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.-end-
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