The
Perfessor chooses cowardice over valour
by
Robert LaFrance
I may have been lying about the ‘War
and Peace’, but there was quite a variety of books that I brought from Tilley
in the 1990s when my father Fred LaFrance moved out of the home estate and into
a nursing home. There were many Lone Ranger books, and a whole whack of Hardy
Boys novels.
Of course, in lieu of actually doing
some work up there in the attic, I sat down on an old chesterfield and started
reading one of the Hardy Boys mysteries, “The Clue in the Rooster’s Ear”. It
was the first time in years that I had read one of those and it reminded me
that there were more characters than just Frank and Joe Hardy, the teenage
detectives.
Of course there was their dumb
friend Chet or Chump (something like that) and the Hardy Boys’ father Fenton
Hardy who actually was a detective. Meaning he got paid.
Then about page 498 or so I came
across yet another Hardy whom I had forgotten about. We only remember Frank and
Joe, but there was another brother who worked at McDonald’s – Harvey McDonald’s
grocery store down the street. He had tried to be a detective too, but no one
would take him seriously.
You see Fenton and Mrs. Fenton had
named their first child Foole as a kind of cute joke. Try getting a job as a
detective – or an accountant or truck driver for that matter - when your name
is Foole Hardy.
*****************************
Would you believe I STILL haven’t
got brook fishing this year?
I, who would murder a canary for an
hour’s fishing in Bubie Brook just down from our house, have been no closer to
a brook in 2013 than crossing one over a culvert, or as the old Romans used to
say, a viaduct. I prefer to say culvert however, because viaducts are so rare
that one is reduced to duct hunting if he wants to see one.
Ah, last summer, now that was a
great one for fishing. I would be at the brook before 8:00 am and come home
with a whole ‘mess’ of fish as mother used to say. One day I caught one that
was ‘as long as my leg and big around as any stovepipe’ in Grampy’s words, and
it was quite a job getting that in the frying pan. We had to invite the
neighbours and cook it in stages.
“That’s quite a lie,” said Flug who
had been sitting behind me and sipping on a lemonade as I had been typing. “The
biggest one you ever caught was that haddock you bought uptown. If I recall,
you dropped it on the porch and the dog Belvedere pounced on it.”
“I’ll have you know I caught a good
many sturgeon in that stream,” I remonstrated, whatever that might mean. I
think it means I was calling him a horse’s patoot. In any case, the point is, I
want to get fishing or you’ll see me standing alongside the fish display in the
grocery store and shedding a dozen tears on the packaged trout.
*********************************
Now I’ll just mention some things we
were talking about at the club last evening. One was about Eb Starling, who has
been a club member since just before the Crimean War. It seems his doctor got
him to take one of those ‘stool tests’ and Eb, not a bright light, put his
dog’s stool on the little cards they gave him. Now he has to be treated for
Canine Distemper.
Those ‘keyless entry’ things
sometimes cause a little problem. The Perfessor, who recently got a new Chev
Flicker (cheaper version of the Blazer), was at a Wal-Mart parking lot and lost
his vehicle in the crowd. He pushed the red button which is supposed to locate
your own car and, for some reason, the alarms of about 25 vehicles started
braying. He took a walk over to East Side Mario’s until the hubbub died down.
The linguini was good, he said.
My wife what’s-her-name, my son and
I were out on the lawn chasing fireflies one evening last week when a carload
of Ontario tourists who were staying nearby happened to pass on the road. So
there we were, three alleged grownups with hands cupped running around on the
lawn and trying to catch fireflies. Of course they didn’t know what we were
doing. I noticed after that that those people drove much faster on later tours
of this road.
As Canadians living close to the U.S.
border, we are inundated with American ‘culture’ to the point that many people
pronounce the last letter of the alphabet as ‘zee’ and pronounce the word
‘Lieutenant’ as Loo-tenant. Can you imagine? It’s clearly to be pronounced
LEFT-tenant. Oops. Poor example, but some people do get carried away with the
U.S. vs. Canadian spelling. Ed the bartender put on his shopping list: ‘razour
blades’.
-end-
