A bungalow and Rolls for my birthday (May 11)

DIARY

Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday, dear Bob

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Today, May 11, 2016, is the 68^th anniversary of my birthday. At least I think it is. Willie Nelson, the famous pot-smoker and singer, celebrated his 83^rd on the last day of April, but then said his actual birthday was on the 29^th. His parents had been a bit casual in registering his birth, I suspect for the same reason Willie is so casual about things.

            So, like Willie, but for a different reason, none of us really knows when our big day is. It’s only what we’ve been told.

            On to more important subjects, I am rejoicing this morning because I found an heirloom. Last fall I was doing various kinds of work in my orchard – picking apples, eating apples, looking at apples, and eating some more apples – and I lost the jackknife that had been my father’s for half a century or more and whose ownership passed to me on January 5, 1999.

            Of course I didn’t know at the time that I had dropped it; otherwise I would have reached down to the ground and picked it up. That evening when I sat down to watch a TV show – probably something religious, like Grantchester – I realized my knife was missing.

            Next morning I searched all over eastern Canada, but to no avail (to know a veil?) so I had to settle for another knife drawn from a kitchen drawer. All winter I struggled to cut things, including fingers, with the substitute knife, but it wasn’t the same.

            Then this morning I found my dad’s knife and it was a great birthday present. Now I have to pretend to like my wife’s gift to me as much as I like the return of the jackknife. Most husbands would be pleased to get a 1964 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III for their birthdays, but I like my knife.

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            Some people here in Victoria County, New Brunswick are quite amazed at the prices of houses these days. It used to be that for a house to sell for $100,000 or more there had to be a millionaire involved – Lord Beaverbrook for example – but now a bungalow in Perth-Andover goes for that.

            “Well, I’ll tell you what,” as my friend Flug often begins his conversations, especially at Club Lemonade. What I’ll tell is that you could buy fifteen houses – decent, comfortable ‘single-family dwellings’ as they say, for the same price you could buy ONE similar house in Vancouver. True. A bungalow in Vancouver goes for about $1.78 million.

            Television news reporters say that both Vancouver and Toronto have housing markets that are ‘overheated’. No kidding.

            As with most things concerning old codgers like me, I think back to the old days. In January, 1972, I left my job in Burlington, Ontario and headed out west to make my fortune, or at least find a better pub than the ones in my neighbourhood, and fetched up at the St. Francis Hotel right across the road from the CPR station which is still there even if the hotel isn’t. My daughter was there last year and took photos of my old digs. It’s a new  office building now.

            My point is this: Houses didn’t cost $1.78 million the day I arrived there, nor when I left in September of 1973. People don’t believe me when I tell them I paid $15 a week – A WEEK! – for a small room in that hotel which was a decent clean place. Just at a guess, if someone had made an offer in 1972 for the entire 4-storey St. Francis Hotel, it might have been in the $500,000 range. Has the whole world gone crazy, or just Vancouver?

            I was 24 years old at the time, the same age my son is now, and it pains me to think that young people today probably will never experience Vancouver as it was then. Today it’s all plate glass and hockey riots.

            People also won’t believe that I ate gourmet meals for less than $2. I got this hint from an Australian guy who figured he owed me money. He and a friend had arrived in Vancouver from Melbourne the week before, had gone to the welfare office for a cheque, and immediately got knocked out and rolled at a Davie Street hooker palace. I ‘lent’ them enough money to eat at the Vancouver Vocational School.

            They had found that the student cooks there were eager to have someone – anyone – try their creations, so the Aussies and I would go there at supper time and have Coq au vin or stuffed pork tenderloin for $1.25 plus coffee and dessert. A great life. I wouldn’t advise trying it today. There’s probably some government regulation that says no one may eat that food because the chefs are not licensed.
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