I
made a slight error in judgement
by
Robert LaFrance
The faithful and long-suffering
readers of this column have often heard me say that I am the messiest dude in
Canada – a real slob – and I am here to tell you that I have put an end to all
that, perhaps not in the way I intended, but “anyway, however”, as Aunt Ruby
used to say.
If I sit down to have a meal and am
covered with a tarpaulin, I will find a way to get stains on my clothes.
Perhaps the filling of my fried egg sandwich will fly out, bounce off the dog,
and end up, somehow, in my shorts, but Whoever Is In Charge will find a way to
mess up my clothes.
About 1:00 pm on Monday, as I was
gazing down at my pants and the large stain left there from my spilling an
entire can of V-8 juice on them, a lightbulb went on over my head. I thought it
was what’s-her-name turning on my reading light for me, but it was in fact an
idea.
Up in my closet, I said to myself,
are 15 pairs of pants, each of them stained with some food item. They are like
an epicurean biography of my recent meals. “Since I can’t get those stains out
by washing the pants in anything (vinegar, nuclear Tide, etc.),” I reasoned,
“why not dye the pants? Ipso, chango, no more stains!”
You might say I had had a brain-wave, or maybe not. Readers, if you go to your mirrors,
you will see a person who would not have done what I did next. I came up with a
decision that turned out to be as wrong as possible.
At this point the normal, rational
human being would have taken one pair of pants and tried the dye out on them,
just to see if it were a good idea. While your columnist is (probably) a human
being, the other two adjectives didn’t and don’t apply. I decided to dye all my
pants at the same time.
I had to go to town to buy all that
dye, but I found it – enough dye to change the colour of my entire wardrobe of
pants – and went to work. I happened to have a galvanized tub from my
moonshining days and put “the whole complete unit” (as the late Paul St. Peter
used to say) in there. Slosh, slosh, slosh and it was done. The pants were now
all a uniform grey. I hung them on the clothesline with confidence and aplomb.
Late that afternoon they were all
dry, but the colours (plural, as you see) were not all grey any more. They were
kind of a pastel rainbow but, to look on the bright side, all the stripes were
vertical. That would make me look taller.
“Slings
and arrows”
That was probably the first time I
ever made a mistake on this scale, except that time in Orillia, Ontario…but
that’s another story. In one fell swoop, or as the late Marvin Toner used to
say, one smell foop, I had taken fifteen pairs of pants whose biggest crimes
had been the fact that I had worn them, and pretty much ruined them.
“Be careful what you wish for, it
may come true,” goes the old saying, and the fate of my wardrobe was an
excellent example of that. I had all those pants that were stained, it is true,
but they were wearable, and nobody other than friends and relatives made snide comments
about them. My ‘new’ clothes were somewhat (shall we say?) gaudy, even if the
colours were muted, but what could I do but wear them?
The first time I wore them in public
was at a ceremony in Fredericton where I was covering the story of Prince Charles’s
dedicating a new grocery store or something. He took one look at me and, right
in the middle of a sentence, burst out laughing. Beside him Camilla, Duchess of
Cornwall, was in stitches, and that must have hurt. I decided then and there to
buy an entirely new pants wardrobe.
“I say, did you have an explosion in
your house?” asked Prince Charles after the ceremony. “I have just the thing to
help you out, old chap. Since I never wear a pair of pantaloons (he said that)
twice, I will donate my entire week’s discards to you.”
So if you see me at Save-Easy and
wearing what looks like some rather foppy trousers, or pantaloons, that is the
whole story. I am now a clothes-horse, or some part of a horse. I no longer
have to endure, as Shakespeare wrote in ‘Hamlet’, “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. Thanks, Chuck.
-end-
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