DIARY
Behold
a new holiday – Pessimists’ Day
by
Robert LaFrance
We have all heard the ‘glass half
full – glass half empty’ routine, have we not? I am a ‘glass half empty’ type
of guy, a pessimist since May 11, 1948, when I said to myself: “They’re going
to drop me on the floor, aren’t they?”
They did, but luckily it was on the
softwood living room floor at our house in Tilley where I had been born half an
hour earlier. I was only unconscious an hour or so but that explains a few
things.
I am on the subject of pessimism
because the day this paper appears is June 22, when the days are beginning
their downward slide toward winter. Ever since December 22 the days had been
getting longer until yesterday when we reached the Summer solstice and winter
beckoned.
On another subject, people say weird
things. By ‘people’ I mean WE. Day before yesterday, I heard a woman say: “We
have to put on a new roof this summer.” But did she really mean the words she
was saying. I pursued the matter further and asked if she and her
long-suffering husband planned to ‘put on a new roof’ or did she really mean
‘shingle the roof’? It turned out that the latter was the case.
I mentioned that I was and am a
pessimist. My late father Fred LaFrance (1914-1999) was an optimist, especially
when he was looking for a place to park. I swear he would have driven into a
Toronto parking lot at high noon and would have expected to find a parking
place forty feet from the main door. Sometimes he had to search, but he usually
did find one of the elusive parking places. I remember once in the late 1960s
he was driving our Volkswaggen Deluxe and couldn’t find a place in one big
parking lot, but drove around until he did – 27 minutes. It is considered the
modern record for PLS (parking lot searches).
A recent headline in my daily paper
caught my eye. It seems the NB government was considering a different way of
having ‘fracking’ companies do their business. They think that fracking in
certain areas may be acceptable, but only certain areas. Hmmm…let me see. Can
we envision which areas the government will choose? There will be certain
guidelines. (1) No fracking where rich people live, and (2) no fracking where
influential government members live. I guess that covers it. Excuse me, I have
to go down and run some pails of water before my well is contaminated.
Those curly fluorescent light bulbs
– it’s great that they won’t burn out until they have been used at least 20,000
hours. I had two of them burn out last week, and probably five or six in the
past year. So I put in an LED bulb in the kitchen and noticed it wasn’t
supposed to be used inside a light fixture. Anybody know why? They don’t give
off heat. I can’t help thinking we’re being scammed. I don’t like curly fries either.
Walking through my orchard with a
pile of sunchokes I had just dug, I happened upon a very impressive black bear
who evidently had decided he (or she, but I’ll say he) was going to rip off my
face. He kept advancing and I started backing away, but after a while he was
getting too close so I started throwing sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes) at
him. He would stop and chew away for a few seconds while I got closer to my
house with each sunchoke. Finally I was on my porch step and close to the
kitchen door. Just then my wife came out with her hardwood rolling pin and
Mister Bruin took off for the woods. Possibly a true story.
Four days ago, in a fit of
nostalgia, I drove up to Tilley and the house where I was born to give myself a
refresher course on what it was like when I was growing up, if I ever did. I
walked out to the edge of the woods where I had built a cabin in 1976 after
some years in the NWT. The cabin was long gone, but the nearby dump – used in
the days before the public dump arrived in Lake Edward – held all sorts of
nostalgic treasures. Part of a 1949 Monarch car was there; I remembered driving
that down to Lila Goodine’s store, and there were beer bottles of the day (how
did THOSE get there?) scattered around. I was quite optimistic back then,
wasn’t I? I didn’t even return
the empties.
-end-
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