – that could easily be put aside. While driving on the right side of the road may not be one of them, certainly Valentine’s Day could be placed in the dustbin (as the British say) along with other British holdouts like Boxing Day. When I was a kid my neighbour Big Sully used to always come down and beat me up on December 26. Finally my mother dropped him with a right cross to the chin and explained that the ‘boxing’ part of Boxing Day referred to putting unwanted Christmas presents in boxes and taking them to ‘the poor’. I Tilley in the 1950s, that would have included just about everyone except Hiram Kinney’s dog, who lived well.

            Talking about the needy brings me to the Good Samaritan Food Bank. It recently had its fall food drive and did all right, including getting some good donations of money, but it always needs more. They also accept returnable empty bottles and cans that they can take in for money.

            Here’s what the Good Samaritan Food Bank almost always needs: canned meats, baby food, pasta sauce, canned milk, oatmeal and childrens’ items like small juice boxes and snack bars. And bring in those returnables. Those people who run the food bank are amazing; let’s not disappoint them. The food bank is located along the Aroostook Road in Andover, just downriver from McAsphalt.

            In what must be some kind of a record, the food bank has been broken into four times in the past year. I’m trying to picture the type of person who would break into a place to steal food when all they have to do is walk in the front door and ask for it.

            The rest of column will be devoted to less important items, but still those that are part of our everyday lives. For example, how many of you readers know the meaning and the origin of the word ‘smithereens’? Well, I’ll tell you. It means ‘bits and pieces’ and it was evidently coined by an IRA explosives specialist in County Donegal (the home of some of my ancestors). Watching a building explode due to one of his bombs in 1921, he said to his wife: “Begorrah! That jalopy is now smithereens, my girl!”

Among the items I bought on my latest trip to a grocery store was a cut of ‘cured ham’. It seems that for the past few weeks if I’ve heard nothing but news stories about the XL meat plant in Brooks, Alberta, where the wonderful bacterium eColi was found. My question is, why haven’t we heard about whatever used to be wrong with the ham I just bought? If it’s cured, then what was it cured of? Consumers need to know these things.

Last week I saw a hummingbird, probably the last one of the fall before they head south to Kissimmee, Florida. No wait! That’s my sister! The point is, they were about to head south for the winter. Usually when you see one hummingbird, another comes along soon to fight with the first.

Sure enough, about a minute later I saw a second hummingbird who immediately attacked the first one. That’s all they seem to do – fight. I wish I could explain to them that if they didn’t waste all that energy fighting they would probably be the size of eagles. Why do they act like married couples?

                                    -end-