Do
soap opera (or operas) reflect real life?
by
Robert LaFrance
It takes a lot to shock this old
reporter who has been on the job since 1978, but I must admit that last week
something shocked me to the point where I stopped complaining about the weather
and the government and went: “WOW!”
It happened at a grocery store in
Perth-Andover.
Normally not a whole lot happens in
grocery stores unless I go in there while I’m hungry and have to leave my
pickup truck in partial payment for the groceries I just have to have, but on
this day something did happen.
I remember it well, it was a
Thursday morning.
“No, Bob, it was a Tuesday
afternoon,” said my wife, reading over my shoulder.
Well anyway, I was walking down the
spices aisle (another interruption to say it was the ‘baking goods’ aisle, at
which point I ejected her from the room) and there were jars of unsalted
peanuts, which is the only kind I eat. I picked up a bottle and was about to
put it in my grocery cart when I decided, just for the halibut, to check the
list of ingredients to see what kinds and quantities of chemicals were included
with one of my favourite snack foods.
Here’s where the shock came in:
there was one ingredient – peanuts.
Where were the preservatives? The
colouring agents? The toxic chemicals so that my system didn’t collapse? They
were not there, and I began hyperventilating at the idea that, all these years,
I had been eating peanuts that were not laced with the usual chemicals that my
body has become used to.
*****************************
On the sometimes toxic subject of
golf, for the first time in many years I played a game and it turned out so
well that I put the results on Facebook.
My daughter Kate and I played nine
holes at Plaster Rock course (one I have always liked very much) and it seems
we were the prime attractions for everyone who was golfing that day, living
nearby, or driving by on the Renous Highway. Crowds gathered to see some of my
drives, and my putts were the stuff of legends, as you shall see.
Kate, who seems to have some talent
for the game unlike her old Papa, pretty much always hit the ball in the
direction of the green we were bravely seeking, but my shots were, as I said,
‘the stuff of legends’. I might as well go to the final score right now so the
reader does not skip to the end of this report and miss the details: I won. My
final score over nine holes was 548, while hers was only 68. Clearly I have the
golfing talent in the…”
“Bob,” interrupted my friend Flug,
who had been reading over my shoulder, “the one with the lowest score wins the
game.” Oh. Why don’t people tell me these things so I don’t make more of a fool
of myself than Nature already has?
I suppose I might as well relate the
tale of the game I almost won, and would have if not for the intervention of
one of those young fellows who tend to trundle around golf courses on riding
mowers. It was on the third hole, and the young fellow was mowing well off to
the side, so I decided to take my tee shot. Fully expecting to put it on the
green (at worst) I took a smooth swing – at least it started it smooth – but
Fate intervened at that second.
The young gent on the mower caught
sight of my daughter, who is quite a looker, and he veered right in front of
the green. My golf ball bounced off the top of the mower and zinged over toward
Two Rivers mill and right in the window of one of the big trucks going by.
Mouth agape, I watched my shot head for Connecticut in the cab of the big
diesel truck. I was still winning, I thought, but that didn’t help.
Still vaguely on the subject of
golf, I recall back in the early 1980s when I used to go to Plaster Rock every
Wednesday afternoon – and play a round of golf if it didn’t rain – I would stop
at a house along the Currie Road and visit with a little old lady who was a
former neighbour from Churchland Road, Tilley.
One day I stopped and she was
watching a certain soap opera – ‘The Secret Edge of Restless Stomach’ perhaps.
A certain character was holding a gun on someone in a graveyard. Exactly one week
later I again stopped again to visit, and the same character was holding a gun
on the same guy. This would be 168 hours without food, drink or washroom.
It was then I realized that soap
opera (that’s the plural of ‘opus’) weren’t quite factual, and if not for golf
I wouldn’t have guessed.
-end-
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