DIARY
A
big blaze on the River St. John
by Robert LaFrance
So the Christmas-New Years holiday
season is over for another year. When I went uptown yesterday morning I saw an
enormous smoke and assumed people were burning Christmas trees, but then I
remembered the village had banned the practice.
So was it a building or a gaggle of car tires?
It was a humongous pile of credit
cards. I had driven across the bridge to Aroostook Road where there was a path
down to the ice. The credit cards were blazing away as Perth-Andover
firefighters with backpacks watched.
“What is going on, other than the
obvious?” I asked one of the firefighters.
“Spontaneous combustion,” he said.
“Husbands brought their credit cards here after Christmas because they kept
catching fire in their wallets. That gets a little uncomfortable you know.”
After talking to a few other
husbands, I had the full story. As a trained journalist, I merely had to find
the answers to five questions – who, what, where, why, and how. And perhaps a
sixth: “What the hell is going on?”
What was going on was the rotten
underside of the capitalist system: Christmas and its aftermath. I talked to
husbands who had bought their wives necklaces and rings, fur coats and
cosmetics costing thousands and which put the family in debt until next
November. All because of some nice TV commercials that said: “Hey, dude, if you
love your wife, buy this totally useless piece of beautiful junk.”
I talked to this one and that one
and the prevailing message was: ‘I just paid thousands of dollars of which 95%
was for useless garbage but I was desperate; I felt I was forced to.’
And that was why a credit card
bonfire was such a good idea. Everybody still has to pay off his debt, but the
sight of the real criminal going up in flame was so-o-o restful. Next step:
television itself.
**************************
Some other observations: Flug, who
is trying to be a sports fan, was talking about the good old days of hockey
when Mark Messiah was a great player for the New York Rangers. I told him I
thought the star’s surname was Messier, but then he said maybe he was wrong and
then insisted the player was Lionel Messi. I said no, Messi was and is a soccer
player for Barcelona. I didn’t even dare to mention The Flower (Guy Lafleur).
Flug, always the romantic, hired a
skywriter (small plane writing in the sky) to write the words “Flug loves
Joanne” in the sky over by the Mars Hill windmills so his new bride would be
impressed, but two factors intruded: the pilot couldn’t spell, and the wind was
blowing a little too hard. What we all saw up there was “F-gloves Jonnn” to
which we each made our own translation. Joanne’s reaction was not recorded.
I happened to be in Fredericton on
December 21st, the day the latest “Star Wars” movie came to the theatre in the Regent
Mall. You know, there are times when I do the dumbest things ever recorded, but
I have not stood in line to watch a movie since 1972 when “Reefer Madness” came
to Vancouver where I was living at the time. A reefer is of course a marijuana
cigarette and madness is, well, madness. It was hard to see the screen for the
smoke.
But back to Dec. 21, 2015: There were at least 200
persons standing there waiting for the next empty seats at ‘Star Wars’. I went
into the store Chapters across the hall and read about 25 pages of ‘Huckleberry
Finn’. This took half an hour, and when I came out of Chapters, the same people
were standing in the same places. Some folks need a hobby, I said to myself.
The parking lot outside (which is a
good spot for it) was packed solid. An anorexic aardvark couldn’t have found a
place to rest his bones. My son had wanted to go to the mall and buy a few
things, and we had to park in Gagetown. For those who don’t know how far Regent
Street, Fredericton, is from Gagetown, take my word for it: you don’t want to
be carrying no big suitcase.
Because it was the pre-Christmas
season (see credit card comments above), the streets were packed, stores were
packed, the sidewalks were packed, but because it was only the 21st,
few husbands had ventured out yet. I almost did some Christmas shopping myself,
but remembered I was a husband and couldn’t legally shop until the 24th.
-end-
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