DIARY
Crossing
the river sane? – not Aloyisius!
by
Robert LaFrance
My friend Flug (real name Richard
LaFrance – no relation) got one of THOSE email messages last week. It was
purportedly from his nephew Aloyisius who was in a jail along ‘the River Sane’
in Paris and needed $2658 to pay off the prosecutor. That was all well and
good, as grampie used to say, but when the email arrived Aloyisius was sitting
in Flug’s living room and eating cherry pie on a new formerly beige
chesterfield. That reference to the River Sane was because the scam ‘artists’
spelled that Paris river (Seine) that way in the letter. It was a clue.
An example of changing generations:
In my day (I am now 68) when someone saw a car parked close to a building but
as far out of sight as possible it was because a guy and his best girl were
‘parking’, but nowadays it is more likely to be someone trying to get a free
Wi-Fi signal.
Everyone tries to ignore Canada, and
usually does a good job of it. The BBC recently reported that Sadiq Khan, the
newly elected mayor of London, England, was “the only Muslim mayor of a major
western city”. Surely Calgary, Alberta, and Mayor Naheed Kurban Nenshi would
argue with that statement. By the way, Donald Trump has said that if he were
president, his ban on Muslims travelling to the U.S. would “make an exception”
of the London mayor. He didn’t mention Nenshi of course.
Flug and I were having a good laugh
last evening when Lester Habob, the town drunk (and that’s saying something!)
staggered in to the club, followed by his chauffeur and valet. The mixologist
Billy Bond (no relation to his cousin James) has given Lester his own bar code.
Everywhere we go these days we hear
announcements about the deer tick and the fact that it carries the Lyme Disease
bacterium to us unsuspecting woods travellers. I hope none of us gets it. One
feature of just about every report is the opinion that doctors are very
reluctant to diagnose it. I don’t know if that’s true, but I hope not.
Once again today I heard a Fredericton
based politician, doing his best to close rural hospitals, say that because
Ottawa, with a similar population, has only five general use hospitals, so our
province should have the same. I looked it up on Google Maps and I’m pretty
sure it’s farther from Grand Manan to Bas-Caraquet than it is from the Ottawa
River to Sharel Drive where I used to live with a family from Lutes Mountain.
Three days ago I went fishing in
Bubie Brook near here. Because there are frequent bear sightings around here
(similar to a Turkish bath – bare sightings, get it?) I took a can of bear
repellent in my jacket pocket, my cellphone in my shirt pocket, and put my
wallet securely in a pants pocket. It wasn’t until I climbed back up the bank
near Burns Hall that I realized I no longer had any of the three. Calm down
though; I found all three about six feet behind the car that I had parked near
the hall. It was a good day; I even caught a fish. Flug had caught one the day
before, just before he saw a bear. “Next time I take a roll of Delsey with me.”
He declared.
Down at the club we often hear some
of the older members complaining about young people and their torn jeans, metal
harpoons through nostrils, drooping pants and other affectations, including the
wearing of baseball caps backwards while the sun beats down into their eyes.
Last week I found out the reason for the backward baseball cap business. The
wind was howling on this mountain and my cap blew off twice. Flug’s teenage
nephew Swansea spent an hour raking the lawn outside (where else?) and not once
did HIS cap blow off. The reason? That howling wind couldn’t get a hold on the
cap’s visor because it was down along his neck. Perhaps we should listen to
young people more often. They have some good ideas.
We often hear about John James
Audubon, the naturalist and artist who made thousands of paintings of birds,
supposedly in the wild. He is considered a great guy by those who love nature,
but I wonder how many people realize that before he painted those birds he shot
them. The SPCA here in Canada probably doesn’t realize that this French guy who
came to the U.S. in the early 1800s killed more birds than Donald Trump has
said the word ‘huge’.
New Brunswick has a public debt in
the range of $13 billion but I was staggered yesterday – well, mildly surprised
– to learn that the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico has a debt of $70 billion.
Wow! It’s about the size of Tilley, not including Lerwick. Come on New
Brunswickers, let’s start spending!-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment