DIARY
The
last 2016 apple is now a memory
by
Robert LaFrance
Believe it or not, it’s sometimes a
sad thing to eat an apple, particularly if it’s almost spring and the apple
you’ve just eaten is the last one from the crop of the fall before.
Because my Macfree apples were the
ones that kept the longest, I saved them until the last. Anybody who knows
anything about apples knows that McIntosh are among the first to suffer the
ravages, and Cortlands, while fairly long keepers, do not hold a candle to Macfrees.
Novamacs are good too. Both are allegedly from the original McIntosh, but
neither has the slightest resemblance to it, except for being spherical.
I started my orchard in 1986, two
years after we bought this estate from the United Church. It was the house the
ministers lived in over the years, and I did my best to continue upholding
their traditions.
(“You mean their use of certain
words?” asked Flug, who had been looking over my should as I typed this
trenchant text.)
The first two trees I planted, ones
bought from a nursery in Fredericton, were McIntosh and Cortland, and they
turned out to be two of my worst mistakes. Trees of those types are HIGHLY
susceptible to scab. If you don’t know what scab is, the name tells it all.
Hundreds of trees later (I usually
have about 80 trees blossom each May although I once had close to 400) I know
better. Since I started full-time work in 2002, I haven’t had time to care for
them, so to speak, and many have passed on. Deer and bears have ruined more.
Back to the point, eating that last
2016 apple, the Macfree, gave me a sense of nostalgia, but then what doesn’t
when you’re old like me?
*************************
Not to actually have a column
without mentioning Donald Trump, the original Wild Man of the City, I was
recently impressed by his second try to ban Muslims from the hallowed shores of
the U.S.A.
It seems he actually had lawyers
look at this one. However, it’s already had casualties. He took Iraq off that
famous list of seven countries and it was personal. It turned out that one of
his old pals from his days in New York, Ned Amalfi, had somehow got caught up
in that first 1930s Germany-type sweep, and had gotten sent back to Iraq.
So Trump took Iraq off the list. One
of Trump’s aides asked why, and ‘The Donald’ said: “It’s because of Iraq Ned,”
whereupon the aide, who has a deadly fear of spiders, fainted. He thought Trump
had said ‘arachnid’. Talk about unintended consequences!
Not to spend too much time on U.S.
politics, but I should mention to those who have often asked me who my friend
Flug (Richard LaFrance, no relation) is, that there really was a Flug. I just
heard of him yesterday. He was Jim Flug who was prominent in 1970s Washington
as a lobbyist and generally a friend of Senators. You can Google ‘James Flug’.
*************************
As spring – or as I call it, SPRING!
– approaches, I am eager to get fishing in the local streams as well as some in
foreign countries like Upper Kintore, Leonard Colony and Carlingford.
The famous English dictionary guy,
Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), had an opinion about fishing and it didn’t
quite agree with mine. He lets the catfish out of the bag with his definition
of a fishing rod. It is “a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the
other”.
Someone else who really enjoys brook
fishing is my friend Angus P. Pielder, an actor who recently completed a
successful run with his one-man play (“The Man who Didn’t Care”) about former
NB Premier Bernard Lord.
That fact that Premier Lord dropped
the least amount of asphalt and chipseal ever to have occurred or not occurred
in a (blessedly short) 4-year mandate, figures prominently in the play.
Angus wasn’t being humorous though,
when he called on Friday. Although he rarely watches TV, he said that he had
just finished ‘viewing’ (that’s how actors talk) a car commercial that started
out showing the sentence “real people, not actors”.
“I’m a real people, aren’t I Bob?”
he moaned. Then he launched into Shylock’s monologue from the Shakespeare play
Merchant of Venice, ending with: “…if you prick me, do I not bleed?”
Having seen him curse when he lost
fish, I agreed that he was in fact a real people, but, I told him, his cause
would gain a little more credibility if he didn’t launch into Shakespeare every
whipstitch.
“You’re right Bob,” he said. “I will
watch that. It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done.” And with
that Charles Dickens quote from A Tale of Two Cities, he took a bow over the
phone and thanked me for being a good audience.-end-
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