DIARY
“If this guy tries to
predict the weather, call the cops!”
by
Robert LaFrance
I receive many (one a month) letters
from readers who are either irate about something I’ve written or who say they
will defend to the death or thereabouts my right to say it. Others point out
things that I never would have thought of.
Rolling pins, for example. A woman
in Four Falls wrote to me about the rolling pins that I often mention, since my
wife often whacks me upside the head with one. “Do you realize that most housewives
today wouldn’t know a rolling pin from a pair of cowboy boots?” wrote Mrs. Emma
Doolittle. “Yet you prattle on about your wife and her rolling pin.
“You see, housewives don’t cook from
scratch any more,” the letter continued. “The most ambitious ones tear open a
microwaveable package and blast it with radio waves. To most people a stove
oven is something to store their pots and pans in, from the old days of their
grandmas.”
First of all, she is the one who
used the word ‘housewife’, a noun I would not dare to try around here. I do
agree with Mrs. Doolittle though: neither men nor women these days cook from
scratch and in this household we rarely cook any other way.
Still on that subject, a few weeks
ago I prevented a murder. A young woman stopped by here around supper time so
my wife invited her to stay for a meal. “Where did you buy this fish chowder?”
she asked, and narrowly escaped sudden injury. That wasn’t close enough I
guess; when the cake arrived she asked my wife where she bought the cake mix
and was the frosting from a can?
It reminded me of the time, almost
two months after my wife had borne our second child. In a store uptown, the
clerk asked her when the baby was due. I took one look at how things were going
and headed for the door. They say that ‘discretion is the better part of
valour’ and while I don’t have either one, I know when to skedaddle.
***********************
There was a time when I thought I
was quite bright, probably around the age of seven, but I have since been informed
many times that such is not the case.
The most notable example of this
occurred when one of my children attended his first day of kindergarten. Up to
that point I was the fountain of knowledge. I was the go-to person (as they
say) for any information required by anybody here, especially the youngest, who
was about to become a scholar.
I went down to the mailbox (we had
one then) to meet his schoolbus, and, incidentally, to meet him, and he was
beaming. “Papa, you remember how you said we should only fish when the sky was
overcast because the fish could see us? Well, Mrs. Grumpski says that’s
nonsense. And also…”
He listed another five items I had
taught him, and explained that I had been wrong on all of them. I expected he
would also tell me that Mrs. Grumpski preferred cake mixes to baking from
scratch, but even that notable lady hadn’t dared go that far. Rolling pins and
kindergarten teachers don’t go together any better than rolling pins and
newspaper columnists.
On the subject of the weather forecasts
that are available to us here in Victoria County, NB, many people would say we
are lucky because we live close to the U.S. border and so are blessed with all
their information as well as that from Environment Canada and The Weather
Channel.
However, it is a mixed blessing, as
the old phrase goes, the problem being that with about four conflicting
forecasts to choose from, we have an information overload, to use yet another
old phrase.
I tend to choose the forecast from
my former employer, Environment Canada, for whom I toiled in the 1970s, but I
also watch the Presque Isle, Maine, WAGM-TV forecast of meteorologist Ted
Shapiro, who is only occasionly right in spite of the fact that if it weren’t
for a line of hills at the border, I could see Presque Isle. Predicting the
weather for Canada Day, Shapiro was confident that there would be no rain from
dawn until 10:00 pm. It rained all day in Perth-Andover, yet in River de Chute,
at the border of Carleton County, it was sunny for several hours, at least at
JP’s Restaurant, as a friend told me.
Amid all this complaining about
weather forecasts, I should mention that in 1976 I was a television weather
forecaster, probably the most incompetent one ever. Relieving vacationing
meteorologists at stations along the Mackenzie River, I found myself in Inuvit,
NWT, where the meteorologist had just been flown out for an emergency
appendectomy. No more needs to be said, except that after my week there the
department ran TV ads for a month: “If this guy tries to predict the weather,
call the RCMP”.-end-
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