Spring cleaning is fun??? (May 10)

My mother ‘the doctor’ and spring cleaning

                        by Robert LaFrance

            It’s hard to believe, but once in a while a television show depicts something true. On Thursday evening I must have been hard up for entertainment and tuned in to a BBC program about rural England in the 1940s and 1950s. One of the characters was my mother.

            Well, not really my mother, but the person was enough like my mother to give me pause, as they say.

            Marjorie Wanda (Schriver) LaFrance was born in August 1906 and died in May 1961. Back in 1948, after having my brother Lawrence in 1939 and my sister Joan in 1941, she was the proud mother of me. You may be saying that ‘third time conquers’ but in between me and Joan was my brother David (1944-1947).

            The TV show I was talking about featured a rural woman named Joan who was a retired registered nurse, but who was in reality the medical doctor for the whole community of Stansleigh, England, which sounded an awful lot like (north) Tilley, NB, in the 1950s. There my mother, a trained RN who had left the profession to raise a family, was the resident doctor.

            As I was growing up in that decade (if I ever did grow up), there was what amounted to a steady stream of ill and injured neighbours and friends of the family who came to see my mother in the hope that she could alleviate their suffering. She usually could.

            I saw people limping in or being carried in with injuries ranging from bucksaw gashes, broken bones from being hit by a tree, birdshot wounds or some dread disease that prompted Mum to send us out of the house. Any intestinal problem was dealt with by an enema and broken bones were set then and there or sent to Andover or Perth where two medical doctors lived, Doctor MacIntosh and Dr. Earle.

            People ask me why I have such a strong stomach and I tell them it had something to do with my childhood, when I was likely to come home from Block X School to find a bloody patient on blankets on the kitchen floor and Mum patching him up for a trip downtown if he could find a way. Ambulances, taxis and Medicare were all in short supply back then, so it was a stressful time for the victim.

            Mum died when I was twelve. She didn’t leave any medical files so historians could write about the Nurse-Doctor of Churchland Road, but I surely remember how much she did for her patients. She was a midwife, GP, pharmacist and surgeon.

                                                ***********************

            As one can imagine, our house was often quite a mess when an injured party left, and that makes a good segue to my next topic, which is spring cleaning.

            Is there such a thing as spring cleaning any more? When I was a kid (there I go again with nostalgia!) I remember all the wives would start talking about SPRING CLEANING as soon as April Fools Day (Poisson d’Avril) came along. When those women said those words, they weren’t kidding.

            It was like a tremendous religious ceremony, spring cleaning was. The ‘housewives’ planned for weeks, gathering up cardboard boxes to lug out the detritus of winter and take it to the dump at the edge of the woods, or burn it in a field. The wives and mothers – and often the poor schoolchild who couldn’t escape and I’m not mentioning any names – had to gather up cleaning materials and get ready for the frenzy.

            Once the weather got warm, the wives found ways of washing huge and heavy blankets that had been in the house all winter. We took our blankets down to Pelkey Brook where a nice deep swimming hole was just the spot for laundering and rinsing the blankets. Once they were on the clothesline or hanging on a fence, it was time for the real spring cleaning to begin.

            Picture how much soot and dust would be on all the flat surfaces inside the house. All winter long the cookstove and any heaters or furnaces had been depositing dust all over the house. Spring cleaning was revenge against all the days when the house had been closed up. The cookstove would be moved into the summer kitchen because otherwise the main kitchen would reach steel foundry temperatures in the summer. My cousin Elizabeth didn’t have a summer kitchen, so she got her poor downtrodden (much as I am today) husband Ralph to move the cookstove out into the yard.

            I recently read a book called ‘Harness in the Parlour’ by Audrey Armstrong. It described the tribulations of pioneer men and women. Referring to spring cleaning, she wrote: “Despite the hard work involved, pioneer women welcomed spring cleaning. It gave them a chance to shrug off winter doldrums, and to literally work out their frustrations…it was dreaded by men but thoroughly enjoyed by women.”

            Funny, I don’t remember my mother being giddy with joy at the idea or the job.
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The obsession with statistics (May 3)

The lower end of high-end technology

                        by Robert LaFrance

            There is a downside to modern technology – in fact, there are many downsides (which we used to call disadvantages) to modern technology; I found yet another one just this morning.

            Since we are quite wealthy, we have two cars, a 2009 Toyota Yaris and a 2014 Toyota Corolla. Luxury on wheels in both cases.

            My wife and I each drive both vehicles, although one of us does not drive both at the same time. When I drive the Corolla, I find that the backup camera, when I have remembered to clean the crud off it, is a valuable tool for, well, backing up.

            This morning, thinking I was heading for town, I jumped into the Yaris and started backing it up. I couldn’t understand why the image on the backup camera wasn’t changing. I kept backing up anyway. It had to change sooner or later, right?

            Too late I realized that I had been looking at the car’s radio, which is situated at the same place in the Yaris as the backup camera in the Corolla. Did you know that 2002 Chev pickup trucks can really put a crimp in one’s plans, if one backs out in front of one? Well, it can.

                                    ***********************

            I rarely watch hockey, even in Stanley Cup Playoff time, but when I do I am amazed at the absolute frenzy sports announcers go into about statistics. It’s the same with soccer, my favourite sport, but let’s stick to hockey for now.

            “Vinnie, we have to keep our eye on Leaf winger Olaf Pingous,” said announcer Edgar Sunderland during one game. “Did you know that this year he hasn’t scored a slapshot goal between minute 21 and minute 29 in any game that takes place in a city whose name has more than four vowels?”

            “I hear you, Edgar. And how about that Detroit goalie, Al Drumbeat? I just looked into the lists of ‘firsts’ and found that he was the first left-handed NHL player to score 20 goals before the 40^th game of a season ending in the digit ‘8’. That would be 1988, when he was playing for the Mighty Ducks.”

            They went on and on, outlining other statistics and major milestones (even though we are supposed to use the metric system) in various players’ careers. I’ll leave you with one more:

            In the year 2007, Jerry Feinstin Jr. of the Toronto Maple Leafs, later the Dream Team of 2016-17, scored a goal in minute 18 of the first, second and third periods. A hat trick to dream of. The Leafs were playing the Detroit Red Wings, whose announcer, Goergio Fennault, also pointed out that Feinstin was the first player without a beard who ever wore pink skates while eating a Tim Horton’s chili dog between the second and third periods. A defenseman name Chuck Heppner had done a similar thing in 1997, but between the first and second periods.

                                                **********************

            I do a lot of reading, as the faithful and long-suffering consumer of this column knows, and one book I read at least four times a year is ‘Rural Musings’ by a New  Brunswick gent, now deceased, named Rolf Munroe from Taymouth. He also wrote a column by that  name from 1959 to 1963 in the Daily Gleaner.

            He had the country life down pat. The first chapter is entitled ‘Country Grapevine’ and hankered back to the days when – long before email, Facebook, cellphones, and even private telephone lines for everyone – the news got out somehow. Probably more quickly and more accurately than it does today.

            “The deepest routes of the grapevine stem from the fact that country communities, or most of them, have no police force, no fire department, no resident doctor or local hospital. When disaster strikes in the country, it is the victim’s neighbours who come to the rescue…” Of course he was talking about communities much farther away from these services than most of us are today. Munroe said that somehow the word spread faster in those days than it does today, and he died long before Snapchat and Twitter.

            He described how snake (cedar) fences were constructed, how, in those days before texting and GPS, children actually made paths through the woods without using their thumbs, how important railways were for local travel, and how impossible it was to put stovepipes together once that had been taken apart. He said that in those days houses had parlours, or ‘front rooms’ rarely used except for funerals, and kerosene lamps and lanterns, which he said were becoming obsolete.

            I highly recommend you read this great book, but I have to argue with him about the obsolescence of kerosene lamps and lanterns. Here in this estate, anticipating power outages, we own four kerosene lamps and two kerosene lanterns, plus lots of candles. We can’t all be right all the time.
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Flug won the lottery! (April 26)

Complaining about a skiff of snow

                        by Robert LaFrance

            This is part of the weather forecast for Wednesday evening, April 19: “Rain and snow in the evening...then all snow.”

            Now I ask you: “SNOW on April 19^th? This is communism. I don’t want to talk about it any more.

                                                **********************

            Looking at the good side of things, my friend Flug (Richard LaFrance, no relation) won a pile of money in a lottery and is going to take me and my wife out to supper/dinner. The bad news is that he is going to put a $45 limit on each of us.

            “Wrong, Bob,” said Flug, who was reading over my shoulder as I typed those immortal words. “I said a TOTAL of forty-five dollars and we’ll pick up the tip.” The ‘we’ he referred to was (or were) he and his latest wife Janine Lewindowski-Smith-Jones-Lennon. She, like Flug, has chosen the well-worn marital path quite a few times over the years. I only report a small number of her blissful spouses, blissful now that she’s gone from their marital beds.

            Thursday, April 20, 2017 – I rolled out of bed at 7:25 am to find that about three inches (approx. 34 kilograms I think, in metric) of snow had fallen during the night. The previous evening I had texted my daughter in Singapore that this snow was forecast. She asked me if I was lying. In the morning I texted her a photo of the whited-out ground. “Does this look like lying?” I asked. She said it was 32ºC over there and she was about to leap into the pool.

            Jump ahead to later in the month. We ate at a gourmet restaurant named Belle’s Truck Stop. Their only dish, at least that day, was beans. Baked beans, string beans, Jack and the Beanstalk beans, refried beans – they know their beans.

            Indeed, they serve so many beans that a special carbon tax (just for them) is making its way through the House of Commons and Senate as we speak. As we know, beans are the musical fruit, but tough on the old ozone layer.

            Flug, still looking over my shoulder, said he wanted to correct something I had reported earlier in the column. He hadn’t won a lottery; he had won a Phoenix.

            For those to whom the word Phoenix is not familiar, other than the Greek mythology bird that rises from the ashes of other Phoenixes, we should remember that it is also a federal government program that organizes payrolls. It has a few minor flaws, like depositing 12 cents into one civil servant’s account for her bi-weekly pay.

            Flug, who receives a federal pension, was one Canadian who did not complain about Phoenix. His monthly cheque, usually $1277, was $24,339 last month. He’s hoping that Phoenix does not slip back into its ashes anytime soon. “An honest man would inform them,” he said, “but guess what?”
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Was Hitler a good guy after all? (April 19)

Oh, for a hole to crawl into!

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Whew! Last week’s column in which I used the phrase ‘old people’ certainly drew some reaction. I’ve had to hire two people just to handle all the email, and the snail mail (another insulting phrase) has been tremendous.

            “You young people have no respect,” wrote Mrs. J. J. Linham of Minto, NB. “And don’t try to say that you are sixty-eight years old, because I happen to know that you must be much younger. I would say 39, according to your photo. As an octogenarian, I bitterly resent being lumped in with people in their nineties. They really ARE old people!”

            A George M. Cohan of southwest Sisson Ridge wrote me a long letter with quite a lecture about ‘respect’, even referring to the Aretha Franklin song ‘R-E-S-P-E-C-T’ as if I not only needed to cultivate some of that characteristic, but that I can’t spell.

            “I think it is very sleazy of you to pretend that you’re 68 just to try and avoid criticism for all your slurs against us older persons,” wrote Alice Ganong of Aroostook. “As I matter of fact, I know that you can’t be over 35, because I saw you at Clarks’ grocery store in Perth-Andover only the other day, and if you’re over 35 I’ll eat an armadillo.”

                                                ***********************

            I continue to be fascinated by the people that U.S. president Donald Trump has surrounded himself with. His ‘Counsellor’ Kellyanne Conway tells people that microwave ovens are capable of spying on us, and that lies are simply ‘alternative facts’.

(We call them simply microwaves now. Like the original phrase ‘pizza pie’ they have lost a word.)

The latest gaffe by a Trump staffer was by his press secretary, Sean Spicer. He informed the Washington press corps a few days ago that the terrible Adolph Hitler, bad as he was, never used poison gas in World War II, as compared to Assad’s recent gas attacks in Syria. That revelation will come as quite a, well, revelation to the millions of people killed in Hitler’s gas ovens. We all know what Spicer meant, that Hitler didn’t drop bombs of poison gas from planes.

Still, I hope Conway and Spicer don’t get fired; it is all rather entertaining.

                                    *************************

It seems I owe DTI, the provincial Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, an apology.

Here all this time I have been blaming them, the former D.O.T., for the criminal potholes, especially those along Highway 105 between Muniac and Beechwood, in Tilley and on Tobique First Nation, when all the time it was the RCMP who should have been blamed. Specifically the traffic division.

The true facts (as I heard someone recently say) came to light after a video surfaced of several RCMP officers who were out on Highway 105 about 4:00 am two days ago. They had jackhammers, pickaxes and shovels and were digging enthusiastically into the road. “The potholes here weren’t nearly deep enough,” commented Staff Sergeant Glen Tweelieski who continued to dig as he talked. “There! That should do it!” The pothole was about of a size to accommodate a small pickup truck, but of course not one of those big $65,000 hogs. At this point the video camera operator asked S/Sgt Tweelieski why he and his members (as they call themselves) were doing what they were doing.

“Why, this place was like a racetrack,” he answered. “We decided to slow down traffic. I think it worked.” He pointed to the roof of a Volvo Slivo just visible in a pothole, and to what could have been a Ford F150 turned on its side. “Yup, they don’t drive like maniacs any more over these roads, I’ll tell ya that.”

                                    ***********************

As I write these important words, I note that, on this day at least, almost everyone in Perth-Andover is optimistic that there won’t be a flood this spring. Not around there anyway.

It brings to mind what happened on April 11, 1993 and it was not a happy experience, either for those who were flooded out of their homes and businesses, or for me. You see, I made a boo-boo that left me in deep doo-doo.

At the time I was doing news for CJCJ Radio in Woodstock and of course keeping an eye on potential flooding in Perth-Andover, which is only about 18 km from our estate. Our house is and was on a mountain here in Kincardine, but I spent a lot of time uptown watching the river levels.

At some point around midday, I called the station to give them a voice report: “So it looks as if Perth-Andover is going to escape a flood this year…”

Within half an hour, and I am not kidding, the level of the river had risen exactly one foot, and continued from there. If there had been a hole to crawl into, I would have done so, but they were all filled with water.
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GPS is now king (April 12)

A few idle thoughts from an old feller

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I speak to many old people in the course of a week’s work, and most of them bitterly resent being called old people. I am 68, hoping to be 69 on May 11, and I am more bitter about another phrase that’s used to describe us oldsters: aging demographic. Whenever people talking about the fact that the average New Brunswicker’s age is rising (we hope) all the time, somehow they slip in the phrase aging demographic. How about saying this: “The codger factor is expanding”?

            Somebody was saying last week that the reason so many countries are producing big deficits all the time is that we’re all ‘profligate’. That’s what he said, profligate, which I thought was something like having warts in a certain area. He meant, of course, that every one of us wastes a whole pile of money and if we didn’t do that, all would be better. Wrong. If we all quit wasting money tomorrow, the economy would take a nose dive similar to what the Toronto Maple Leafs are about to take. Some people go out and buy a new car every three years even though theirs is perfectly all right. Without that car sale and millions like it, the auto industry could be carried on in somebody’s basement.

            I have been toying with the ideas of changing my column style (the editor cringes at this) from the current scattergun method to perhaps a cooking one, or maybe a column on etiquette, or perhaps a ‘Dear Abby’ advice column. Imagine that. I am leaning toward the ‘advice to the lovelorn’ type. People would write in with their problems and I would give them advice. For example, ‘Marissa’ would write to me and say that her husband ‘Bill’ doesn’t take her seriously when she tells him he has bad breath. I would say that she should set a delicate houseplant in front of him at supper time, and when it immediately wilts, she could point out that the plant is especially fearful of halitosis. I’m still working on the idea that needs work to be sure.

            My recent column about feeling sorry for the Americans has drawn quite a ‘HUGE’ response, as Donald Trump would say. Most (all) of the letters came from the other side of the international border. One example was from an Enid Claymore from Millinocket, Maine. Enid wrote that I should be jailed as a communist. Others called me a Red, a Commie and other variations on the word ‘Communist’. It reminded me of a guy I worked with at North Vancouver Postal Station #3 back in 1973. An American, he would call anyone who didn’t agree with him a Communist. One day I asked him to define the word; he pointed at me and: “You!”

            Here’s a phrase I had never heard before last Saturday, after the cook at the Club had served a large pot of baked beans. As we later sat around the TV, there was a rather large noise that came from a sheepish-looking Willard Keokuk. The Perfessor turned to me and said: “You know, Will might not be a great mechanic, but he is enthusiastically flatulent”. I should mention right now that the Perfessor’s real name is Joseph Fine. It  raised quite a laugh at one of the club’s recent meetings when our treasurer, Bruce Billtey, pronounced it Josephine.

            How many people do we know who still use a roadmap? I think about six, because the GPS has pretty much taken over. There’s one major problem though; you have to update the GPS once a year or so – perhaps when one washes his feet – or you could find yourself out in the woods behind a stump or floating down the Tobique behind a loosely held raft of evergreen trees that have wrenched loose from the bank.

            St. Patrick’s Day last month brought out the usual great response from those with as much as a spittoon half full of Irish ancestry. As one who, in spite of my surname, had four great great-grandfathers born in Ireland, I like to take part in the celebrations, sometimes too much. Naturally we sang ‘Danny Boy’ but there was a slight problem with pronunciation of the song’s other name ‘Londonderry Air’. Again it was Bruce Billtey, who, reading from an agenda, said: “Let’s sing London Derriere!”

            It reminds me of the time that Brenda Dugwood, chairing a meeting of the Kincardine Literary Society, decided to comment on a comment by Bruce, who had referred to a sentence in one of the books being reviewed. He said it contained ‘an ox and a moron’, and Brenda made it worse by saying: “Surely you mean ox, you moron.” We all knew that polite Brenda really didn’t mean to say that.
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Grampy like to rant too (April 5)

Somehow, I feel sorry for the Americans

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I often sneer at the Americans for their bizarre actions, but these days I feel sorry for them.

            Just as the citizens of Britain are now wondering if they did the right thing in voting to leave the European Union, many Americans are taking a second look at their collective decision in November to elect a president who probably would have a hard job being elected dogcatcher-in-chief of Minto, NB.

            Once in a while the U.S. gets down a quart or two of redneck jelly and that has to be topped up. Unfortunately that happened in November and right at that time a lot of people decided they weren’t going to vote at all, the FBI director announced that Hillary Clinton was once again being investigated, the Russians stepped in to hack the Democrats and what Americans see is what they get.

            While I’m sure that Donald Trump is a Dog-fearing person and wouldn’t knowingly do anything wrong, his biggest problem is the characteristic he emphasized during the election campaign – he’s not a politician. Like Joe Clark in 1980, he forgot to count the votes he could rely on.

            As one who spent his early teenage summers visiting my aunt and uncle on a farm near New Sweden, Maine, I know that the folks who live over there are decent and law abiding, but there’s something in the general American psyche that is susceptible to persuasion from the higher-ups. When George W. Bush wanted to go to war against Iraq, only about a third of the people agreed. Then he and his team of warmongers brought out the redneck jelly. Presto! A few months later polls showed over half the Americans said “go for it George, and find some Weapons of Mass Destruction whether or not they exist”. They didn’t of course.

            A few years ago, an American movie called ‘Argo’ dealt with the rescue of American hostages from their embassy in Iran. This was nearly all done by Canadian embassy people, but in the movie they might as well have been on the moon. The CIA, whose real role was minimal, were the heroes.

            Ever see the movie ‘The Great Escape’ about 73 Allied prisoners of war tunnelling out of Stalag Luft III in Poland? The hero was, of course, an American (played by Steve McQueen), but in reality NOT ONE of the 73 was an American.

            Remember the Newsweek photo of the American space equipment that included what we call the Canadarm? The magazine airbrushed out the word ‘Canada’. Can’t have that. After all, that might cause heart palpitations in Peoria, Illinois.

                                                ***********************

            Changing the subject from my Rick Mercer type rant, I continue to be amazed at how the English language changes over the years. When I lived in Vancouver in the early 1970s, and if a woman of my acquaintance asked me to tweet her, that would be an entirely different message than the same words today. Or maybe not.

            We all keep hearing about too few nursing home beds, too many schools for the number of students and that sort of thing. I am wondering if the problem might not be too many government planners who don’t know what they’re doing. Not a clue. A week or two ago I read in my daily paper about a new school in Miramichi, one that will open this coming fall. In the same news story was the fact that this school is already overcrowded even before it opens. Imagine that. A new school opens with mobile classrooms already in place. You don’t suppose that ‘administration’ is taking up a third of the building do you?

            As to nursing home bed shortages, surely a little better planning ten years ago could have dealt with this in advance and left more hospital beds for people who are not just there because there are no nursing home beds.

            I think the reason for all this is that governments rely on Toronto and Boston consultants so much that their own employees don’t get a chance to know the problems in their own departments. As my late Grampy would have said: “Maybe they don’t know their (bums) from a hole in the ground!” He liked to rant too.

            Just to end these lucid words with a more cheerful note, I noticed this morning that my friend Flug had a visitor whose car in Flug’s yard had Manitoba plates. Naturally I had to stroll over that way to say hello. The visitor was an old friend of Flug, and introduced himself as Eugene. He couldn’t stay long, and after he had driven away, I asked Flug what his name was. “Eugene,” he said. “He told you that.” No, I persisted, I mean his surname.

            “He’s not a Sir, yet, but his last name is Therrapee,” said Flug. It wasn’t until I had gotten back home that I realized somebody was pulling somebody’s leg. Gene Therapy?

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