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.-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment