A
rather surprising set of animal tracks
by
Robert LaFrance
I was wading through my orchard day
before yesterday and came across some mighty big tracks. They had not been left
there by an elephant, but they weren’t much smaller than that pachyderm’s footprints.
It was a bear and all this time I thought I was safe
from becoming someone lunch. Shouldn’t all bruins except those in Boston be
hibernating by now?
The reason I mention this is that if
you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s because a rogue bear has decided to
emerge from hibernation a few months early and couldn’t find an open
restaurant. Seeing me, he she or it decided that he (she, it) wouldn’t bother
going all the way uptown for the chili at Mary’s Bake Shop, but would munch on
me.
On the subject of the words we use,
every time I hear someone say they are ‘stacking wood’ I have to remember that,
to me, that means ‘piling wood’. Makes sense; you don’t go out to the woodstack
to get a stick, you go to the woodpile. Is the word ‘stacking’ from American TV
programs or perhaps from another part of Canada?
Another word I hear people say,
referring to what I would call a stick of wood, is a ‘log’. When I grew up in
Tilley, people didn’t “put another log on the fire” because to us a log could
be the 12-foot trunk of a fir tree. Our little kitchen stove would have been a
bit overwhelmed.
Over the years I have heard a lot of
people wonder about the word ‘dooryard’ and if it is used all over Canada or
just in the Maritimes. I asked my friend Mr. Google. He gave me several
explanations, several of which asserted that ‘dooryard’ is used exclusively in
Maine, which is of course typical American bunk. When I lived in BC and when I
lived in Ontario I often heard it. However, when I lived in the Northwest Territories
I never heard it. Funny about that, until one remembers that most Inuit
residences didn’t have one, at least not in the places I lived.
*************************
This portion of today’s column could
be entitled “Things that I don’t miss”. I’m
sure we could all write a column – or five columns – on this, but please
don’t; I need the money to make my January VISA payment.
DIAL-UP. Those who first ‘accessed’
the Internet, or the World Wide Web as people used to say more often, via
dial-up, will agree with me that it was a royal pain in the aspect. I remember
the day that a certain fiddler in the Moncton area sent me a 4-megabyte photo
and it took two hours to download it to my computer from his email.
I am not kidding – two hours. I
clicked ‘receive mail’ on my Eudora email page and it began to arrive. This was
about 1:00 pm on a weekday and I am sorry that I can’t remember what day it
was. I decided to drive uptown to Bishop’s Grocery and get a few things, then
visit a friend, then get a library book. When I arrived back home just before
3:00 pm, the photo was just arriving in full. It was a photo of me taken at a
fiddle doo.
JOHN WAYNE – A few decades ago it
was hard to see a movie or watch TV without seeing the big blustering blowhard
John Wayne, the American hero. He acted as a brave soldier and all sorts of
similar roles and people actually thought he was. Trouble is, they didn’t
realize all that time that he was a World War II draft dodger, a fact that was
well covered up at the time. Google “John Wayne, draft dodger”.
MY 1973 PLYMOUTH SATELLITE CAR – I
had that vehicle for three months and put $600 worth of repairs on it, the most
expensive of them being about $60. I doubt if I ever left my yard, went to
town, and came back without the car breaking down. Those were the early days of
computers in cars. In the end I sold the car to a friend after telling him
about every one of those repairs. I had paid $1600 for it and sold it for $800,
considering myself lucky.
A year after he bought the car, my
friend and I saw each other in Perth. Fearing an assault, I made as if to run
away, but he said he “had never laid a wrench on it” since he bought it from
me. I had fixed all that had been wrong with it. Steve Cronk and I remained
friends until his death many years later.
GEORGE W. BUSH – How many needless
deaths is that man responsible for? Many fear that Donald Trump will do similar
things, but somehow I think he is smarter than that, although he doesn’t act it
at times.
-end-
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