Where
have all the flowers gone?
by
Robert LaFrance
Last evening I looked at my calendar
to see if I needed to send birthday wishes to anyone in February. It turns out
that my cousin – one of the cousins I grew up with – turns sixty-five, and my
nephew, who only a few years ago was a teenager zooming around on a snowmobile,
is turning fifty.
How did that happen?
Oh sure, I am 65 going on 66 (as
they say unnecessarily) but I don’t feel a day over 64, so how come these
relatives are getting so old? I was going to make a joke about their catching
up to me, but I thought about for a while and realized there’s only one way
they could do that, and I wouldn’t like that way at all.
Aging is a curious thing. A lot of people get older
as they do it, but I don’t; I just get better. (Flug says there’s lots of room
for improvement.)
****************************
My column two weeks ago asked if
bureaucrats and politicians who announce cutbacks and who say there’ll be no
reduction in service are (1) stupid or (2) lying.
I was referring to the latest
Horizon Health cuts in numbers of radiologists and their assertion that it
wouldn’t affect patient care, but only hours after that column appeared in the
paper a similar thing happened, this one involving the federal government.
Across Canada the feds shut down
eight Veterans’ centres and then insisted that the soldiers and former soldiers
suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome could get just as much help from
Service Canada offices.
The odd thing is, in this case they
might be right, because, going by the number of military suicides in the past
few months, whatever the government was doing wasn’t working. I have this
sinking feeling that this lack of effectiveness has been due to other
government cutbacks. That’s their answer to everything, but I think I can
safely predict that, as we get closer to an election (provincial 2014, federal
2015) the politicians will stumble upon huge caches of money under beds and
chairs.
****************************
James, a reporter I know on a weekly
(weakly?) newspaper in eastern Ontario phoned me on Tuesday and could hardly
talk, he was laughing so hard.
“Slow down!” I said into the phone.
“Turn down the music in the Elks Club juke box and tell me why you’re laughing
so hard. I need a laugh because I just received my income tax (the Rides of
March) forms in the mail.”
“I had a misprint in my newspaper story about Mayor
Roredon,” he laughed. “I meant to write he was INDUCTED into the municipal hall
of fame and I typed INDICTED which, as you know, being a famous reporter, means
charged by the local prosecutor.”
“I suppose the mayor was not pleased,” I said, still
unaware of the source of his good humour.
“He came roaring into the office and was going to
shoot me, string me up, run over me with a D-9 Caterpillar bulldozer and then
get rough.”
“Then what’s so funny?” I asked.
“While the mayor was yelling at me, Staff Sergeant
Wilcox came in and arrested him. Within an hour, he was INDICTED for bribery,
corruption, spitting on the sidewalk, and whatever else they could think of. I
love it!”
And so we come to the German word ‘schadenfreude’,
one that I’ve wanted to use for quite a while. It means
‘enjoying someone else’s misfortune’.
****************************
We have a new bartender at the club – our seventh
this winter – and his name is William Tell. Those of us of a certain age
remember that the old TV show ‘The Lone Ranger’ began and ended with a piece
from the opera ‘The William Tell Overture’ and I want you to know that this
William Tell has nothing to do with that William Tell. The closest he has come
is that on Tuesday evening, when it snowed, he was complaining because he left
something at the club – the William Tell Overshoes.
We are all rather tired of hearing about the young
rock singer Justin Bieber’s problems with the law. Referring to the previous
paragraph, I might remind you that the original William Tell was the guy who,
trying to gain his freedom, was forced to shoot an arrow through an apple on
his son’s head. I hope Justin’s dad is practising his bow skills.
In my (our) Facebook group ‘Old Photos of Victoria
County, NB’ there has been quite a discussion about girls’ pants. I am not referring
to girls’ panties, but about the days when the female students of almost every
NB high school were not allowed to wear pants to or in school. It was the late
1960s before SVRHS in Andover started allowing it so that girls didn’t have to
wade snow to their bare knees. You can see the discussion on the FB pages,
including one remark: “If the (male) principal insisted on girls wearing skirts
in -30º weather, let him try it.” Amen.
-end-
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