The
Scots and the Irish do sometimes agree
by
Robert LaFrance
The 18th century Scottish
poet Robert Burns wrote in a poem called “To a Mouse” that “the best laid
schemes of mice and men gang aft agley” and I have a feeling he was thinking of
me.
Perhaps I should translate that, at
least the last part. “Gang aft agley” means ‘fly all to heck’ and especially
fly all to heck in the most inconvenient way possible. So it was when I was
brook fishing on Tuesday morning and fell in almost to my chin.
Although the brook is no more than a
foot deep at its lowest point (it ain’t no Marianas Trench!) I did manage to
fall in to my beard by tripping over a log that someone named Arthur recently
dropped there.
(I should hastily explain that it
wasn’t my neighbour Arthur Phillips who did the deed, but Hurricane Arthur, or
‘sub-tropical storm Arthur’ as they’re calling him now, who had swept through
here like a dance hall girl through a convent.)
Walking along the brook in search of
the elusive trout, I came across a rotten tree trunk that had been standing a
week before, and I tried to lift up my ancient foot over it. The bones and
muscles did not cooperate and my foot slipped, depositing me on the floor of
Bubie Brook. Although I didn’t smash a rock with my head or drown, it was a
near thing.
However, this was not the example of
‘gang aft agley’ that I wanted to present. Although Robert Burns was a
Scotsman, and Murphy’s Law was written by an Irishman, they came together
nicely on that day.
Soaked to the skin (as they say), I
made my way back home and on the way soaked my car seat. I felt better fifteen
minutes later because I was in dry clothes, had had a cold drink and was all
ready to mow our front lawn as I planned to do earlier before I had decided to
chase trout.
We have three push mowers so that we
can be sure of at least one of them working, so I started cranking the
Craftsman because it has always been the most reliable. On my 89th
crank I guess it wasn’t going to start, although I had checked everything
possible. The gas was ethanol-free, there was ‘fire’ going to the sparkplug, it
was primed, but no way on this green earth could I get that started.
I moved on to the Lawn Boy, and boy,
did it act like a Lawn Boy. After 47 pulls on the cord, even I knew it wasn’t
going to start. It reminded me of an old McCullough chainsaw father used to
have: it worked perfectly until he took it to the woods. It’s still up there in
Tilley somewhere, since the day he threw it in a kind of knuckleball against
the trunk of a large rock maple tree. In later years I had a snowblower like
that; it worked great in July, but as winter approached it became harder and
harder to start.
So, on to the third mower. It was
another Craftsman. You would think you could trust a piece of equipment called
Craftsman, but you couldn’t trust this one either. My right arm was 34
centimetres longer by the time I finished cranking on that one.
If you ever want a perfect
illustration of the phrase ‘glutton for punishment’ you would only have had to
look at me on that day. I refer to the fact that, instead of walking away from
those three pieces of (expletive deleted by writer) and sitting in front of the
TV, I started from the beginning and gave each of them another chance, just as
my high school English teacher, Miss Sara Williams, would give me after I had
murdered a conjunction or split an infinitive into many pieces. To my complete
surprise, none of the lawn mowers would start the second time around, and so ends
my story of “the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley”.
Wait…I should go on to relate the epilogue of this
story, courtesy of my wife, who shall remain nameless.
After I gave up trying to start
those mowers, I went inside and turned on an educational TV show called “Naked
Sorority Girls at Midnight” (all about anatomy) and watched that until I fell
asleep. I was rudely awakened after only about ten minutes by the noise of a
lawn mower just outside the living room window. The noise was courtesy of
certain spouses of mine. I pulled the blinds, put in earplugs and got a large
bottle of lemonade out of the fridge, which was working. I hate Robert Burns.
-end-
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