Some
facts, or, at worst, ideas
by
Robert LaFrance
My daughter was recently visiting us
from Calgary and was reading a book about all the things there are to see and
do when she returns to that Alberta metropolis - if she can scrape together
some money. As you know, there’s not much of that in Alberta. Looking at
Chapter 4, she suddenly stopped reading and asked me when our own house here in
Kincardine was built.
According to the information I have (from two
history books of the Scotch Colony) our estate was started in 1886 and completed
in 1991. I guess they had trouble installing some of the high-tech electronic
equipment. She looked back at the book and said: “Hmmmm…you know this house is
actually older than the City of Calgary? It was incorporated in 1893.” It’s a
young province all right. It doesn’t seem long ago that it was just a prairie
cow town where I lived in the Salvation Army hostel for two weeks, but it was
1967. Centuries ago.
Speaking of deer, I visited
Fredericton on July 27 and when I got home I walked around this estate, a
wander that included my back garden that is located 91.4 metres from the house,
out in the orchard. The first thing I noticed was that the string beans looked
a little weird.
“The beans really grew fast while I
was gone a whole nine hours,” I thought to myself (which is my favourite way to
think). Then I looked for the four beet plants I had been looking forward to
devouring sometime in the next month. Three of them were gone and one was
suffering Post Traumatic Quivering (PTQ). The thick row of head lettuce was
also damaged. I had been deered.
It’s just a small garden, so the
deer that had visited had tramped pretty well everywhere. Anybody with half an
eye and an elbow (I cleaned up that phrase for the paper) would have seen that
first thing. What to do, what to do so that I could save what was left? Then I
remembered the time back in the 1980s when I had a problem with deer coming in
my orchard on a path from the next property. The answer then, as it was on July
27, was to hang a small net bag containing human hair. Deer won’t go near that.
The only problem is, when my
neighbour, Louee Witson, wakes up from his deep sleep, what is he going to
think when he finds his shoulder-length hair is a little more jagged than it
was when he sat down? Serves him right for falling asleep in a lawn chair right
out in the open like that.
People occasionally tell me that I
think too much, and I think I agree. However, once in a while I come up with an
original idea that arrived because my lines of thought are on a completely
different plane (higher or lower?) from everybody else’s. Here’s my latest
revelation: while I was sipping on a lemonade at the club’s outdoor lounge,
someone mentioned that it was starting to cloud over.
Have you thought about what you’re
saying?” I said. “You’re saying the sky is clouding over, when in fact the sky
is clouding UNDER, right? When it’s all cloudy we can’t see the sky, which is
ABOVE the clouds.” This will shock you, but no one seemed that concerned about
this. In fact, they seemed militantly unconcerned.
A federal cabinet minister was on
television yesterday afternoon and going over the fabulous accomplishments of
his government since one S. Harper had formed that government a few decades
ago. Or perhaps it just seems that way. So last evening – this was just after
my cloud revelations – when we were all watching this performance on the club’s
ancient TV, the Perfessor cleared his throat and said ponderously: “ You know,
memory is closer to imagination than reality.” There was a silence while we
drank this in, so to speak, and then someone got up and turned the TV over to
the soccer game from Brazil.
While the average stoat has more
Scottish blood in his or her veins than I do, I still am looking forward to
this month’s 140th anniversary of the Scotch Colony celebrations
here in Kincardine. The Fitzgerald Family music show on July 16 was the first
event of the celebrations and it was just about the best show I’ve ever seen in
Burns Hall, and there will be lots of things going on Aug. 23-25. They have
even put together a history/cook book for the event and many dozens have been
sold already, probably because I wrote one piece in it…or not. Other than my
story, it’s a very entertaining book.
A final note for this week: I bought
a new shaving mirror, even though some people look at my ‘beard’ and think I
don’t shave. Anyway, this mirror has a feature I insisted upon. At the bottom
is the sentence: “bearded persons in this mirror are much handsomer than they
appear”. It’s an ego thing.
-end-
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