DIARY
Some
things, like King James, can’t be explained
by
Robert LaFrance
I just came in from my front garden
where I picked peas for half an hour, enough to feed any two pigs – not
mentioning names – for half a day. Looking over my journals from previous
years, I can brag that this is the earliest I have ever picked ripe peas. My
beets, romaine lettuce and onions? I don’t want to talk about it.
Another thing: I drive here and
there and often see roadside gardens that are beautiful and geometric, but mine
are about as neat as a missed hockey hip check. I saw one of those during the
playoffs and was impressed with how a player could hurl himself over the glass
and up to the fifth row.
On to a gentler subject – books -
last Wednesday evening, when I was visiting Clyde Nigel St. John (pronounced
Sin-gin) at his cottage in Lower Kintore, I was impressed by his book
collection of several thousand volumes, most of them about British history
before Brexit. I might have been less impressed than some, because I have
500-600 books, almost all about Canadian and New Brunswick history. Still, I
was impressed, since his cottage was really a cabin. Every wall was filled with
books. Of all those tomes, the one that impressed me the most though, was the
King James Version of the Holy Bible – now get this – SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR.
Listening to a CBC radio program
about the mistakes Albert Einstein made in his General Theory of Relativity
(published 1916) I was astonished at how wrong he was about certain things. I
know my relatives are quite baffling too. Relativity, get it? The common tater,
a scientist, spoke for half an hour and then conceded that Einstein was right
in 99.9% of his theories. If I had done that well in school, I might have gone
into something complicated, like meteorology, the study of meteors.
Yesterday morning one of the ladies
in the UCW, CWL, DAR, or the YWCA asked Flug why he never wears shorts. I
almost choked on my lemonade. I have seen Flug’s legs, back in Ottawa when we
were both on the Parliament Hill Co-Ed Field Hockey team. However, we did make
it to the nationals that year, in Nepean, Ontario. Since Nepean is right next
to Ottawa and we were two of the only three teams in the league, the other
being Maxville, ON, it was quite convenient. We won, by the way, because Flug`s
legs (that looked like folded up pancakes laced with chokecherries) kept the
other teams helpless with laughter.
Ah, we were young athletes them. Now
I don’t understand athletes at all. My daughter Kate played all season with the
Fredericton Gladiators women’s tackle football team and went on to make the
Maritime team, but I’ll never understand why anyone would play tackle football.
Her Maritime team will be playing in the nationals next month in Regina and I
wish her and them all the best. Like Swahili, I’ll never understand it.
A quick question: Do you often use
the phrase ‘of course’ when answering a question? It was only yesterday that I
finally realized that ‘of course’ doesn’t make any sense.
CBC Radio and MPBN Radio (PBS)
occasionally play music from other lands and I have to admit I rarely am able
to get any joy out of it. I mean, I grew up listening to Hank Williams and Don
Messer. Am I really going to enjoy a sitar concert? Back in the 1960s the
Beatles went to India and learned the True Way from a sitar player named Ravi
Shankar, and even got him to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. I watched it and
couldn’t make head nor tails of it. Rap gives me the same feeling. Maybe some
people think it’s music, but I don’t.
Another quick question: What the
hell is a ‘research analyst’? I keep hearing people being described as such,
and I could be listening to…well…Swahili again. Yet no one questions it. Does
this person analyze research? Does he or she research analysis? One of the
great unsolved mysteries of life in the 21st century.
One of the descriptions I also tire
of is the adjective ‘award-winning’. At a media event last week, a newspaper
guy from the National Post was introduced as an ‘award-winning columnist’ (it could have been Communist)
and I wondered what was the award he had won? Nobody said. Accordingly, I am
going to carve a plaque – this would be an award – out off a piece of birch and
have Silo the bartender present it to me. Then I can be introduced as ‘an
award-winning’ columnist. Or Communist.
Now I have to find someone who will
introduce me.
-end-
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