Our new Toyota saved its own life (June 25)

What you might call a ‘plethora’

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Saturday, June 14, turned out to be a rather egg-y day, if there is such a word. On the fridge grocery list, my wife had written that we needed catsup and eggs in addition to things on the list I always carry in my notebook, so when I got to the store in Perth-Andover I bought two dozen eggs.

            That was the day of the summer’s first farm market at the Legion’s curling club and a young lady from Tilley, Velma G, was selling farm-fresh eggs. Not realizing I had already purchased some eggs, my wife bought two dozen brown ones. Meanwhile, among the audience listening to the Wednesday Evening Fiddlers was my Uncle Frank, who also noted those farm-fresh eggs and thought it would be a nice gesture if he bought us a couple of dozen, to make up for the four he ate last Sunday morning when he ‘happened’ to drop by at breakfast time.

            The dénouement (as they say) of this scenario occurred about two in the afternoon when all six dozen of those eggs arrived at the same time on our kitchen counter. Three astonished faces looked at the stack, looked at each other, and one of those faces said: "Looks like we better make an omelette."

            Uncle Frank said it looked as if we had a "plethora" of eggs, and maybe even a "surfeit". I couldn't help but agree, especially after I looked in the Tilley Dictionary to find they were both defined as "too much of a good thing".

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            The new car we recently acquired, a 2014 Corolla, has a feature that has already saved its own life. The backup camera shows on a little screen under the radio what is behind the car as it’s backing out of a driveway or a parking place.

            Making sure there wasn’t a huge van parked beside me to block my view when I backed out later, I parked across the street from ScotiaBank. Of course when I came out there were three schoolbuses, nine vans, and a motorcycle parked on the upriver side, meaning that when I backed out I couldn’t back out, I could only EDGE out.

            I did that very thing and was about a yard (I don’t think it was quite a metre) out when I happened to see some motion on the backup camera screen. It was a tractor-trailer going 200 miles an hour – at least – and he wasn’t slowing down. I jammed on the brakes and when I regained consciousness, it was with the realization that that truck would have crushed my backup camera to smithereens. And incidentally, the entire car and me.

                                                ********************************

            Earlier I mentioned my Uncle Frank; now to look at him one would not guess that his mouth would easily accept a size 13 running shoe, but history has proved that it can. Aunt Mary asked him last week: “Does this dress make me look fat?” and he quickly found something to do in his woodworking shop, meanwhile mumbling that a B-52 flying low overhead that afternoon had ruined his hearing.

            So he had handled that situation perfectly. It was the next one that he bobbled. Aunt Mary said it was her third anniversary as an adherent of the religion called Weight Watchers. At that point he should have quickly (1) left the room, and preferably the county, (2) ignored her completely and turned up the TV, citing that B-52 induced hearing loss, or (3) complained of severe chest pains and got her to dial 9-1-1.

            What did Uncle Frank do? He looked at her and said: “That’s great, dear. You’ve stuck with them through thick and thin.”

            He went fishing that afternoon, and the next, and ate his meals in restaurants. And by the way, no B-52s have flown over this area since the USAF closed Loring Air Base in the early 1990s. It was located near Caribou, Maine and when those behemoths passed over Tilley the windows shook, but not nearly as much as after Uncle Frank made the above gaffe.

            Uncle Frank does have a habit of doing that sort of thing – speaking before thinking. We all should wait until that connection between brain and mouth is solid before using the mouth.

            About two weeks ago he saw a young married woman whom he knew sitting in a black pickup truck at the grocery store parking lot. Later in the day, he saw her again sitting in a black pickup with a different man. Uncle Frank didn’t know that this one, unlike the earlier one, was her husband. Of course he had to say: “I guess that was your brother I saw you with this morning.”

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Not really an Ottawa insult (June 18)

Ottawa: 30 square miles surrounded by reality

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Once in a while each of us hears about something another person has said, and we say to ourselves: “Now why didn’t I think of that?”

            Such was the case when I heard a CBC announcer (or possibly a common tater) say that our national capital is “thirty square miles surrounded by reality”. I am sure the ‘reality’ part might be questioned, but one thing at a time.

            Only one day after I heard the above statement, someone else – no doubt a cynic – said: “Politicians should wear shock collars that go off every time they tell a lie.”

            Hold on now! Many persons would object if someone put a shock collar on his dog, so why is it okay for a politician to wear one?

            The reason for all this thinking (and my head hurts now) about politics is that, for the past month or so, one of the television channels I watch, CHCH in Hamilton where I used to live, has shown nothing but election ads.

            You know what I mean. “We’re going to stop government waste!” thunders the Liberal Party, but they never seem to finish that sentence, which, as we know, would be: “…and carry out our own waste management program.”

            We all roar about government waste, but do we really understand how much money is wasted by these people? It is said that a cancelled ‘gas plant’ project near Toronto cost Ontario taxpayers one billion dollars. Next time you drive by a food bank or a homeless person, think about that figure. Mirabel airport near Montreal was even more expensive, and Chretien’s cancelling the big helicopter contract when he took over from Mulroney, what did that cost? $550 million, that’s what. The original estimate for Point Lepreau was $455 million and it cost $1.5 billion.

            I’d continue, but I have to eat soon.

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            I have now sent letters to the New Brunswick government and the Opposition Liberals, as well as to the candidates for the NDP and the Green Party, and it’s all about spin-doctoring.

            You will have noticed that the government occasionally produces A PLAN on this subject or that minutes later the other parties will meet with the media who are all too willing to print their opinions. (Yes, the word ‘media’ is plural, as are ‘bacteria’ and ‘data’.)

            Here’s my idea: Why not have the government be heard from AFTER the opposition parties have had their say? And why haven’t their highly paid spin doctors  thought of this? So far the only thing they have thought of is to have the government release A PLAN late Friday afternoon so as to miss the major broadcasts.

            Here’s how my idea would work: On Monday the government announces that on the following Friday they will be releasing ‘A Plan to Stop Obesity in Brook Trout’. In minutes all the opposition parties will go to the media and say that it’s a terrible plan. It’s “too little, too late” and “the government gave in to the big trout companies” and things like that.

               Then on Friday, as promised, the government comes out with THE PLAN which by that time they have overhauled and tweaked, thanks to all that constructive criticism from the other parties. And that’s it. Simple as a church mouse playing a Beethoven symphony on the organ.

                                                ************************

            I (and you) have railed away about all the medicines now available to treat illnesses we didn’t know we had, or didn’t know existed, and it’s only going to get worse. I think the only defence against this sort of thing – which might be called ‘hypochondria catering’ is to come up with our own set of medical conditions and then make up some sort of pill for it. The most obvious condition that comes to mind is one we all need  treatment for now and then. It’s called ‘stunned’.

            Changing subject, it’s time we males stepped up and started to make formal complaints about sexism toward us. Driving to Grand Falls, I always notice the yellow signs that warn us that a moose might choose there to cross the Trans Canada Highway. You will notice that the moose on the sign always has antlers; don’t cow moose ever need to cross the road? Chickens do.

            Another example of this is the phrase ‘Old Man Winter’. This is not only sexism, but ageism, because there’s an insult toward males in there as well as an insult toward OLD males. Now that I’m 66, I resent it. I cry myself to sleep every night, but come to think of it, that is because of the rolling pin bruises.

            I didn’t realize the power I had until I wrote the story about Roger Pelkey’s trip to Israel and mentioned some of the things he said about the Dead Sea. The only thing is, I wrote “The Black Sea” which means that, with the stroke of a pen, I moved an entire body of water from somewhere over near Turkey to a little area between Israel and Jordan. This is power.

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A dirty garage just needs a 'b' (June 11)

There is an upside to everything – well almost everything

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            My old friend Juliane McKay wrote me from Whitehorse that things are going well for her, especially her aardvark training business that she began in the 1970s, shortly after moving from Edmonton where she and I worked for an oil company.

            Her letter, after apprising me of the news in Yukon, moved on to the fact that she had a bad cold and, at the age of 62, she had found yet another reason to rejoice at having one. "We all know that it is a great excuse to call in sick to work (especially that bunch I have working for me!), but this morning I found that when I sang ‘Friends in Low Places’ I could hit those lowest notes."

            She went on to say that, after lots of practice, when she played the guitar along with her singing, she was finally able to hit the chord E Flat Diminished, which is vital to that song. And THEN she said a very curious thing: "But don’t expect to see me on YouTube or something. I ONLY sing in the shower."

            Let's recap: She only sings in the shower, but she accompanies herself on the guitar when she sings. And she sings ‘Friends in Low Places’. It's too much to envision. She must go through a lot of guitars. Those Martins and Yamahas don't sound their best when they're water-logged, but a Gibson might take it.

                                            *****************************

            Flug stopped by day before yesterday while I was cleaning the detritus out of my garage and commented that my 2-bay establishment was about the neatest one he’d seen for some time. “You could actually park vehicles in here!” he enthused.

            Flug always keeps his garage door locked and his 1986 Gremlin parked outside. I’ve never asked him why. A few hours after he had made his comment about my garage, I decided to go visit him and ask to see the interior of his garage, just for the halibut.

            “I always keep the up-and-down door closed,” he said, “and go in the side door.” I soon saw why. There was everything but the kitchen sink – no wait, there it was – in there and the building was packed solid with his junk (mine was called ‘detritus’, you will remember) whose reason for being there was apparently because it was worthless. There were stacks of newspapers from the 1980s and earlier, car parts (and possibly even a car under there), boxes of broken dishes – in short, a pile of stuff that should have been thrown away a decade ago.

            I offered to help him clean it out so he could park his car, but he said he was quite happy leaving the garage as it was – a large cubical can of trash – although he didn’t exactly use that phrase. He called it his ‘collection’.

            Walking back home to my estate and my newly neatened garage, I reflected that the difference between having a place to park one’s car and a pile of rubble depended on only one letter of the alphabet – ‘b’. Add that letter in the proper place to the word ‘garage’ and you have ‘garbage’. Flug never could spell.

                                             *****************************

            A few more thoughts, gleaned from my notebook:

            (1) There should be an insurance company to protect us against insurance companies. Enough said on that.

            (2) Lumber companies should be doing all right these days. The CEO of the Kincardine Sawmill Co. Inc. told me yesterday that his company is out of the red for the first time since 2007 because of sales of ‘bump’ signs to be placed along the various roads of our county.

            (3) My friend George, who weighed 233 pounds last summer, now clocks in at 155 because every time he sees and hears a warning about a certain food (egg yolks, all sprayed vegetables, all fish, anything else that tastes good) he cuts that out of his diet which now contains only distilled water and organically grown eggplant.

I keep telling him that he’ll never get out of this world alive, certainly not with his money, and he just says a perfect diet means not dying. He added that if he were to die he would take travellers’ cheques to his new location. I wonder if they make asbestos ones?

            (4) We leased a new Corolla back in mid-May and for the first few days at least were very afraid of getting a scratch on it. Three different times I parked far out on the edge of large parking lots uptown and emerged from the store to find that someone had parked alongside me – and I mean RIGHT alongside me. No scratches though, so far.

               (5) Speaking of parking, our new car has a backup camera and now we’re both going to sign up for a 3-week course in Moncton to learn how to operate that beast. I’m too old a dog to be defeated by a young puppy like that camera. I’m a high-tech geezer.
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The bumpiest roads since creation (June 4)

Road trip! Happy Tourist Trails to You

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            When I was a youngster, about a century ago, I and other hoodlums from Tilley used to go once in a while to the Capitol Theatre in Andover to see the Saturday afternoon matinee, which word is a misnomer at best since ‘matin’ means ‘morning’. At least that’s what Grampy told me, and he grew up speaking French.

            Our favourite movies were those starring Roy Rogers (real name: Leonard Slye) who would gallop – or rather his horse Trigger would gallop – across the screen in search of rustlers, who were always found at ‘the old line shack’.

            Still on the same subject, believe it or not, I recently took a road trip to Plaster Rock on my side of the Tobique River and then came back the other side. I drove from our estate in Kincardine, along Kintore Road to Highway 109 along the Tobique, then Highway 390 from Arthurette to Plaster Rock, then Enterprise Road – all beautiful areas. On the return it was down the river on #109, then on McLaughlin Road, Bedford Cross Road, Anderson Road, Currie Road, and Churchland Road to Highway 105 in Tilley.

            The reason I mention all those roads is that most of them are what some in government call ‘tertiary’ ones, meaning that, theoretically, they’re not as important as Highway 105, which is a secondary road. EVERY ROAD I mentioned was better than Highway 105.

Kintore Road, which probably gets 10% of the traffic that #105 does, is in far better shape. Roy Rogers and his wife Dale Evans used to sing a tune called ‘Happy Trails to You’ and I will guarantee Roy Rogers would never have tried to ride Trigger on Highway 105 of New Brunswick. Cruelty to animals. This road is amusingly called, by the province at least, ‘a scenic route’. I wonder if any tourist who unwittingly found himself on that road would use the word ‘scenic’? Perhaps, but I do know some other words he would use.

            I know I rail and rant a lot about potholes, but Highway 105, at least in southern Victoria and northern Carleton Counties, takes the definition of the word ‘pothole’ to a whole new universe.

            I mentioned my grandfather earlier; I doubt very much if he, like Roy Rogers,  would take a horse that he liked onto Highway 105, especially that part of it between the Victoria-Carleton County border and the village of Bath. However, I can be certain of one thing he WOULD say: “Whoever is in charge of that stretch of highway should be horsewhipped.”

                                            *****************************

            As to events going on around here, Flug’s nephew Dill, only 38 years of age, got bifocals. He went to the optimist, er, optometrist, and he, she, or it (to preserve anonymity) said that if he, Dill, didn’t want to keep changing his glasses every time he wanted to read ‘War and Peace’ he should get bifocals.

            Dill, whose library consists of the current and back issues of ‘TV Guide’, decided to make the change so he could easily see when ‘Murdoch’s Mysteries’ came on. Unfortunately, he saw a flight of stairs (that wasn’t there) as he was leaving the optometrist’s office and went flying onto his face. Luckily nothing important, or even worthwhile, was injured, but Dill considered a lawsuit. He was going to cite physical damage and embarrassment because, just at the moment that Dill fell on his face, well known anti-alcohol terrorist Maud Stravinsky happened to be arriving for an appointment. Of course she assumed that he had been ‘over-served’ in the lemonade department and laid a lecture on him. The fact that her optometrist appointment was long overdue meant she was lecturing the door hinges was the only saving grace in the whole scene. I couldn’t help but laugh, although I’m not usually a cruel man.

            The bottom line, as they say, is that Dill went to another optimist who dinged him  $414 for non-bifocals, but a tool and his money are soon parted, according to the Perfessor.

                                             *****************************

            Speaking of that learned and worthy gent, the Perfessor, he was saying the other evening how important a thing it is to be perfectly literate and clear every time we utter a sentence. He went on and on and ON until, as Beatrix Potter used to say, I felt I would go distracted.

            As picky as I am about clear speech (I wish!) I must say that I don’t know the difference between a gerund, a conjunction and a cherub; I just know I ain’t none of them  three stooges.

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