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".
*****************************
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.”
-end-
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