DIARY
Location,
location, location
by
Robert LaFrance
News flash: At 8:29 am on
Saturday, May 23, 2015, Victoria Star cub (or old grizzly bear) reporter Robert
LaFrance looked out the window of his bedroom and said to himself: “Looks like
snow to me.”
It was snow all right – about three
inches of it, or, to use that new metric stuff, it was however many kilograms
was the equivalent of three inches of snow.
My friend Flug woke up in his house,
looked out the window, and went back to bed. He was on his 17th
honeymoon and would rather look at Flora (Glenna?) than go out into that
returning winter. By the time he did get up the snow was all melted anyway,
possibly because of his efforts.
(There’s a business mantra ‘Location,
location, location’ which is all-important. Once again that was proved true.
People in Perth-Andover didn’t have snow, or at least not much on May 23rd.)
It was quite a shock for a few
seconds, but then it was still quite a shock, but after a third shock I was
okay. I knew it wouldn’t stay. Or would it? My grandfather told me about the
summer when it snowed in late August and stayed on for a month. “That was back
in the pod-auger days,” he told me, referring to the times when people with
long augers drilled out poles that the people then used for water pipes.
He was two years old and always said that the weird
weather was caused by a volcano “in Asia somewhere” spouting ash that went
around the world. “Sure, gramps,” I would say, until I found out that Krakatoa
volcano of Indonesia occurred in late August 1883, when Grampy was two and a
half. He was gone by the time I moved back to Tilley so I couldn’t apologize
for doubting him.
Back to the May 23 three-inch snowstorm in
Kincardine, I don’t want to talk about it any more. It wasn’t quite in the
Krakatoa ball park, was it?
*****************************
I recently heard a story that
reminded me of those pod-auger days – although not as far back as 1883 – and
how most people around these parts didn’t have a lot of money.
Covering – for this newspaper – the
opening of Liberal MLA Andrew Harvey’s constituency office on the Fort Road in
Perth-Andover, I got to talking to Roger Pelkey, now of Carlingford but who
grew up in Aroostook. He didn’t mention pod-augers. He started out by saying
that he and his brother Rufus were only able to dress up and go to town on alternate weekends. “Why
was that?” I asked.
“Because we only had one pair of
good pants for the two of us,” he said, and that reminded me that people didn’t
have a lot of money in those days, like hardly any. My mother-in-law, who had
ten kids, scrounged clothes that people had thrown away and sewed into the
small hours of the morning to make decent clothes for her kids to wear. My own
family was quite wealthy in comparison. Since there were only three of us kids,
our hand-me-downs only had to go three hands.
Kids today have it tough too; I’m
not saying they don’t. One young fellow I know has had to make do with an
iPhone 3 when all his friends have iPhone5 or later. On the other hand, kids
today are under far more pressure than we ever were. Back in my day, when you
took a job with CN or in the Fraser Company sawmill, it was thought to be for
life. Now they’re lucky if a company lasts an hour before some Toronto
bean-counter decides to close things down without ever having been east of
Oshawa.
It has usually been the rural folk,
and particularly farmers, who got the short end of the stick, except for one
major case I have heard about. During the World Wars there was food rationing,
but guess whose milk, meat, eggs and other food staples wasn’t rationed? How
could it be? The farmers were the ones producing it all.
*************************
The average reader of this column –
and I know you’re all above average – remembers that a few weeks ago I “took
the Royal Bank (RBC) to task” for their ridiculous new bank charges that
included having to pay a $5 fee for making a payment on your mortgage.
This is after reporting record profits in their last quarter.
Good news. RBC, and I can’t say that
it’s through no vault of my own (pun intended), has dropped most if not all
those new fees. This just goes to show you the power of a rural New Brunswick
weekly newspaper. When I wrote that, RBC was obviously listening, er, reading,
and reacted by doing the right thing.
Now, if I can just persuade Stephen
Harper to step down, or at least name me a Senator.
-end-
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