Kids do a lot of iPadding (Dec. 16 column)

Hornets don’t really die, do they?

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            I only dare to tell you this now because my friend Flug is away on his honeymoon (#17 I think, or is it #18?) and won’t be back until almost Christmas day.

            He made me swear not to tell anyone, and I’m not telling ANYONE, am I? I’m telling you and I know you won’t mention it.

            In late September Flug walked out into his garage and there was a hornet’s nest nestled against one of the roof trusses. He hadn’t noticed it before. He took a hoe handle and hit the underside of the roof, near the nest, and there was no action there, which is something we often say at the club.

            He didn’t knock down the nest then, when it was quite cold, but waited until the next day when the temperature had risen to +22ºC. Do I have to tell you what happened?

            Believe it or not, I’m a little nasty myself when I wake up too soon and those hornets sure were.

            By the way, his newest bride is NOT Suzanne Leonard, a meteorologist of The Weather Channel. Flug has been enamoured of her for months and we all assumed that when he went to Toronto a few days ago he would persuade her to leave that city and come live in the Scotch Colony, which has yellow lines on some of its roads and is otherwise a rather frisky place.

            I am told that she turned him down and he decided to marry an Abigail Remelle, who is the CEO of Microsoft Canada. I hope they have a lovely stay in Flin Flon, which is not a place I would choose for a honeymoon.

            Indeed, when my bride and I wed in the fall of 1982, we motored to Cape Breton Island where the motor fell out of our Gremlin and we had to take the bus home. It’s been downhill ever since, rolling pin wise.

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            People often comment that kids nowadays don’t play outside the way that they used to, but some of them do.

            The afternoon following our big snowstorm of Dec. 3, I was uptown and stopped by to visit a family who lives along one of the back streets of the village – out of the flood zone, but not exactly downtown. This family had three kids, all over five and under ten.

            Neither their front or back lawn held a human’s track; apparently the kids, whom I could see texting and iPad-ing away in the living room, didn’t play outside, which must have saved the family big bucks in winter clothes.

            When I came outside, I asked Derrax (not his real name) who it was who lived next door. The front and back lawns were trampled down as if by a flock of elephants, and I could hear kids playing in the nearby woods.

            “Oh, that’s the Hendersons,” he said, Henderson not being THEIR real names. “They have three kids, the same age as ours. They don’t even have iPads and suchlike and have to play out in the snow.” Poor little waifs!

            Just a final note on that subject: I can’t remember the details of the story, but one chap – a friend of a friend of a friend – was telling his friend that his son had just bought a mini-pad. The friend’s wife, who was listening to this, suddenly turned beet-red and found something urgent to do in the house. Go figure women eh?

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            I was afraid my friend Flug and his brother-in-law Clyde were going to come to blows last evening at the club; that’s how hot the argument became.

            Clyde was bombasting (if that is a verb) about Canada’s bringing in Syrian and other refugees, which is his own opinion and he certainly has a right to it. He ended with the usual phrase: “What’s the government doing for our own homeless? There are even homeless veterans.”

            Flug, speaking very quietly which is a sign that he was girding his loins (right there in the club!) for battle. “Well Clyde, what have YOU done for our homeless lately?”

            Clyde, who in June had spent $175,000 on a Winnebago that he will use 100 hours at most in the coming year, spluttered a bit at that one. “It’s not my responsibility…etc.”

            While not strictly amused, I was bemused at how a perfectly friendly game of 8-ball could turn into an argument. It was a good thing we had sat down by this time and those two weren’t holding pool ball and cues. Those things hurt when you get them upside the head. I remember that time in Minto…

            But that’s another story.

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