Christmas shopping for husbands (Dec. 9)

The U.S.A. really doesn’t need to fear terrorists

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            My friend Elvis was saying last evening as we were going cross-country skiing (there was a skiff of snow on Mount Carleton but a beer store in Plaster Rock) that the United States no longer had to fear terrorist attacks.

            I thought he was joking and was a little annoyed that he would treat such a subject with levity, but apparently he had been serious. That happens sometimes when he gets thinking. I said sometimes.

            “I can picture ISIS and all those other murdering thugs thinking about shooting a bunch of people in the U.S.,” he said, “and then reading the newspapers from Dallas, or Ferguson, or Chicago, or Columbine, or San Bernadino or…”

            “I get the point, Elvis,” I interrupted.

            “Just picture somebody in the Middle East planning to slaughter a bunch of Americans,” he continued, “and then they look over those newspapers. They turn to their fellow suicide bombers and other assorted gunman; what do you suppose they would say?”

            “I don’t know, Elvis. What would they say?”

            “They would say: ‘No need of us travelling all the way over there, eating bad airline food, etc. to kill Americans when they are killing each other off faster than we ever could.”

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            The description of Christmas shopping from the husband’s point of view is much like the husband himself – simple.

            We go out and buy some power tools for ourselves, some jewelry or clothes for the grown-up kids, and as Dec. 23 arrives, go out and get some kitchen item for the wife. (I sure hope ‘the wife’ is not reading this, or I am ‘toast’.)

            Something in the female DNA forces women, especially wives, to go berserk once December first shows up on the calendar. Everything not nailed down must be decorated with coloured lights or flashing LED signs inviting Santa to stop at their chimneys and leave a bunch of toys although the youngest child is now 23.

            I looked out the window about an hour ago to see a deer and a red squirrel looking back and forth at each other as ‘she who must be obeyed’ (Horace Rumpole’s wife in the novels by John Mortimer) was putting up lights on various trees near the house. I could imagine what they were saying to each other:

            “I say Nigel (it was an English white-tail deer),” says the ruminant to the rodent, “is she in possession of all her faculties?”

            “I couldn’t say,” answered the rodent, “but it is nice of her to light the way to the apple trees.”

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            A quick off-the-topic note: my friend Big Louis, who is studying music - the gazebo, or gazelle, or maybe the pan flute – asked me what a metronome was. He had read the word in a music book. “A metro-gnome,” I replied, “is a small person who lives in a city.”

            Back to the subject of men and women’s shopping habits: Three days ago I was in a city at one of the ‘big box stores’ (whatever that might mean) and saw Flug with his wife Jolene. He was trailing around behind her – which, when you think about it, is the only way to trail somebody – and he was looking bored. In his hand he held a cordless electric drill.

            “I came in here to buy this drill,” he said, “because it is on sale – twenty dollars less that it was in the summer. I walked down to the power tools section of the store, picked up the drill, and said to myself: that was easy.”

            He sighed the sigh of a husband tortured beyond endurance; in other words, he sighed like a husband because we’re always…no, let’s leave that.

            “And then Jolene decided she wanted to buy some dishcloths and I heard the bell toll. It was too late. She headed for the ‘housewares’ department like a partridge heading for a swamp. That was an hour ago.”

            “But Flug,” I said, “she’s not carrying anything.”

            “No,” he cried in anguish. “As the comedian Lorne Elliott says, “men have no verb for ‘to shop’ but women sure do. Their idea of shopping is to go through an entire store and turn over every item, then put it back, then buy the first item they saw two hours before. I say two hours, but I always was an optimist.” I asked him why he didn’t get a book and go sit in the store’s waiting area to read it.

            “I could read ‘War and Peace’ from cover to cover and make a good start on ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’,” he moaned, “but she’d still be turning over items. She’ll end up getting me a pair of socks and a girdle for her Aunt Ethelreid who really needs a girdle.”

            Not able to endure his pain any longer, I left him there. I know what you’re thinking: with a friend like me he doesn’t need any enemies. So true, but what you see is what you get.

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