DIARY
Red toes? That is (or are) chilblains
by
Robert LaFrance
“But officer,” I said. “I was
wearing my glasses when I hit that bridge! They just happened to be my reading glasses and not my regular glasses.”
That was my friend Flug talking. He
gets himself in some awful scrapes, doesn’t he? I don’t know if, in my nearly
69 years as an inmate of this universe, I have ever heard of anyone driving
around while wearing his reading glasses. The closest was the day that Aunt
Polly, then in her twenties, drove the Farmall tractor to town while under the
impression that it was a Model T.
It turned out that there wasn’t much
damage to Flug’s car – a 1991 Volvo, and they’re tough as old shoe-leather –
but his pride took a hit. Off course the boys at the club wouldn’t let that
rest.
They won’t let Donald Trump rest
either. Most of them are set up to receive the U.S. president’s tweets. “It all
reminds me of something I learned at the University of Edinburgh,” commented
the Perfessor, who had attended that school for a weekend back in the 1970s.
“There’s a Robert Burns poem that refers to a child who listens to everything.
“There’s a chiel among you taking notes,” Burns wrote. That sounds like Donald
Trump, who is like a child who just says what he feels like that day.”
**************************
To make a radical shift in subject
matter, I now want to assert that weather forecasts should be banned and
withheld from everyone except school bus drivers and school district officials.
We don’t want the kiddies to freeze to death in some sylvan snowdrift.
As to the rest of us, we are missing
out on a lot of activities because of weather forecasts that promise doom if we
venture past our woodshed doorstep. Let there be a public forecast of a mere 40
or 50 centimetres of snow accompanied by hurricane-like winds and people
postpone or even cancel events that could have taken place.
Take the Kincardine Club Dart
Tournament for example. When we heard the March 14 forecast that we here in the
Scotch Colony were about to get snow up the yin-yang, we could have cancelled
the tournament, but did we do that?
No, we did not. Instead, Lefty the
bartender simply filled his 1982 Gremlin to the gunwales with lemonade and
snacks and we carried on. Each of us brought snowshoes in case the electricity
took flight and we had to trudge to the privy-outhouse in a blizzard. As it
happened, the power didn’t go away (kudos to NB Power and last summer’s
roadside bush and tree cutting) so we didn’t need the snowshoes.
Good thing. When Jamie Gleeson
ploughed out the club driveway the next day he ran over them all.
My point is, we have to toughen up.
A mere 60 cm of snow (which is less in feet and inches) shouldn’t slow us down
from our appointed rounds. By the way, if you see any of the spouses of dart
players, you could mention that they are still at the club. Jamie pushed all
the snow in front of the main door so everyone has to stay there and drink
lemonade until spring.
*************************
Listening to a CBC Radio documentary
one recent evening, I was interested to learn that we Canadians are fat. Oh,
they used the words obese, portly, stocky etc. but there at the nub and the
gist of it was the word fat.
“We Canadians are carrying around
half a billion pounds of excess weight,” the so-called scientist told the radio
interviewer. “Just think what we could do with all that fat. We could use it to
run power plants and all sorts of other industrial facilities. Why, it would be
a boon to us all!”
It might be a boon to some, I said
to myself, but what about the Canadian economy? The sugar industry would
collapse and fast-food places would cease to exist except in our fevered
imaginations as we drool over photos of double bacon cheeseburgers. People
would start buying cars that run on fat instead of gasoline and we can imagine
the problems there. The funeral businesses would tank because no one would die
any more.
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I mentioned the Perfessor. Last week
he had an interesting comment about his feet. To paraphrase the late comedian
George Carlin: when you find yourself talking about feet, there must be some
subjects you’ve missed.
The Perfessor said he had
‘chilblains’ at the ends of his toes that were quite red from enduring too much
cold. He offered to show me, but I nipped that idea in the bud.
What was most interesting was the
list of treatments: Friar’s balsam, a weak iodine solution, a mixture of eggs,
wine and fennel root and warm garlic. I wished him well, then remembered an
appointment I had in Saskatoon.-end-
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