At 69, my mind wanders (May 17)

DIARY

Keep (or start) that cash coming in

                        by Robert LaFrance

            It has come to my attention that I have forgotten to inform my readers in advance of my birthday.

            Any other year I would have mentioned in early May that my birthday was coming up, and that would have given folks a chance to go out and get me a nice gift, preferably cash. Preferably a lot of cash.

            Alas, this year I neglected to do so and will have to be satisfied with your best wishes, such as they are. This column appears (as they say) in the Victoria Star on May 17, but my 69^th birthday – actually anniversary of my birthday since we can only have one birthday – was May 11.

            On that day in 1948, I was born in a log cabin – well, it could have been a log cabin – at what is now 210 Churchland Road (north) Tilley. No hospitals back then and even if there had been it would have cost $100 or close to it. No medicare in 1948, but my mother was a retired RN and was her own obstetrician.

            One more note on financial gifts you want to send my way: ‘cash’ has the same number of letters as ‘best’.

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            People in the rest of Canada think that we Maritimers are always going out on our fishing boats and saying things like “three points abaft the starboard beam, matey!” but we here in Victoria County, New Brunswick, are not exactly Jacques Cartier (who I believe sold diamonds on the side when he wasn’t ‘discovering’ new countries. Hint: Somebody was already here when he arrived).

            I was in my teens before I saw salt water, and it looked a lot like fresh water. A sailor I am not, but I do have a certain resemblance to Popeye the Sailor Man except I don’t like cooked spinach.

            Where was I going with this? At age 69 my ‘mind’ tends to wander.

            Now I remember. I recently went out sailing on the lake created by Mactaquac hydro dam. I was the guest of a certain radio personality, now retired, and was accompanied by my friend Flug, who had said he was a good sailor and therefore didn’t have to take any mal-de-mer pills before going to sea on the St. John River. I didn’t think to ask him where he had gotten his sailing experience. He said that it had occurred in 1981 when he rode the Barney Baker ferry in Medford.

            I should have been suspicious when he told me this; the last time that ferry was in operation was in the 1950s. People could go from Medford to Morrell Siding in minutes.

            Back to the present, the sailboat’s owner – we will call him Buford Johnston so he doesn’t get legions of fans storming his boat – cast off the line and called to the experienced sailor Flug to ‘weigh anchor’. Flug looked bewildered at first, and then went to work, pulling the heavy anchor up on deck, and then letting it fall back into the water.

            In the best seafaring tradition, Flug shouted: “Aye, captain, I would estimate the anchor to weigh about two hundred pounds.”

            The lights were on, but nobody was home.

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            Johnny de Forte is in trouble again with his wife Zelda, who is a bagpiper.

            He is on a mental par with Flug, in other words as smart as the rest of us, but one neglected part of his education was any sweeping knowledge of that Scottish wind (and how!) instrument that Zelda had only recently begun to practise.

            How shall I put this? Johnny tends to sip away on lemonade – terrible habit! – when he watches TV so sometimes he doesn’t grasp all the facts and nuances being presented. So when a firefighter in full uniform came on the screen and suggested that May was a great time to “clean your pipes” before the summer, Johnny leapt into action.

            In a bit of a fog which is not that unusual, he decided he would do Zelda a favour while she was away at a ‘joy through tofu’ conference and take apart her pipes for a good cleaning. As Queen Victoria said the day someone made a joke in her presence, Zelda “was not amused” even if I, a bagpipe widower from way back, was.

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            A final note, this one on spring generally. Yesterday I was walking across the grocery store parking lot up uptown when a gent in a Gremlin hailed me. “Enjoying your column, Bob,” he said. Please remember that this man drives a Gremlin. Indicating the rain that continued to fall although we’d endured a week of it already, he said: “You know, I would rather see it snow.” My murder trial is set for July.
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