A
midnight tour of Iceland for us all
by
Robert LaFrance
I am writing this column on my
laptop in a small lounge in the small Pierpoint Hotel in the small city of
Reykjavik in the small country of Iceland. (The noise taking place in our room
makes it impossible for me to concentrate there.)
There are five couples registered in
this hotel – Flug and his present wife Magda, Gerry Plum and his brother Boyd,
the Perfessor and his wife, also named Magda, Jimmy Caine and his wife Susan,
and my wife Diane and I. We are having a time.
“My name is Darlene, Bob,” said my
long-suffering wife.
Going back a few days – about a week
really – I will try to explain why we are here. Last Tuesday Boyd Plum was
looking in an old trunk in his attic and found one hundred shares of Microsoft
stock bought in 1989. Neither he nor his brother remembered buying them, but
their names were on them. I looked it up and the shares would have cost $2100.
How could they forget? Of course they had inherited that money from their Uncle
Jed.
“I was going to throw them away
because I didn’t think they were still any good,” Boyd told ‘the gang’
afterward. “Then we took them in to the bank manager. She took one look and
turned a whiter shade of pale,” he said poetically. The manager bade them to
sit down.
“Do you know what you have here?”
she asked the boys (as we call them). Although they didn’t, they soon found
out. There are differing figures involved here, but the boys agreed that those
pieces of paper turned out to be worth somewhere in the vicinity of $762,110,
give or take a little pocket change.
So here we are. The Plum brothers,
generous to the end, paid for this whole trip, drinks and all. By the way, I am
done trying to type because we’re all going on a ‘nightclub tour’. I used to
call it ‘bar-hopping’ when I lived in Hamilton, Ontario. We’re going to a place
called Laugavegur that allegedly has over fifty nightclubs. I’ll report later
on how many of them we were able to visit.
**********************
I am writing this two days later and
I must report that we didn’t do well on our nightclub tour. Only 17 places. It
is embarrassing for a Maritimer. I’ll write while the rest of them are in
church. They certainly need it.
Here in our room where I am typing
away on my laptop there is a wonderful view of the street that goes by here and
stops abruptly at some hot geysers. Good thing I would say, because that water
is HOT. Here in Iceland they get almost all their electric power from hydro and
geothermal sources.
But that’s sounding too much like
classroom teaching. The point I was about to make is that this city of
Reykjavik contains what must be the record for distracted drivers. I couldn’t
concentrate on my writing because I kept seeing those drivers, many of them
behind the wheels of their cars.
The reason I say that ‘many’ of them
are behind the wheels of their cars is that in many other cases dogs, cats and
other domestic animals appeared to be driving. I never saw anything like it.
It’s possible in Perth-Andover, Plaster Rock or Grand Falls to see this, but
it’s pretty much the norm over here.
I made some notes. In the space of
fifteen minutes I counted 16 dogs driving – one of them a Great Dane – and 9
cases of cats up in the drivers’ faces. Once, when traffic had slowed to a
crawl, a middle-aged gent whipped out a cordless electric razor and started
shaving his own face, then shaved a bit from the sides of a poodle that was
perched on his lap. I hope neither of them had fleas.
*********************
Back in Canada after that
fascinating tour, I just got a phone call from Boyd Plum who said it had all
been a mistake and the bank had finally realized that those Microsoft stock
certificates had been photocopies of real ones and we each owed him $18,879.
The copies had been used in a play performed at Southern Victoria High School
gymnasium, as if it made a difference where the play had been put on.
It was shocking to say the least,
but as my wife Diane-
“That’s Darlene,” she reminded me.
As my wife Darlene and I were
sitting there half-comatose and wondering where we were going to get $18,879 as
well as $40 to buy that week’s groceries, the phone rang again. It was Gerry
Plum.
“Crisis over,” he said. “I found the
real stock certificates and it turns out there are 150 genuine shares of
Microsoft. They’re worth over a million dollars – WELL over a million dollars.
What say we all take another trip? How about Indonesia?”
With one voice, my wife Diane and I
roared: “NO! A thousand times no!”-end-
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