DIARY
And they say New Brunswickers are daft?
by
Robert LaFrance
I am probably not the only person to
ever say: “Truth is stranger than fiction”. It hurts me that I didn’t think of
that first, but that’s the way it goes.
Sure, Einstein was the first to
think of the General Theory of Relativity, but we can’t all be Einsteins. In
fact, none of us can be Einsteins.
What I’m getting at is a news story
out of Ernfold, Saskatchewan, Burdock Capital of Canada and home of famous
hockey player Gordie Hull. Gordie, getting a bit bored with retirement from the
SHL where adoring crowds cheered him on most nights, asked his wife Sadie what he could invent to get back in the
limelight.
“Invent washing the dishes for a
change!” she roared at Gordie, whose selective hearing didn’t pick that up. Later
in the (one-sided) conversation, she said he should do something with his
music. He had taken piano lessons for almost six months when he was nine.
Gordie pondered and he thought and
he ruminated, much like other ruminants (cows and the like, chewing their cuds)
in the fields and finally he came up with an idea. That night, down at a bar
not unlike the watering hole Flug and I frequent, he gathered together a whole
whack of his cronies, bought them each a beer so they wouldn’t make fun of him,
and made his pitch.
“Every pickup truck’s horn has a
horn with slightly different pitch than everybody else’s. How about if we
create a car horn symphony?”
It took some more talking and a
whole lot more lemonade, but he finally persuaded ‘the boys’ to give it a try.
For the next week there was Gordie going around Ernfold with an electronic
tuner to find out the pitch of each vehicle horn. Using the same method, except
pink gin this time instead of lemonade, he persuaded the ladies to go along
with his weird scheme and finally he had 34 vehicles lined up in the driveway
of the Ernfold Church of Enlightenment. It was a Saturday night. Hundreds of
people, including reporters and camera men and women from Sask TV, were ready.
And so the universe unfolded, with
all those musicians, under the direction of famous retired hockey player Gordie
Hull. They played two selections from Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and one from
Don Messer’s ‘Victoria County Suite’.
It was a huge success. I don’t have to tell you that
the whole musical scene was picked up by CBC’s ‘The National’ with Peter
Mansbridge and Wendy Mesley describing it in detail. I heard that Wendy wanted
to come out and see for herself, but CBC’s vice-president, speaking from
Florida where he was on a fact-finding tour, said no.
**************************
I was just recalling that when I was
growing up in Tilley in the 1950s and 1960s I dreamed of travelling to far-off
places like Edmundston and even Montreal, and I later did, but it was pretty
much all in Canada, except for a 2-week stay with friends in Columbus, Indiana
back in 1970.
The reason I was reminiscing was
that I just received a text message from my travelling younger daughter who is
at present in Singapore. Singapore? Where’s that?
Before that, she and her husband had
stayed a week in Hong Kong which was pretty much a good experience. My
son-in-law and my daughter discovered an area of Mong Kok, Kowloon that was
called Sneaker Street. The whole street sold nothing but sneakers, running
shoes – whatever you want to call them. He bought a pair of Nike trainers at a
good price.
To recap, there I was thinking about
growing up in Tilley and considering that
Edmundston was quite a journey, and there are my daughter and son-in-law
buying shoes in China.
Speaking of that, my daughter found
when she was in Hong Kong that an acquaintance from Upper Kent was working in a
city called Shenzhen that was only 17 kilometres
away from Hong Kong. However, getting there would have been a problem because
it is located in ‘the real China’ as someone called it. It needed visas to get
there and they would have taken days to get.
*************************
Up
to the time of this writing, we have been having a wonderful fall here,
referring to the weather. I know, Old Man Winter will soon be here – and may
already have arrived by the time this column is printed – and is ‘just around
the corner’ as they say so I decided to celebrate.
No
parties for me, I decided to go to a hairdresser and get the old mane trimmed.
I had been cutting my own hair since the summer of 1972 when my Vancouver
barber made a mess of my hair for the second time in a row (Get me to tell you
THAT story some time!) and I bought a pair of scissors.-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment