DIARY
Do
you see a watch on yon wrist, laddie?
by
Robert LaFrance
One day last week I was dozing in my
easy chair when I snapped wide awake because a (very) loud TV commercial came
on. It was showing a Toyota zooming around some pylons in a big parking lot and
narrowly missing people standing there. Then the car went over a ramp and came
to a screeching halt in front of a stone wall.
I write this from my hospital bed
because I didn’t see the small letters on the lower corner of the commercial:
“Professional drivers. Do not try this at home.”
It’s been that kind of a summer. I missed winning a
$64,000,000 lottery by only one number wrong. True, I had all the digits wrong,
but the number itself was incorrect too.
Surely the recent spat between Canada Post and that
company’s management wouldn’t result in legitimate mail going undelivered, but
so far that seems to be the case. About three weeks ago I sent a letter to my
daughter and gave the street address in Woodstock. Four days later it hadn’t
arrived and the post office people said it was because the apartment number
wasn’t included. I didn’t even know she had an apartment number. Any letter I
had previously sent or forwarded to her had arrived with just the street
address. There are only two apartments in the house.
The next week she asked again at the post office
there and was told it had been ‘returned to sender’. A week after that I asked
in Perth-Andover and they knew nothing about it. I knew I had put on the same
return address I always do – my name and postal code, nothing more, and that
should have been enough.
Do we all know what it’s like when a computer file
is ‘lost in cyberspace’? Such is the case here. Maybe current post office rules
don’t allow for delivering mail without a strict apartment number in a
2-apartment building, but when I was a letter carrier in North Vancouver
(1972-73) we were told to use some sense. “And don’t get bit!”
**************************
I know I rail on a lot about tailgaters and that I
have even written a poem about them – “Tailergater, tailgater, look just like
an alligator…” – but the one that followed me to town last evening was a real
doozie.
It was either a soccer mom or a soccer dad driving a
van. The first time I saw the vehicle was in the area of the Kilburn flat.
Driving the speed limit, I was at the north end of the flat and the van’s
headlights were half a kilometre behind. Zap! No more than twenty seconds later
all I could see was the hood and the bottom half of the van’s windshield. He,
she or it must have been doing 140 km/hr when I had first spied the vehicle.
When the van got up to me it was in a passing area, but it stayed glued to my
bumper.
The van’s headlights were on high beam. I slowed down and pulled over
to the side but the van stayed right there. Then we met a pickup truck with
about 40 lights at the front. The van driver behind me dimmed his lights in a
courteous gesture, then once the pickup had passed put his high beams back on.
Meanwhile I could only see coloured lights as I slowed down even more to
persuade this idiot to pass and moved even closer to the edge. Eventually,
after meeting two more vehicles, Mister Idiot did go by me – on a turn.
Is there a motto or a lesson to be learned from this
story? Probably not, but if there is it must be this: “If you drive, stay off
the road.”
**************************
I mentioned in a recent column that
the Australian accent gives the word ‘so’ three syllables and that was unfair.
I do apologize after a visit from a couple of travellers hailing from the
Melbourne area.
After these guys spoke for a while I
could see where an apology was in order. Truly, the word ‘so’ has FOUR
syllables. Besides, some, perhaps many, Aussies ‘enhance’ their accents when
they come to North America. In that respect they remind me of Glasgow, Scotland
residents. Freddie Bardin, whom I met at the recent NB Highland Games in
Fredericton, when I asked him the time said: “Main roch theena?”
This translates to:
“Do you see a watch on yon wrist, laddie?”-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment