Them was good writers - better 'n me (April 15 column)

Some fine young writers from 1987

                                       by Robert LaFrance

            Once in a while I like to leave the serious world where denizens like my friend Flug reside and think about more cheerful things. As you know, Flug is always yammering about all the alimony he has to pay to his eleven former wives, and about the world political situation, not to mention the temperature of the lemonade at the club (too cold).

               Therefore, last week I found myself jogging along Kintore Road (if you believe that, you’ll believe I am a major shareholder in the CN Tower) and thinking to myself, which is my favourite way, that I should lighten up a bit. When I got back home and had the Gremlin parked in the garage, I continued pondering, to the point where I think I hurt my head. However, Bell Aliant stepped onto the stage to provide me with just exactly the ammunition I needed to make this a sparkling, informative, and entertaining column. (About time, you're thinking.)

               The phone call was from my grade 2 teacher Mrs.Emily DeMerchant, 84, who had been moving some things around her apartment and had found a file folder containing comments by her grade 3F students in the days and weeks following the April 2, 1987 flood in Perth-Andover. A few days later she lent me the materials. What a treasure trove!

               First, a little background: Emily (I finally dare to call her by her first name) tried to teach me at Block X School in Tilley; I’m not sure how successful she was, but I am sure of one thing I learned at that one-room school I attended to the end of grade five – Earlon Kinney taught me how to swear and do it right.

               The first flood description in the folder was from a girl we will call Leah, age 8. Here’s part of it, describing what a certain farmer did when the flood hit. We’ll call him Jackson. “He was in the Farmer Store when we had the flood. He through his sandwich out the window when the train bridge collapsed…He was there with his tractor and couldn’t get home with the tractor.”

               This one is by Tony: “We had a flood….Some people losted everything they had and the train bridge fall. Their was some boxcars weighted it down.”

               Brandy had this to say: “Aprpl 2 and 3 Perth Andover had a flood. There was 17 boxcars on the CPR railway to hold it down but it was no use the train bridge train bridge let go. Mr. Armstrong lost 20 cattle because they would not leve there cafes (calves). We hope this appsely dose not happen agen.”

               I am going to pause right now to explain that I am not making fun of these children. They were only in grade three, most of them about eight years of age, and they wrote some wonderful descriptions of what had happened when the ice jam reached Perth-Andover. I left in the spelling errors just to remind myself that they were kids; the point is, they got their message across. Why else would Emily DeMerchant, who taught school for many decades, save these and other students’ work? And another thing: the penmanship was amazing. I’ll save my rant on that for another column, but not many youngsters today are able to write so well.

               Moving on, this short essay is from Jason: “The water went very high, it went into peoples houses and ruined most of their stuff. It also tore down the train bridge.”

               Jessie had a localized take on the disaster. “Perth Elementary School had a flood. There were fish in the basement of the other school. Trudy Ranger the principal was talking on the raido.”

               Dale had a descriptive view of the event: “Some of my friends in Perth-Andover have been swept out of their homes by the flood the Saint John River. They will have new homes by the flood.” He also has a nice drawing of the river, the Farmers’ Store, and an apartment building with people in the upper floor and looking out.

               Sasha explained that people flooded out of their homes had to find somewhere else to go, such as the Galaxy Motel, which I think by that time was officially called the Perth-Andover Motor Inn. “Some houses were ruined and had to use the Galaxy. The water was so high because of the ice melting. The peoples homes that were ruined had to go to motels. I hope Perth-Andover never has a flood again.”

               Rebecca talked about the flood in Fort Fairfield, Maine, which since then has built a berm, a big wall next to the Aroostook River, to hold back the flood waters. “There was a big clump of ice in Fort Fairfield in back of Smith Sub Shop. Also there was a huge clump of ice on the railroad track. The IGA was not wet but most of the stores over there were wet.”

               That is just a sample of the essays or descriptions of the 1987 flood. They were all great. No wonder Emily kept them, but I hope no one has to write such a description this year.

                                                        -end-

A strange definition of 'hard times' (April 8 column)

DIARY

My ‘hard times’ are not their ‘hard times’

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            I have no idea why I was reading the business section of the March 25 edition of my daily paper – I have no money - but when I got to page D3 and read “American Express faces hard times”, I was concerned.

            It’s serious when a big company like that goes through ‘hard times’.

            The company’s share prices had dropped twelve percent which was bad news – for the actual workers. When share prices drop, the folks in middle management leap into action and lay off everyone below them.

Cleaning out the crowd responsible for the drop in stock price never seems to occur to anyone, so the ones who actually do the work lose their jobs. In this case it was four thousand persons, most with families I am sure.

            Then came the real disaster. In the next paragraph I read that analysts have cut their forecasts of 2015 profits from $6.2 billion to $5.6 billion. No wonder they’re saying ‘hard times’ are here. Boy, would I love to experience those hard times.

Let’s face it; hard times are here to stay. Only last week I heard about a guy who bought a truck supposedly worth $55,000 and then lost his job. He got another job, but it only paid $41,000 a year. He is now reduced to watching black-and-white television to pay for that truck, his $25,000 snowmobile, rent ($650 a month), insurance ($200+ a month), and his iPhone, and iPad. Plus, let's not forget iFood.

Although the official inflation rate has been no higher than 3% a year since 1995, I suspect the actual (not lying) rate is more like 8.5%. I paid $10,300 for a one and a half storey house in 1980 and today that same house is officially valued at $112,000. If inflation were truly 3% a year, its actual book value would be $28,983.            

And don’t forget, it’s now a depressed housing market.

Another example of the brutal existence we suffer is what news reporters referred to as ‘the NB election night fiasco’ of 2014. Could it be that we have lost our perspective(s) and possibly our minds?

In the March 4 edition of my daily newspaper was the announcement that although the tabulating machines worked well, the software didn’t (the operation was a success but the patient died), so they scrapped the software and ruined the reputations of many computer programmers.

Let’s remember that the delay was only a few hours, five in a couple of cases, and all the recounts (hardly the fault of the computers) confirmed what had been reported. Are we so spoiled that a few hours make that much difference?

                                    *************************

Someone living in the city of Saint John has put up a website where people can vote on what is the worst street in the municipality. He should come to Victoria County.

Earlier today I drove (limped) across Tobique Narrows dam and thought that short road – not counting the new parts – held the worst potholes in the area. But wait!

I then drove to New Street, at Tobique First Nation, and saw that it would put up quite a fight for the title of Worst Street or Road. If that were located in Saint John, that  guy would simply close down his website because it would be no contest.

Those two locations I mentioned – the dam(n) roadway and New Street – are so bad that whoever is in charge of roads in this county should be brought there duct-taped to the back of a 1974 GMC pickup with bad springs, and then driven back and forth for half an hour. He, she or it would soon decide that perhaps D.O.T. (I refuse to call it DTI – they’re just hiding) should send out a dozen trucks to work there a week or so.

There’s no reason, given normal government waste, that human beings should have to travel on such roads. I know of potholes, there and on other roads such as Highway 105, that have been there since last summer without any effort being made to repair them.

Enough for now on that infuriating subject.

                                    *************************

Speaking of infuriating, the trial of the surviving Boston Marathon bomber brother is still going on today, with the defendant’s position being: “The devil made me do it”.

I am not exactly a capital punishment nut, but I have been wondering how a chap, being filmed all the while, can set down a bomb on the sidewalk, and minutes later the bomb kills many innocent people, and expect anything but the death penalty. If there weren't such a thing as the death penalty for a federal crime, that would be that, but there is.

His defence isn’t really that the Devil made him do it; it was his brother, killed shortly after the bombing, who forced him to blew up those kids. Hey listen, I know what he means. When I was a teenager and my big brother Lawrence would have told me to jump off the barn, I wouldn’t have had a choice.

                                                -end-

English: a funny (and foolish) old language (April 1st)

DIARY

“Poissons to you too, fool”

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            I am not mentioning a name of someone who might be a fool, although it would be quite an honour for Flug. It’s also called All Fools Day, and in France, according to legend, it started out in the year 1508 as “Poisson d’Avril” which of course means “Take poison on the first of April”.

            Flug, reading over my shoulder, said: “Bob, the French word ‘poisson’ means fish, not poison.” Sometimes he can be a real pain, but at least he didn’t see what I wrote in the first paragraph.

            The newspaper headline on this April 1^st edition should be something like: “Tilley man (which I’ll always be) wins $17 trillion in lottery.” There would be a nice photo of me standing there and surrounded by cash.

            Perhaps I would be like my dad, the late Fred LaFrance, who, when I told him back in the 1970s about the $14 million lottery winner in Ontario, said that if he won that he would buy some new chairs for the kitchen and maybe a colour television.

            So happy April Poisson Day everyone, and watch out for practical jokes. I have told everyone I know that I would be carrying a gun all day, and my trigger finger would be very, very itchy. Very itchy.

                                                *******************************

            Some random observations:

            Yesterday morning I visited my old friend Johan, a retired Mount Allison University Music professor. Sipping on some lemonade in the living room, I asked him where his wife was. He said with a grin: “Oh, she’s out Bach and Chopin wood. She’s Vivaldi this time of year.” I almost spat out my lemonade, but didn’t. After all, it was lemonade.

            English is a funny old language; a dog can worry a bone and since I used to be a letter carrier in North Vancouver, I can tell you that a dog can worry a postman. However, a bone that is being worried is not itself worried while that letter carrier certainly is.

            I believe I mentioned once before in these pages that my Aunt Tilley was named after Atilla the hun. My question is, why do we always say “Atilla the Hun?” We don’t say Hitler the Austrian do we? How many Atillas were there around? Was there an Atilla the Swede?

            My old friend Johan, whom I mentioned earlier, owns a car that was made in the 1960s. Last week he lent his nephew Glent that car and then realized the next day that his, Johan’s, important keys had gone away with him. I asked Johan where Glent was and he sighed. “He’s in Borden, PEI, in a Galaxy far, far away,” he lamented. “My Ford Galaxy that is.”

            What do the Toronto Maple Leaves – okay, Leafs – have in common with the late bandleader Lawrence Welk? We know about the Leafs, who have won one game in the past two seasons, and yet their arena is packed full every game. Lawrence Welk, who sounded quite silly and was the object of laughter by other musicians who felt he was a buffoon, didn’t care about any of that. He was asked if the lack of respect bothered him. “I’m laughing all the way to the bank,” he answered. So are the Leafs’ owners.

            Why does it seem that every word any politician (of any party) utters is aimed entirely at getting votes in the fall federal election and is not concerned in any way with my or your problems? But then I’m cynical; it helps for a reporter to be so.

            Speaking of politics – and I’d rather talk about soccer or hockey – I get the impression that Prime Minister George W. Harper (as Flug calls him) is going to try and force Bill C-51 through parliament, but one rumour I heard was that he needs Mike Duffy’s vote in the Senate to put him over the top. Mike, vacationing in Renous, NB, (acclimatizing?) couldn’t be reached for a comment.

            While I was preparing the first part of this column, Spring sprang at me in the form of yet another blizzard even though at 7:45 pm on Friday, March 20, Winter gave up and officially changed to Spring. I hope Spring is proud of itself. Here’s something I want to say to it: “I know March came in like a lamb and is supposed to go out like a lion, but that old saying is referring to the last two days of winter, not the last two weeks.”

            I have reserved this last paragraph for saying ‘thank you’. Although there are many people I need to thank, this time it is the snowplough drivers. We’ve lived here since 1984 and they have been great every winter. Thanks, guys, and no offence, but I don’t want to see you again until next winter except socially.

                                                   -end-