A
staggering change in the weather
by
Robert LaFrance
It’s been quite a week. My
grandfather, Muff LaFrance (1881-1976) would have called it “a staggering
change in the weather”.
He wouldn’t have been referring to
the weather. What happened was that last Thursday Mrs. Jean McAlloy finally
gave her consent to her husband Oscar McAlloy. Nothing to do with matrimony,
since they’d been married 37 years, but the consent was that she had finally
agreed that the two of them would clean out ‘the junk cupboard’ and ‘throw a
lot of stuff away’.
Anyone who knows Jean McAlloy would
have been extremely dubious about that second part. The last time she threw
anything away was 1981 when a mouse knocked a china cup onto the floor and
smashed it to smithereens. Smashed the cup I mean, not the floor. Jean
reluctantly consented to put the broken pieces into the refuse tip as the say
in her native England. It took some persuading. At one point she suggested
trying to glue it back together.
Back to the junk cupboard. We see on
television that we shouldn’t have hazardous waste in the house; the McAlloys
(Jean) only had it stored in a low kitchen cupboard for 30 years or so.
Whenever something needed to be discarded, like DDT, she would just shove it to
the back of the lower shelf. Over the years Oscar tried dozens of times to get
rid of some of that detritus before it exploded, but she watched carefully. The
closest he came to triumph was the spring day in 2002 when Jean was abed with a
bad cold. She took Dramamine or Columbine or something sleep-inducing and was
out like a light, but, somewhat like one of Pavlov’s famous dogs, she sprang to her feet when she heard
the creak of the cupboard door.
How did she get to the point where
she was considering throwing out a few things? A flyer came in her and Oscar’s
group mailbox and it was from her local solid waste commission. “Safely get rid
of computer monitors, toxic chemicals, blah blah blah…” was the message on the
flyer. Oscar strategically placed the flyer near her knitting and later saw her
pick it, put it down, then pick it up again. “We should look into this,” she
said. “There’s some spray cans we should throw away since we don’t use them any
more. DDT for example…why is your jaw dropping like that?”
*****************************
“I would say we took out three
45-gallon drums of toxic and nuclear waste,” Oscar told me over a lemonade at
the club. “Jean was crying at the end, just at the thought of throwing
something away.”
I asked him how he managed to get
her to agree to throwing out what to her must have been items “that might come
in handy” or things “that we’ll need as soon as we throw it away” and he
pointed to his lemonade.
“Let’s just say that by the time we
were ready to put the last of the stuff on our Ford Explorer, she would have
given away her cat. It was evil and underhanded, but it had to be done. Even
so, once the people in the white protective suits had gently put the toxic
waste into their truck, Jean had to be held back. I had three carloads of
police officers there to help out.”
A lot of people might think I’m
making this up, but I swear on my dog Belvedere’s (1975-1988) grave that it’s
all true. Three years ago she picked potatoes at Bon Accord Seed Farm and earned
enough to buy a $900 chesterfield that she had to have. Then, when the truck
arrived from the furniture store and the men offered to take the old couch out
on the porch out of the way, she said no, they would keep both of them in the
living room. So now, when they want to watch ‘Canada’s Smartest Person’ (which
my daughter Kate will be on November 2) they have to sit at an angle and peer
around a corner.
It used to be that the excuse for
holding on to everything, forever, was that the person “had lived through the
Depression”, but nowadays that often is not the case. Jean is 61. Her family in
England (now living in Alberta) was always well off and not overly parsimonious
(which my friend Alby says means ‘cheap’), so nobody knows why Jean has to keep
EVERYTHING. It hurts her to take 20-year-old newspapers to recycling, but after
Oscar’s and her bedroom got so full it
wouldn’t hold an idea, she finally conceded.
NOTE: Early in this column I
mentioned their group mailbox. When Canada Post cut off home delivery to those
without a fortified parking lot, Jean refused to remove her home mailbox. It’s
still there, just in case.
-end-
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