DIARY
Some summer questions and
comments
by
Robert LaFrance
A few weeks ago I was interviewing
someone and after I finished a query he/she said: “That’s an excellent
question.” I felt as if I’d been patted on the head. Trouble is, he or she
never did answer it. People rarely answer excellent questions.
Driving around Bristol two days ago,
I saw a very large man on a riding mower and wondered why, since he could stand
to lose some weight, he didn’t use a push mower. “Ask yourself that question,”
said my friend Flug, who had been reading over my shoulder. I resolved right
then and there that (1) I would go on a crash diet, and (2) I wouldn’t ever
again let Flug into my office when I was typing. One out of two ain’t bad.
‘Better late than never’ is one of those
expressions that sound reasonable until one examines them. My old friend The
Perfessor had gone all his 77 years without ever breaking a bone or having to
go to the hospital when he tripped over his dog Merton. “Better late than never
– BAH!” he waved his cast at me as we shared a large jug of lemonade at the
club. “I am thinking that I would have preferred NEVER.”
Another example I thought of involved a firing squad, if
it were about to deal with me out in the secret police target ground. I really
would have preferred ‘never’ because ‘late’ implies that they did get there
eventually.
We recently celebrated an
anniversary here in rural New Brunswick, in the hamlet of Kincardine. It was
exactly 19 years ago today that the federal crown corporation called Canada
Post took away our mailbox delivery and made us drive two kilometres every
weekday to pick up our junk mail. Their reason? Because it was too dangerous
for the letter carrier to stop along the road, although our letter carrier
didn’t see a problem, since he could pull his car completely off the road. This
is the same outfit that hired a group of Newfoundlanders to assign civic
numbers to our houses and who insisted that we lived in Lower Kintore and not
Kincardine at all. That took some doing to fix that.
My nephew Seymour turned green at a
recent conference of potato farmers. I don’t mean that he suddenly advocated
organic farming, tree hugging and going chemical-free forever (he sprays Lysol
on his cornflakes); I mean he spilled a whole litre of a green coloured energy
drink on the front of his white pants. Was he embarrassed? Oh yeah. I’ve done
similar things myself, but I am such a slob that I always assume I will spill
whatever I am holding and therefore carry spare clothing. The bottom line about
Seymour’s problem was that Jock McDrason, a Glascow Scot, lent Seymour his kilt
to wear for the remained of the meeting that he had to cover for his newspaper.
See-more indeed.
Visiting another friend, Gladwin, in
Morrell Siding one day last week, I was impressed at the restoration job he had
done on his 1950 Ford Meteor. Except for the colour, it was identical to the
car I drove around Tilley when I was 12 or 13. Glad had painted his car a pale
blue, and the one I used to drive was grey. It even smelled the same, a sort of
mustiness from spilled lemonade.
Glad even let me drive it up to
Portage and back on the old Trans Canada Highway. It purred right along, just
like the one I used to drive until I hit the hydro pole that had no business
being where it was that late at night, and on a turn.
It all got me thinking about
vehicles that we drive today. It is practically a catastrophe if one doesn’t
have air conditioning now, and heated seats are a must for the winter months
which, by the way, are much, much warmer than when I was a kid. I remember one
day in February 1967 when a bunch of us started out for Campbell River, BC; the
temperature in Tilley, NB, was –52ºF. (We hadn’t heard of the metric system.)
On our car today we have a backup
camera, sensors to alert the driver about EVERYTHING including a slack tire; we
have Bluetooth included, a cabin filter to help prevent halitosis I guess, and
any number of other arcane devices.
In spite of all that, when Glad and
I returned from Portage, I offered an even trade of our 2014 Toyota Corolla for
his 1950 Meteor. He looked at my registration and said he’d have to phone my
wife to sign it. You can guess how that turned out.-end-
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