DIARY
Hummingbirds
calm down!
by
Robert LaFrance
This afternoon (I’m writing in the
evening) I sat on a lawn chair on our porch and watched two hummingbirds fight
it out over a bit of sugared water and thought about all the wars, battles,
skirmishes and just plain bloodbaths that are occurring in the world as I sat
there.
Did you ever watch a pair of hummingbirds fighting?
One will go to the feeder and try to get a drink to give himself or herself
enough energy to keep going, and before the sipping is finished the other bird
will come along and attack.
It makes no sense – there’s lots of nectar for both
– but they do it anyway, just like Sudan and South Sudan. If Greenland and
Tasmania could find some way to go to war with each other they would. Remember
the Falkland Islands war in the 1980s?
On to a less violent subject,
psychology. There is psychology in every aspect of our lives, even in grocery
stores, and all the time I was thinking they just sold food. Two days ago I was
near a certain store (not in Kincardine) at lunchtime and decided I wanted a
snack. I bought a little package called Lunch-Mate Stackers, made by
Schneiders, and figured that would do the trick for now. There were little
round crackers, slices of alleged cheese, slices of ham and a very small
Kit-Kat chocolate bar. Imagine my shock when I found there were 8 crackers, 8
pieces of alleged cheese, but only seven slices of ham.
A lot of people reading this column
probably think I’m going to complain, send a message to Schneider’s, sass the
store manager, call in the riot police, etc. but I am not going to do any of
that. In fact, I am rather pleased about the missing piece of ham. It gives me
hope that somewhere in the world somebody else can make a mistake in spite of
all the ‘smart’ technology that permeates our existence.
Here in the neighbourhood where Flug
and I have families and house pets, there is not much strife, except
occasionally in the early morning hours in the club where we have canasta and
auction 45 tournaments and allow lemonade to be served. It’s a weird community,
half sane and you can guess the other half.
One of the residents (he lives just
down the road, beyond the big pine tree) resides a gent who is a prime example
of the other half, the non-sane side (in my opinion). Fredson Blark is an
antiques nut.
Born in the late 1960s, he’s not an antique himself,
but I really think he sat too long in the sun in his younger years spent in
Burma, what is now called Myanmar, full name Republic of the
Union of Myanmar. He arrived here
in the benighted Scotch Colony in the 1990 and promptly started collecting
antiques, marrying 71-year-old Martha Grundge. (She calls HERSELF an antique,
so don’t get mad at me.)
Within two years, he had their
little cottage FULL of antiques. He would go to yard sales as far away as
Arvida, Province of Quebec, and Halifax. Last week I decided to ask if I could
visit and see his collection and it was true, the place was FULL of antiques
(in case I hadn’t made that plain), but I didn’t realize just how full until I
got ‘caught short’ as Aunt Ella used to say and asked to use the bathroom. I’m
not kidding, he had no plumbing in the house. He directed me to his ‘washroom’,
which turned out to be an outhouse, but with a difference. It was inside the
house. How does he empty that? I soon decided I was in the company of a person
who might be violent. I fled.
Speaking of nut cases, yesterday
Flug came over and had a lemonade with me. When the subject changed to crabs, a
topic I can take or leave, preferably leave, I was about to leave but
remembered it was my house. He wanted me to go with him to Aleck Gannon’s and see Aleck’s new crabs. It
turned out that Alex had recently bought three crabapple trees, nothing
serious. You never know about Flug – or Aleck for that matter.
A lot of Americans are talking now
about impeachment of their beloved president, and others are talking as if that
gentleman may just decide to resign because he isn’t having any fun, but they
had better think twice about what’s waiting in the wings.
Mike Pence is their vice-president,
and if people are uncomfortable with Donald Trump, they ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Pence would not only chop their health care and smile while he’s doing it, but
he would probably ban income taxes on the rich – he’s a bit right-wing like
that.-end-
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