DIARY
Those ‘good old days’ were
better only in some ways
by
Robert LaFrance
When I began my short-lived
university career (September 1966- February 1967) in Fredericton it was a major
project to talk to my own father.
He lived in Tilley, a 2-hour drive (at
least) from UNB and he might as well not have had a phone because his was ‘a
party line’. Eight households on the one phone line so if I ever phoned home,
everybody on that line would be hearing what I was calling about. Usually it
was to find out of he needed any money that I could send him right away.
Wait…maybe it was the other way
around in reverse, as the comedian says.
As an old person (I hope to make 70
next May) I have seen at least some of the ‘good old days’ and some of them
weren’t so good. However, although there were not the miracles of today, at
least we knew what was going on, and a millionaire was a very rich person. In
the year 2017 one doesn’t get called rich until he or she is ‘worth’ at least
$100 billion.
Henry David Thoreau, one of my
favourite authors, would have been aghast at the way things are done today
compared to the 1840s when he built his cabin near Walden Pond. He said a pair
of pants didn’t get comfortable until he had worn then them at least 25 times.
Not all in a row of course; he did have friends and didn’t want to offend them.
I have often wondered if he were
from Victoria County, New Brunswick. He wrote about comfortable clothes and
said that kings, from youth to death, never knew the feeling of wearing a
good-fitting suit because they only wore each suit once. My friend Flug
(Richard LaFrance, no relation) must be especially comfortable because he has
been known to wear a shirt for two weeks.
Probably what astonishes me most
about modern times is how expensive everything is. My first car, a 1961 Ford
Falcon that I bought in Hamilton, Ontario in the late 1960s, cost me $200. That
wouldn’t buy two tires for my 2014 Toyota Corolla. My old friend Llewelyn
bought a brand new Chevrolet Impala in 1972 for the grand total of $3200. A
much-used 2005 Buick Century would go for that now.
And yet we don’t complain. We just
go on, day after day, knowing that we can’t afford whatever it is being sold on
that particular day. I knew a guy who bought a $6000 Rolex watch that he has to
take in for servicing every two years at a cost of $600 each time. I wear a $19
Timex and figured I had splurged when I bought that.
When I was in my teens and the
government was paying a million dollars a mile to build the Trans Canada
Highway through Madawaska, Victoria and Carleton Counties, we ordinary citizens
were amazed. At that time a Vincent van Gogh painting sold for $800,000. Now
the government can’t seem to even fix potholes and a van Gogh painting went
last week for $119 million.
Has anything improved enough to
justify the enormous cost of everything? Vincent vG is still dead and not
making much money on the increased ‘value’ of his paintings, and roads are
still roads. What seems to have changed is the people buying paintings and
using the roads. Driving my Toyota around town and stopping at intersections, I
am always interested in the fact that at each stop, there is a million dollars
worth of hardware sitting there and idling within fifty metres of me.
The cost of insurance, bank fees, vehicles
and even coffee, compared to 1980 or 1995, has taken what experts are fond of
calling ‘a quantum leap’ whose meaning I have yet to figure out. I think it
means a lot.
Possibly the point of this column is
that we don’t need $6000 Rolex watches and we don’t need $64,000 pickup trips
when we are not hauling freight between Grand Falls and Fredericton and don’t
need to know the Rolex time. My father bought a sturdy 1952 International truck
for hailing gravel and then lost his job working for the government because he
was on the wrong side of politics, and that truck – I swear – was no bigger
that the 2016 Dodge truck Flug’s nephew Glen bought last week. The heaviest
thing Glen will ever carry on that truck will be a case of Railcar Brewing
Company craft beer or a gallon of chain oil sitting on four garbage bags to
avoid spillage of the oil. Mustn’t get the truck dirty.
-end-
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