Just
think of those poor people in Florida
by
Robert LaFrance
Did you ever make ice cream, I mean
with an ice cream maker that you crank and crank and crank, and then when
you’re finished that cranking you find it wasn’t worth doing? Really? I never
have. It’s always delicious. But what I wanted to say is that when I was
cranking (and cranking, etc.) I was thinking how very lucky we were in that
instance, that of making ice cream. Or, as some say, ‘making homemade ice
cream’.
The snow this time of year is
crystalline, if that’s the right word, and is perfect for making ice cream.
While I was cranking, I thought of all the people in Florida who aren’t lucky
enough to be able to go out on their porches and make it. I wonder if they
realize what they’re missing, with their golf and outdoor swimming in January,
when they could be cranking.
It reminds me of what Grampy said to
me once. Back in the 1970s, I was mentioning that the population of Toronto,
eight hundred miles away, was over two million at the time. He scratched his
chin, looked around at the rolling hills of Tilley and said: “I wonder why so
many people want to live so far away from everything.”
On another subject, it’s not often
that an organization can find the perfect phrase for what they want to do. The
phrase ‘zero tolerance’ is one of those. It is embraced and caressed by police
forces all over North America, especially in the U.S. where officers see
themselves as the combination of Batman, Butch Cassidy and G.I. Joe. When they
say ‘zero tolerance’ that relieves them of any responsibility for thinking, not
an easy endeavour at the best of times.
“Life is not a problem to be solved,
but a reality to be experienced,” said the 19th century Danish
philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, but I’ll wager he never saw a provincial
government that apparently had decided to stomp his home town (meaning
Perth-Andover) every chance they get. He never saw the price of a box of Vector
breakfast cereal go from $7.29 to $2.99 for a week and then go back to $7.29.
So…he needs to go back to Copenhagen, tend his garden, and do some more
philosophizing.
The world is a weird place. Donald
Trump, the U.S.A.’s counterpart for Conrad Black except that so far he’s stayed
out of jail, built a golf course in northern Scotland. Then Scotland decided to
allow an energy company to build a wind farm that would supply half the energy
needed by the city of Aberdeen. Trump sued and lost. His reason for suing?
Because the wind farm would spoil the view of the North Sea from the golf
course. What a buffoon and cartoon character that man is! Can he be a real
person?
Meanwhile, in Germany, a museum that
contained – was actually built around – a section of the Berlin Wall where it
was constructed in 1961 wanted to move,
and of course they wanted to move that piece of the Berlin Wall. There was a
national outcry. I have a suggestion to the museum people: bring in Horizon
Health and advisors from the NB provincial government. They move stuff all the time,
but the downside is that the Wall may end up in a field in Waterville.
Am I glad the month of March is
over! Cabin fever is the worst in March, worse than January or even February
when the deepest of winter is here and it looks as if spring will never arrive.
In March we can actually see spring springing, but it’s not close enough yet to
get out the screen tent. Now that we are well into April, we can see the flocks
of Canada Geese – the braver ones anyway – heading north. I think I even
recognized one. I last saw Elmer in November, when he honked by here just as if
he were my sister, who thinks nothing of going to Florida in the winter while I
stay here and shovel enough snow every day to bury Caesar, or a 1961 Falcon.
Which brings me to the subject of
the 1961 Falcon I used to own back in the late 1970s. Some people may even
remember the photo of me in the Victoria County Record of the day, the one in
which I held a .410 shotgun pointed at the hood of that car whose nickname was
Hitler.
And I said THE WORLD was a weird
place?
-end-
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