DIARY
Flug’s
problem with an Ottawa woman
by
Robert LaFrance
Every once in a while, like the rest
of us, my friend Flug says something intelligent.
“It won’t last,” he warned me, as if
I were expecting more. As registered males of the human race, we are dull as
dishwater, except for occasional flashes of mediocre thought, or, in this case,
brilliance.
Flug was relating a story about
telling a lie and having it come back at him like cucumbers or radish. The lie
occurred several years ago when he told a lady in Ottawa that he was the owner
of a trucking company in New Brunswick. Remembering that, she wrote to Flug in
Tilley (he lives in Kincardine now, but we can always count on Canada Post)
that she was coming for a visit, perhaps a long visit. It wouldn’t take her
long to realize that Flug’s ‘trucking company’ was a 1999 Ford F150 with lots
of rust.
“What will I do?” he moaned. “She’s
on her way here and she is going to shoot me.” I was thinking that he deserved
shooting, for that lie and many others, but I was and am his friend.
“I’d say shooting is the least of
your worries,” I commented. “What about Roseanne?” That was and is his wife,
either the 16th or 17th. “When she answers the door and
it answers back with this Ottawa woman, you are going to be in the deepest of
doo-doo ever seen in these parts. Have you thought about going on a sudden
vacation?”
He hadn’t, but ruled that out
because he was in the middle of a business deal involving the purchase of
another trucking company, a 2006 Ford F150 whose asking price was $1500. We
talked for a while and didn’t come up with anything, but figured Ottawa
wouldn’t be there for at least two days. “We gotta come up with SOMETHING,” he
said. Where he found the WE he didn’t say.
This is when he said something
intelligent. “You know Bob, telling a lie is like chicken pox. It doesn’t seem
like much at the time, but you look around five or ten or thirty years later
and bazooka! You’ve got shingles which is the chicken pox coming back to hit
you with a stick. If only you hadn’t gotten chicken pox in the first place.”
*************************
On to an entirely different subject
(and leaving Flug to sort out his own shingles) I was sitting in my office
earlier today and working on this very column when the light in my office
started flickering. After four or five minutes of this, the bulb started to
make a buzzing sound after which I leapt (if one can leap at age 68) to the
switch and turned it off.
Of course five minutes later I forgot
about this and went back to my office. When I turned on the light it made an
even louder buzz and crackle. After once more turning it off, I went to the
downstairs cupboard and got a 60W incandescent bulb. I specify because the one
that made the noise was one of those curly fluorescent bulbs, you know, the
ones that were the answer to all our ecological prayers a few years ago. We
would do away with the incandescent ones and live happily ever after because
these ones would each last 20,000 hours and take half the power. And Goldilocks
was a nice little girl except for her minor problem of being a food thief.
For the reader’s information, the
curly-fries bulb was the Noma brand, made in China. Asking around, I have found
that those bulbs made in China have caused many a problem including worry
because they contain mercury.
So I decided to change all our house
lighting to LEDs (light emitting diodes) and went to the hardware store which
is located right near Jim’s Pool Hall and behind the club. I looked at the
price tag - $4,320. I said to the clerk: “So how many LED bulbs does that buy?”
He gave me an odd look and said it was only the down payment on one bulb.
Now where did I put those candles?
*************************
One of the Olympics events
reminded me of the Victorian era in England. In the late 19th
century, people were urged to refrain from saying words like ‘leg’ because it
was risqué, so they had to refer to a table ‘limb’. In Rio one of the events
was the ‘women’s breaststroke’. Times have changed. I don’t know how many
Victorian heart attacks would have been caused by women’s beach volleyball. I’m
still recovering.
By the way, the Ottawa woman who was
headed this way phoned Flug (Richard LaFrance, no relation) Saturday evening
and said she’d just met the love of her life in Cabano and was going back with
him to Fort MacMurray. Just so you know.-end-
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