My Pharmadoodle card (Dec 26)

NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY

Ho ho ho, bah humbug!

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            “Tis the season to be Polly!” shouted my old friend Paul LeGrand, nickname Polly, as he was doing some last-minute Christmas shopping in Perth-Andover’s dollar store.

            Polly was happy to be nearly finished his shopping for another year, except for one minor problem – it was Christmas Eve and he hadn’t bought anything yet. “I’ve almost started,” he said, as he perused the discount store. He had yet to buy a present for his wife Carnal (known as Carnie to her acquaintances, for obvious reasons) and he was getting slightly worried. The store would close in another ninety minutes.

            I had some shopping of my own to do, so it was an hour and a quarter before I got back that way. I had gone into Cannabis NB for a gift for my cousin Vinnie so sugarplums could dance in his head, and I had bought a new bible for Elf Landon, whose old St. James book had come to Canada in 1873, and I had made a few other purchases before I arrived at the dollar store. Polly’s Gremlin was still parked there.

            He was just coming out. “All finished!” he said triumphantly. “I finally got Carnie’s gift.” He reached into the small shopping bag and brought out a can opener, a key chain and two little bottles of chili powder. “Six dollars,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever spent that much.”

            How lucky a man he is, I thought to myself (which is my favourite way, as comedian Martin Mull used to say). I have to buy for my wife and a teeming mass of four more people. Of course my eldest daughter buys it all with my money but I write on the tags. There’s nothing like the Christmas spirit for me.

                                                ***************

            Received my December hydro bill yesterday and decided to mortgage our house and sell the dog.

            Geez, I thought heat pumps were supposed to pay for themselves in only a few years. At this rate they will pay for themselves by the turn of the decade, like 2030, but on the other hand global warming should make them obsolete anyway. Why should we need heat pumps when the average temperature in late January is expected to be 23ºC?

            Speaking of the costs of things, I started craving fried baloney early this morning and by 11:00 am it was an obsession crossed with a fervent desire.

            I passed the hamburger section, the salmon and shellfish section and the sausage section of the local grocery store to find myself at the baloney section. Only it wasn’t the baloney section any more, it was the BOLOGNA section. Also, there were two armed guards and a huge German shepherd dog standing there.

            Looking up over the dog’s shoulder, I could see why all those guards were needed. One roll of ‘bologna’ that weighed perhaps a kilogram (2.2 pounds) would cost me $14.99 if I were to buy it. I decided not to and moved along to the potato chip area. The chips were reasonable in price, and, looking back to where I had just visited, I was pleased to see that the German shepherd was tearing into a small roll of bologna while the armed guards were trying to beat him away with their Uzi machine gun butts.

            Walking outside with my paid-for groceries (no baloney), I noticed a Brinks armoured truck parked by the side entrance. Two Uzi-wielding guards were watching a third guard as he brought out a small box marked ‘Bologna’.

            It was all rather unsettling because I remember when I was a kid growing up in Tilley, baloney was considered the ‘other side of the tracks’ kind of meat. Most of the adults, who didn’t know much anyway, called it New Brunswick Steak.

            From the grocery store I drove over to the pharmacy, which used to be a drug store, to get some eggs that were on sale that day.

            That’s what I said, eggs for sale at a drugstore. Looking around, I noticed that the ‘pharmacy’ also had bread for sale, chain saws and I have a feeling that if I had looked around some more, I would have found they were selling chainsaws and real estate. It’s all very confusing for an old person.

            Arriving at the counter with my eggs, I was asked if I had a Trident card, a Freedom card or a Pharmadoodle card (I think that’s what she said) and if I wanted to pay by VISA, Mastercard, debit card, American Express, Canadian Express, Albanian Express or several others that I can’t remember and I said ‘cash, please’. There were three clerks there and two customers in line and they were all stunned into silence. I could hear someone say: “Should I call Security?”

            Finally, having paid for my eggs, I left the store, the pharmacy, and gratefully got into my 2001 Toyota Tercel for the 20-kilometre trip home. My wife met me at the door. “The frying pan is all ready for your baloney,” she said.

            I told her I was just going to my office and didn’t want to talk to anyone until January 2^nd. I didn’t mention that I had made another stop – at the place where they sell Scotch whisky. I will see you in the new year.
                                          -end-

How governments started (Dec 12/18)

NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY

Whatdya mean, CHILD-proof?

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            My friend and neighbour (who lives 15 kilometres away) Clyde Hainsworth hates to take pills, but on Monday he had some kind of a dog-ail, as my late father-in-law used to call illness, and went to see Dr. Feinstein.

            The physician prescribed something called Fender-bend – or at least that’s what Clyde called it – so Clyde picked some up at the drugstore; as soon as he got home the trouble started.

            I happened to be driving past his house when I heard a mighty boom that sounded as if it had come from his front lawn. Sure enough, there was Clyde out there in his slippers and not much else, and he carried what looked like a 12-gauge shotgun. A bit of smoke was rolling out from the gun’s barrel.

            He pointed to the ground where little – VERY little – pieces of plastic lay amid a scattering of white pills. “Well, I guess that child-proof pill bottle lived up to its name. I couldn’t get it open and I tried pliers, a hammer and finally Old Barleycorn here.” He patted the gun affectionately. He started picking the pills out of the debris and putting them in his pocket.

            It’s true isn’t it? Those child-proof bottles, easily opened by any child over the age of two, are almost impossible for us alleged adults to open. Whoever designed them was clearly a member of a South American death squad. Clyde and I talked for a while but not long since his ears were ringing and he couldn’t hear much, but I did have a suggestion for him.

            That suggestion was the same one I advise older people to do if they acquire a computer for the first time – get a child to show you how it operates. A month later I again stopped by Clyde’s house to ask how things were going. I was surprised to learn that he had taken my advice. His next pill order had shown up the day before and he had immediately called his grandson Curly, who popped open the container and put the pills in a butter dish. There’s always a way.

                                                ***********************

            “You talk a lot about “the good old days”, Charlotte Beamsley emailed me the other day. “I agree that things are better nowadays, Donald Trump notwithstanding, but we have lost a lot of words from are language and I don’t think they will ever be back.

            “When I went to school, the word ‘gay’ meant cheerful but today you could say it doesn’t always mean the same thing. Indeed,” she continued, “it can still mean cheerful, but there is another meaning built in.” I thought about the word ‘indeed’ that she had used and resolved to ask my thousands of friends how many times they had used it in the past six months. So the word ‘gay’ meaning happy and the word ‘indeed’ that is used to emphasize things have both changed from the good old days.

            Just for the record, I am not complaining about either change, but just pointing out that English continues to evolve.

            Take the phrase ‘rap music’ for an example. Since there is no such thing, the whole thing is weird. Rap is just a beat looking for some music, or you could say it is lyrics looking for some music, but unfortunately there ain’t no music involved.

            While I am on this rant, what’s up with television news readers saying that they had “referenced” something when all they mean is that they referred to it, and what happened to the word ‘affect’? These days events ‘impact’ things instead of affecting them. On the other hand, it would sound a little strange to refer to ‘an affected wisdom tooth’.

It’s all bewildering to me. That’s why I stay home and drink after looking  longingly at the Cannibis NB store as I drive by.

            Do you remember buying water in the good old days? Not. Remember what your dog and cat ate? Right, they ate what you ate, but somewhere along the way they became little icons and angels and could only exist on a diet of antibiotics and TLC.

                                                *****************

            LaFrance Dictionary…What is the difference between a bureaucrat and a manager?

            A bureaucrat is one whose entire life is centred around inconveniencing others to the point where those ‘others’ are driven around the bend, or a series of bends. A bureaucrat enjoys putting up roadblocks (I’m not talking about the Tobique Narrows Dam here) and when he or she can reduce grown men and women to tears of frustration that is a day well spent. At that point the bureaucrat ticks off another day on the way to its pension. Notice I did not say “well-earned” pension.

            A manager likes to have things work correctly and makes a real effort to bend the bureaucrats under him or her to actually accomplish something. When an immovable object meets an irresistible force what can be the only result? Government.
                                              -end-

Mary-ja-wanna now legal (Nov 28)

NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY

Legalizing marijuana – good idea?

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            As I write these immortal words, it’s nearing the end of November but I see a gaggle of Canada Geese who were supposed to have gone south a month ago. The funny thing is, they were heading north.

            It was then that I, at the age of seventy, finally realized that Nature’s creatures sometimes rebel against their own mother. The bigger the bird, the more likely he or she is to be a renegade.

            At this point I should tell a story about seeing an ostrich building a campfire in my apple orchard, but I will shock even myself and tell the truth.

            Walking down Manse Hill Road during one of our cold cold days, I heard a thump-thumping noise coming from the top of a hydro pole. I looked up to see a pileated woodpecker, one of those BIG ones who could haul farm equipment if they wanted to, and he (or she or LGBT) was a-pounding away with his beak on a fairly new hydro pole. If he expected to find bugs in there, he must have stopped at Cannabis NB on the way to Kincardine.

            Anyway, he was pounding away and wasn’t the least bit bothered by my walking by and then stopping to fumble for my alleged smartphone. He was even making progress on the pole. I had thought at first it was sort of a mating call he was making, but it wasn’t the right time of year. I recalled some days of my youth when I did similar things, but I certainly wouldn’t have climbed a hydro pole to make my call. Or would I?

                                                *****************

            Donald Trump, a combination of Machiavelli and Bozo the Clown, must be shaking in his boots right about now, because the Special Counsel’s Report of Russia’s helping him, Trump, get elected in 2016, is just about to drop with a huge splat right on the top of Trump’s head.

I am not sure if there is a less likeable person in the world but surely there must be? He seems to automatically do the wrong thing or fail to do the right thing, like not visiting American soldiers in war zones. He should realize that he would be perfectly safe there; the last thing other countries would want to do is get rid of someone who sides with dictators. I’m sure if he were asked what he thought about troop movements he would think the subject was what Americans call latrines.

            But enough about Donald Trump; as they say, he is his own worst enemy and will soon get taken down, somehow. It’s kind of scary though, that this weird guy can start a war anytime he wants to, maybe with us. At least Loring Air Force base, over near Caribou, Maine is no longer with us. Back when I was growing up in the 1950s, the B-52s from Loring used to fly right over our house in Tilley and scare everyone, every time. I often dashed to the ‘latrine’ when I thought one of those monsters was going to crash on our house. That would have been the biggest rebel bird of all.

                                                ********************

            I haven’t made a comprehensive study on this matter, but I must say that I am surprised that there is so much stovewood left in western New Brunswick – much of it even legally cut.

            Day after day pickup truck and trailer loads of stovewood go by our estate and it is amazing that there’s so much wood available for the cutting by people who wouldn’t know a chainsaw from a kiwi. It’s pretty scary in some cases.

            Two days ago the dog Minnie and I were walking around Bon Accord – where the public dump used to be – and we heard the sound of a chainsaw. Eddie Crenshaw and his Husqvarna were clear-cutting Bon Accord, one poplar at a time. While I would have expected him to be cutting maple or beech trees – since poplar is about like kissing your sister for ‘last’ – he was having a good time.

            That is, until he discovered that he had parked his Rav 4 and trailer just a mite too close to where he was cutting. Oh well, that’s why God made insurance.

                                                ******************

            Eddie never was the sharpest knife in the drawer, the biggest mouse in the barn, or the hardiest snow snake in the drift, but he does his best. His daughter Zelda started attending university in September and learned some new words that she proudly showed off to her parents at Thanksgiving dinner last month.

            She said that she had learned a lot about ‘geopolitics’ and both Eddie and Zelda’s mother Gwen were baffled at that one. She went on to say that Canada’s legalizing marijuana had been a good idea, an opinion that didn’t sit well with her parents. They both asked her – at the same time – if she had ever drunk any of that ‘mary-juana pot stuff’ and she said she hadn’t but her friends had.

            Then the conversation went on to politics and Zelda declared that she was ‘pragmatic’. Shocked, her parents said she had to have an abortion right away.
                                                    -end-

Egging on at Hallowe'en (Nov 14)

“If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute”

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            Some people actually like winter, and those people should be deported to Nunavut or the farthest reaches of the Northwest Territories. Perhaps Mars.

            As for me, my mind goes all kablooey when the snow and blustery weather starts, like yesterday. I got up about 8:00 am and went downstairs to find that the wind had blown open the door between the kitchen and the shed and it was about ninety below in there. It was a Monday of course.

            Then there was the matter of opening the can of dogfood. The dog Minnie’s food comes in one of those no-name ones, the paper on the can coloured yellow, and right beside it in the cupboard was a can the same size and colour - Pineapple tidbits.

            Do I need to say any more? I blame it on the impending winter. My brain had already started to shrink.

            It is said about the Maritimes, if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute. Forget that old saying. Winter is here, and waiting a minute ain’t going to help.

                                                *********************

            I thought I had heard every story there was having to do with Hallowe’en night but there was one I missed.

            The stories I was involved in usually had to do with throwing rotten tomatoes at my cousin’s car as he passed by our house on his way to church or somewhere equally GOOD, or maybe watching one of my criminal pals calling the police with a complaint about noise being made by some 89-year-old lady somewhere.

            The story I am about to tell you about occurred in the mid-1960s but I just heard it last week. A young chap (my age then but somehow younger now) from Aroostook was telling me about The Great Hallowe’en Egg Caper. The story goes to show just what kind of preparations some people were willing to make just for a prank.

            There are lots of stories about young scamps, so to speak, climbing up on top of the bridge from Perth to Andover (It became Perth-Andover in November 1966) and tossing eggs down onto the windshields of passing cars whose drivers and passengers were not pleased at the job they had to do when they got home. I never heard of one of these high-level hoodlums being caught, but if I had been in an egged car I would not have chased the egg pitchers around the scaffolding of that bridge. Concrete is hard on the head come October 31.

            To get to the story I just heard, my friend Steve (or so we’ll call him) said that he and his pal Owney (ditto) would go to Perth after dark three or four times in the days just before Hallowe’en, borrow a ladder from Charley Willett’s ESSO station next to the Bank of Montreal, and take up three or four dozen eggs each time to the roof of the bank, now called BMO.

            “We had a great time,” recalled Steve last week, “and we never did get caught. We egged a thousand cars in those three years or so. We egged police cars, threw eggs at dogs and cats who were so stupid they stopped to lick up the eggs, and we egged Father Ronny’s Jeep. He stopped right there – not a good move – and started swearing but he didn’t know who to swear at. So Heaven rained down a few more eggs on him. See you later.”

            That’s not the end of the story. A few minutes later retired police officer George Pattersine came out of the library. “I see you were talking to Steve and he was pointing to the roof of the bank. I’ll bet he was talking about throwing eggs from up there onto cars, people and animals.” I didn’t say anything. Discretion is my middle name, which sometimes confuses my relatives.

            “He thought we didn’t know anything about him and young Owney doing that,” George continued, “but we knew exactly who it was. Not at first, but the last time they did it. My constable, who later became a judge, figured it out that time and sneaked out and hid their ladder. It was cold that night too. They didn’t get down until Charlie Willett came to work the next morning.”

                                    *********************************

            Moving away from the subject of Hallowe’en for another year, several people have commented on my new hunter’s orange coat with the reflective white tape. I am not sure why they felt the need to comment on my personal attire, but there it is.

            A few days after my new coat arrived I was talking to my wife’s friend Mona who commented that, at last, someone could truthfully say that I am bright. I appreciated the thought that went into that remark.

            Another comment I appreciated was from a (former) friend of mine, who said I must have the only coat visible from the moon. One of the few man-or-woman-made objects like that, along with the Great Wall of China and Donald Trump’s mouth.
                                -end-

Gremlin snow tires (Oct 31)

Explaining ‘textual intercourse’

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            My youngest nephew Zack, just turned 12, came home from school one day when I happened to be at his house and told his mother Zelda that he had learned a new phrase in school that day.

            “Textual intercourse,” he said proudly.

            Zelda and Zack’s father Zeros Polanimus almost fell off their chairs, but I, proudly displaying my classical education, said: “It just means sending text messages or even writing to each other.”

            In other vital news from southern Victoria County, those folks who work at Lower Kilburn Garage thought they had seen everything until the Perfessor, my old friend who lives up the road, brought his Gremlin in to get the winter tires put on after the recent and unexpected late October snowstorm.

            “Good day to you all!” he said to old Ben Kilburn, the proprietor and his manly staff. “I’m all set for winter except that my tires aren’t quite up to snuff, so to speak.” Ed Greely looked at the car and then the tires and spoke the words “racing slicks”, which are of course almost smooth tires used in drag racing.

            “How long will it take?” asked the Perfessor and Ed replied that half an hour should do it, and then asked if the winter tires were in the Gremlin’s trunk because they weren’t visible in the back seat or on the roof.

            “Winter tires?” said the Perfessor in a baffled voice. “They’re down home in my shed.” It took Ben and Ed quite a while to explain that in order to put on the Gremlin’s winter tires they would need them to be in the actual garage, that is the garage where Ben and Ed work.

            To cut this story from long to quite long, I will summarize: The Perfessor drove home and got the four winter tires that turned out to be ones from his neighbour Stephen’s Dodge Ram and were a little large for the Gremlin. Then the Perfessor remembered some tires out behind his house and went to get them, but they were 14-inch tires and not the required 13-inch ones.

            Six hours later the Perfessor drove away smiling but Ben and Ed were quaking, shaking hulks, nerves shot. “I should have charged him $300, said Ben, “but I didn’t have the heart.”

            I forgot to mention that the Perfessor drove away in Ben’s 1999 Lumina and not his own Gremlin which had fallen into pieces when they jacked it up on the hoist.

                                                **********************

            Some more comments from my pocket notebook:

            Listening to a CBC Radio program on Sunday morning, I heard that the recent legalization of marijuana had given the town of Smith Falls, Ontario, new economic hope because their new pot store was expecting a profit of $2 million this year and had hired 24 workers. On the way to this information, the announcer referred to the place as “a sleepy little town” because its population was only 8800.

            Who decides if a town should be called ‘sleepy’? If I were a resident of Smith Falls I would bristle if someone called my community sleepy. Is it a function of population? As someone who has visited Perth-Andover, Plaster Rock and Aroostook – not to mention Ernfield, Saskatchewan, I can’t say that any one of them should be called sleepy. I lived in Hamilton five years – population 320,000 at that time – and quite often I could have called it sleepy while nearby Caledonia was a going concern.

            In other words, radio announcers, quit calling communities ‘sleepy’ until you’ve slept there a few times.

            Changing the subject slightly, I was thinking this morning as I got out some milk for my breakfast cereal that the manufacture of fridge magnets is a significant industry. On our old Kenmore are approximately 47 items held on by fridge magnets which must have cost at least a few pennies each.

            Suppose Canada has 19,000,000 households and each house or apartment has a fridge and each fridge has 47 magnets on it, how much would that amount to in dollars and cents?

            Being me, I couldn’t resist dragging out my calculator and figuring it out. Let me see…47 x 2 cents x 19,000,000. That total is $17,860,000. Imagine!

            Moving on to yet another subject – I have a short attention span – it has become clear to me over the years that I am weird, which, if you have money, is called ‘eccentric’. Not having any money, I’m weird. Not to be confused with ‘wired’ which uses the same letters.

            The best illustration of my weirdness can be found in my garage. (I won’t blame my wife for any of this.) We have a 2-bay garage where we actually park our vehicles when we’re both home. Hear that? We put our vehicles inside our garage and don’t use it for a storage shed while leaving the two cars outside in the weather. Weird.

            In a few days the Americans will be voting in their mid-term elections. Please, please let the Democrats win control of at least the house. I really want to find out what Donald Trump is hiding in his income tax returns.

                                       -end-

Women walking = rain (Oct 17)

The good old days when times were bad

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            How times have changed from ‘the good old days’!

            Imagine yourself walking through the woods in 1975, seeing a beautiful (but legal) mushroom and stopping to take a photo of it with your phone, then telephoning your spouse to ask when supper would be ready. Then you send her, him or it the photo you just took.

            (Note: I say ‘mile’ because kilometres and the metric system hadn’t been invented yet. That was accomplished in 1977 by a guy named Joe Celsius, out Minto way.)

            Today, in the year 2018, we probably wouldn’t have been walking through the woods anywhere near that mushroom in the first place, for fear of deer ticks and terrible beasts we had been warned about on Facebook. We now carry a smartphone and bear spray at all times. Danger lurks more than one hundred feet from the house.

            Tim Horton’s and other fast-food drive-thrus have been around a long time and I often think that people go through those more out of habit than for a logical reason. In Andover last week I was standing and observing the progress on the new pot building when a chap driving a 1989 Gremlin stopped and dove into a box of Tim-Bits after spilling coffee on himself. He seemed to be agitated.

            “You seem to be agitated,” I said.

            “You would be too if you took half an hour to go through a drive-thru that’s supposed to make things more convenient,” he retorted, hands shaking from apparent lack of sustenance. A couple more Tim-Bits in rapid succession and he seemed to be okay, or at least better.

            “Why didn’t you just go into the restaurant itself?” I asked, knowing it was a dumb question but feeling as if I should ask it. Anybody will tell you I am a curious person and, as the phrase from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ goes, getting curiouser and curiouser.

            “Listen pal,” he said as he paused for 1.5 seconds. “Did you ever get caught in a drive-thru line?” I had to admit that I had never been in such an entity or conundrum. “It’s like a giant vise, squeezing, squeezing the life out of you – all for a coffee and some little doughnuts.”

            At this point I edged away, and kept edging until I was standing in line at the grocery store. Of course my line made more sense; I was buying Twinkies and chocolate milk for a snack instead of caffeine and unhealthy doughnuts.

            Another difference between then and now is that people do so blasted much walking. It seems as if every day dozens of people invade the walking trails, either those inside arenas or outdoors, and you can’t discourage them. There are even people from  Tilley, the place where I was born and allegedly grew up, who go down to Perth-Andover or up to Plaster Rock and take advantage of the walking trails inside the River Valley Civic Centre or the TobiquePlex as if they don’t have roads in Tilley.

            My late grandfather, Muff LaFrance (1881-1976) never failed to comment when he saw women strolling down the road. “Women walking means it’s going to rain.” he would say – every time, and I would listen patiently every time because he gave me money for hauling his drinking water from the spring and I didn’t want this revenue stream (so to speak) to dry up.

            What if he were around today and saw all the women out walking? “Gonna be a monsoon I guess.”

            Still on the subject of how things have changed, I am always amazed to see someone who I know has good tap water in his or her house hauling out a bottle of commercially bottled water, which, it has been proven, is no better than tap water. What a bunch of great sales people it must have taken to persuade people of this.

            Another multibillion-dollar industry nowadays is the pet food one. I had no idea when I was a kid that we were abusing our dog Rover by giving him meat and bread scraps. What a con job by that gaggle of sales people!

                                                *****************

            I am not the first to say this, but around here during deer hunting season (deer, partridge and wood), it’s like a shooting gallery.

            Our estate is on Manse Hill, at the southern end of the Scotch (I like bourbon myself) Colony and we get the warlike explosions all day, and, if I am going to tell the complete truth, all night. Although, as they say on 1960s TV detective shows, it could be a car backfiring. Born in 1948, I have heard approximately six cars backfire in my life. The only thing close to that sound has been the Chili Night aftermath at the camp.

            The Colony is a busy spot during the fall of any year. Pickup trucks – with and without trailers – go by here heading toward Bon Accord a dozen at a time and come back laden with stovewood, moose and deer. I always hope they don’t get confused: “Martha, throw another moose roast into the furnace, willya?”
                               -end-

Making an Artesian well (Oct 3)

Dogs know what to do with polls

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            There’s no need of commenting further on the recent New Brunswick election result because it’s all been said and we’re no farther ahead than we were a minute after the polls closed. John Diefenbaker once said that dogs know what to do with polls (pee on them in spite of the different spelling) but humans don’t.

            Just one final comment on the election that has, more or less, resulted in a minority government, Vanessa Vander Valk, host of the CBC Radio show ‘Shift’, referred to it as a manure-tea government. I don’t know for sure if she said that deliberately.

            Changing the subject a bit, here are a couple of medical questions: How do you make an artesian well, and how do you make a Venetian blind? Somebody was talking about that yesterday as I was dozing in my easy chair. It reminded me of my youthful days living in Artesia, which is a small country just south of Kosovo, and also when I was making a living as a chauffeur in Venice, Italy. I don’t care to go there again. It’s hard work, poling those kayaks up and down the canals. There I go, talking about polls again.

            It’s that time of year again, fall; it’s named ‘fall’ because that’s what happens to my spirits every October. I remember doing a fist pump when the first robin appeared in April, but now a gaggle of Canada Geese just flew over as I was pruning some apple trees and when I saw them, I immediately walked into the house and quaffed a water glass filled with Teacher’s Highland Cream scotch whisky – or was it whiskey? It didn’t matter.

            When I went back outside, I noticed that the geese, rather than flying in their usual “V” formation, seemed to be making the shape of a human hand with middle finger upraised. “Same to you!” I shouted. I get a little rude in October.

            There sure is a lot of wildlife around here this time of year; the bears appreciate all the work I do in my orchard during the summer and they leave their calling cards all around my apple trees. Some of the calling cards are just barely short enough, as the Tilley expression goes, “for two big men to shake hands over”.

            A porcupine has been chewing away at the boards of my garage step where I usually keep a bag of salt just in case there is some ice each winter; it seems a bit late for this, but a fawn whose mummy I hope is around somewhere keeps wandering across the front lawn, and on different days I counted three kinds of woodpeckers down by the garage – downy, hairy and pileated. Another one I saw was a yellow-bellied sapsucker which I think is also a woodpecker.

            In addition to all that, the raccoons are also on the prowl, as are the skunks and the moose whose sexual desires make them fair game for the hunters who can also be called ‘wildlife’ if one can judge by the various coloured wineskins and other alcohol-filled containers the hunters lug around in case they get thirsty. Late last month there seemed to be more hunters than trees and they ‘harvested’ dozens of moose from around these parts.

            Many of the winter birds have shown up. I didn’t see a chickadee all summer and now I’m tripping over them. They represent the smaller examples of wildlife but the most annoying of all are the field mice that are now coming into our house as well into as many others. The cold weather does that, and thanks a lot, Mother Nature. In the past week we have spent $673.90 in mousetraps, mouse ‘bait’ (as if I wanted to fry them up like brook trout), and various kinds of sticky paper, ultrasonic light beams – anything except a cat. I am not a fan.

            All those who tend to get nervous when weird things happen had better sit down before I tell you what I am about to tell you. It was a shocker to me as well.

            I was visiting my daughter who lives in the Woodstock area when I chanced to stop at a little grocery store near her home. This is where the shocking thing happened. I went into the little store that had the obligatory hardwood floors that squeaked and groaned for anyone who walked on them and I walked around the whole place until I stopped at a spot that had shelves filled with things like hand soap and other kinds of cleansing materials.

            Hold on to your hat. I looked at the shampoos and, imagine my surprise, that little store had real shampoo. There was no ‘moisturizer’ in it, no lanolin, no dermatologist approved Aussie sensitive skin compound; it was just shampoo, period.

            Shaken and trembling, I asked the clerk if she had a case of that shampoo. She had two cases. I bought them and left her a $20 tip. I have been looking for shampoo since 1959.  

                                   -end-

Gluttony and gluten-free (Sept 19)

Election signs, gluttony and tail-gaters

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            Where the hell did the politicians or hopeful politicians find all that wood to make their election signs?

            The day before the New Brunswick election was officially called, somebody who seemed to know a lot was on television and complaining that our province was running out of wood; twenty-four hours later every lawn and spare space held a sign extolling the virtues of this man or that woman who was perfectly willing to solve all New Brunswick’s problems if only we would elect them to the legislature.

            “That (bunch of bums) have ruined our province,” an opposition candidate might say at the same time that the government candidate was saying “look at all we’ve done for you!” It’s enough to confuse us unsophisticated voters and make us wish the Rhinoceros Party were back. They were the ones who were going to repeal the Laws of Gravity.

            Some of their promises even made sense. Major lottery winners would receive, instead of money, a seat in the Senate; the party promised to encourage higher education by building taller schools; they suggested making the Trans Canada Highway one-way only, but didn’t say which way, and they had many more sensible things to say.

            But I really started out to say this when I got sidetracked onto the Rhinoceros Party: The signs we see on lawns are confusing me. Andrew Harvey and Margaret Johnson signs seem to be everywhere, but now and then I saw a sign referring to someone named Exit. That turned out to be a real estate company. It’s hard on my old head.

                                                *********************

            A little over six years ago I created a Facebook page called “Old Photos of Victoria County” – mostly of southern Victoria County – and one could say it has been fairly successful. It’s mostly about Perth-Andover and area, and although Perth-Andover’s population is fewer than 1800, as of yesterday I had 4310 members.

            It’s great to read about the old days, like when Perth businesses, including eleven grocery stores in 1932, occupied both sides of Main Street, and it’s also great to read a posting that is cheerful and optimistic and not those of “the town is dying” kind.

            A few days ago a charter member of the Facebook page, Eva McLaughlin, wrote this: “Perth-Andover is a happening place...look at the waterfront this year and the new pharmacies are wonderful, plus new construction in that area. I am within walking distance of most anything I need except the Post Office and I could and have actually walked over there as well. Things change, new growth, busy Market all summer. No, it is not the same town due to the ravages of the flooding but it is still a wonderful, caring community…Things never remain the same and neither do we...that is called life.”

            Kudos to Eva!

                                                ***********************

            In other news and comments from the area, I hereby point out that there is a lot of dieting going on, all over the place, and I have learned a few things since someone close to me was diagnosed last year with Lyme Disease. I did have an objection at first to some of the phrases being thrown around this house. Number one, I was not happy to be called a glutton. Then she said to me: “Bob, I am on a gluten free diet, and the fact that those two words look so much alike is a mere coincidence.” She said this as I was slurping down the last of my decidedly not gluten-free lasagna.

            On the related subject of tail-gaters, I have been negotiating with UNB in the matter of setting up a credit course on that subject: “The Psychology of Tailgating and Tail-gaters”. I don’t know why, but our 2017 Toyota Corolla seems to be a magnet for these folks. Starting across the Kilburn flat a few days ago, I was amazed to see, in my rear-view mirror, a late model Chevvy so close I couldn’t see the grill of her car. There was no reason to be so close; it is a wide road and there weren’t any other vehicles on that stretch. I was going the speed limit and possibly a bit over. I slowed down to encourage her to pass and she stayed right there. At the end of the flat I pulled off the pavement and she finally went by, then drove 75 km/hr the rest of the way to town. I didn’t tail-gate.

            While I am ranting about drivers, I might as well mention that the auto companies nowadays build their vehicles so that the drivers’ seat belts can be clicked on well before he or she pulls out into traffic, but how many times have we seen people pull out and not put on their seat belts until 300 metres down the road?
                                          -end-

Trump=Machiavelli+Bozo the Clown

For Blackfly Gazette September 5/18

NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY

There is no Niagara in Perth-Andover or Victoria County

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            The legend is that Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity in 1687 when he was sitting under a tree (one presumes an apple tree) when an apple fell down and bonked him on the noggin. “What made that apple fall?” he asked himself.

            I would have asked that myself, especially since the date was June 3^rd and no apple is ripe that early, certainly not in England. However, that’s the legend.

            I tell you that to tell you this: yesterday afternoon I was lying on my hammock with the top end of me under an Alexander apple tree, and anyone who knows anything about apple varieties knows that the Alexander apple is one of the biggest in the orchard. The only one bigger (that I know of) is Wolf River, but I wasn’t lying on my hammock under a Wolf River tree.

            I was reading a novel about a fellow named Raskolnikov who killed an old lady for her stash of money when one of those huge apples worked loose and dropped right onto my forehead, sending to another place – unconscious.

            When I regained consciousness, I could see Donald Trump standing on my garage and behind him I could see a tour bus filled with lawyers and prosecutors all bundling out and arguing about who got to prosecute him first and for what – there was such a choice.

            I passed out again and when I awoke it was after dark. No Donald Trump (a combination of Machiavelli and Bozo the Clown) and no tour bus. The lesson from all this? If you sit or lie under an apple tree in September, make sure it’s a crabapple tree.

                                                ******************

            One day in early August, when British Columbia and California were being incinerated by forest fires and southern Ontario (where I lived for half a decade back in the 1970s) was frying under Humidex readings of 40+ Celsius and our own New Brunswick was not far behind, the Perfessor stopped by to say hello and cadge a cold beer.

            “You won’t hear me complain about the New Brunswick weather,” he began, although I hadn’t mentioned the weather. “Nosiree,” he continued, “whenever I feel like cursing the hot weather I just think of the ‘F Word.’ Then he leaned back in the Adirondack chair that wasn’t really an Adirondack chair but more like a Upper Kintore creation (very comfortable) and took a healthy sip of his Railcar ale. “Don’t you want to know what the F-word is?” he asked.

            “I thought I already knew,” I answered. “It’s fuddle-duddle as Pierre Trudeau might say.”

            “Not at all young feller,” the Perfessor said and I appreciated that word ‘young’. “The “F” word is February. If I start complaining about the hot weather and humidity I think of the word ‘February’ and I quit complaining. Say, this is good ale. Got another?”

                                                *********************

            Another thing the old gent told me was a bit of humour from the club where he had been sitting and guzzling someone else’s ale the night before, at $3.50 a glass.

            The butt of this joke, so to speak, was Eldin Malloy, who, at age 53, is the father of three boys, the youngest being twelve and who hasn’t quite learned the ways of the world of things that worry middle-aged folks like his dad. The Perfessor and a couple of other denizens were sitting on the porch and sipping away when the boy, whose name is Eldin Junior, came bicycling by.

            He carried a note in the basket of the bicycle and held it up. “Hi dad! Some mail came for you.” Eldin Junior, who was getting to know more and more about geography – if not about pharmacy and spelling – went on to say: “Dad, do we get water from Ontario?”

            “Why, son, why do you ask that?”

            “Well, I just learned about Ontario rivers and Mum just told me to come down here QUICKLY and tell you that your order of Niagara was in. That’s what’s on the note anyway. She wants you to go home and she’d be waiting.” With that the young man cycled away toward his friend Beamer’s house.

            Eldin’s face was, by this time, the colour of a Redfree apple. Of course the Perfessor had to make a comment to make it turn a little more crimson. “Hey, Eldin. You don’t suppose that your son mistook the letter ‘V’ for the letter ‘N’ do you? Better head on home.”

                                                ******************

            One day last week I was sitting on one of those benches along the Cultural Walkway of Perth-Andover, on the Perth side, and decided to count the number of people who put on their seatbelts before they actually pulled out into traffic. The answer was three out of 28.

            So twenty-five of 28 drivers backed out into traffic before they had their seatbelts fastened. I tried to figure out why they did this, or didn’t do this. I never did come up with an answer. Perhaps they had their minds on a box of Niagara they were about to pick up at the pharmacy. Who knows?
                                      END-

Lady of a certain age

For Blackfly Gazette August 22/18

NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY

Estimating someone’s age? Not easy

                                    by Robert LaFrance

I can remember phone numbers from 1988 and licence plate numbers of half the county residents - but not their names. I am a math person. I know how I determine someone’s age, or at least make a good guess at it, but others go about it differently.

(Part of the following column is from one I wrote about fifteen years ago.)

            “How old is your brother?” someone may ask me. I would immediately say that he was born in 1939, so he will be 79 this year, the poor old codger. I, on the other hand, am just a kid (born in 1948) and have already made 70 this year. A non-math person would have to go over everyone’s ages to finally arrive at another person’s age, and would use the same method for everyone. It’s not scientific, but sometimes they arrive at the correct answer.

            Here is an example of that other method: two of my acquaintances, Cherily and Glenda, both ‘of a certain age’ as they say, had heard that their acquaintance Shirley Boomist (not her real name) had died and were trying to figure out how old she had been. It was as good as a circus. In a sad way of course. Condolences.

            “Well, Shirley must have been around cousin Janny’s age,” said Glenda, “because they were in school together, she told me once. The school had grades one to six, so they may not have been THAT close in age but they were within five years of each other – or am I thinking of her sister Jane?”

            “No, I think Jane came after her,” Cherily pointed out, “because remember when they had that birthday party for Jane she said that Shirley was her big sister, and I know Glenda is the same age as Harry Carmody. Remember him? He had that convertible Ford car back when we went to school and he wrecked it in Muniac when he swerved to miss that moose that turned into a mouse when he sobered up.”

            “Yeah, that was quite a car, but I liked our old Monarch. It would hold seven people you know, but of course that was in the days before seat belts.”

            This conversation reminded me of a certain Tilley area road that, legend has it, was designed by an engineer who was following a snake through the woods. “So,” I said, “what about Shirley’s birthday?”

            “She started getting her pension when I was working at May Green’s,” said Cherily, “so she’s not as old as the hills, but she was getting right up there.”

            “No spring chicken,” agreed Glenda. “She was long in the tooth, but not over the hill. I would say she was around seventy when my nephew William was born and he’s in grade ten – I think, but didn’t he skip that grade back in elementary school because he knew more than the teacher?”

            “That wouldn’t have been hard,” said Cherily. “I don’t know how she ever got a teacher’s licence. She was one of the Jansons family from New Denmark, or is it Crombie? Maybe Bairdsville or Lerwick. Anyway, back to Shirley’s age, I think she was in the same grade as Mary Ann Goodine, because they went to Caribou together to buy their graduation dresses…”

            “But wasn’t Shirley’s dress for her cousin Marita’s wedding and Mary Ann’s dress for her own graduation, except she didn’t pass her chemistry exam and had to wait a year to wear it?” said Glenda.

            “I think you’re right there. I remember she was some het up about that, because she was all set to marry Iggy Collard after the graduation and Iggy took up with that girl from Wapske and moved to Meech Lake. What a brood of kids they have now! He’s not getting any younger either, is he?”

            “No spring chicken. He’s getting there.”

            I still wanted to know Shirley’s age. I’m like that. “Any ideas yet?” I said.

            “Well, she was not what I would call ancient,” began Glenda, “but she was in the late winter of life…”

            “Her declining years,” added Cherily.

            Since I like knowing stuff and not guessing. I looked on the Internet and found the local funeral home. On their website was information on the funeral of a Shirley Bamford from Portage. I phoned Shirley Boomist at the number listed in the phone book. She was fine.

            “Fine except for when the weather is really muggy, like today,” she said. “Then I feel like I did after I fell over that culvert back…oh, let me see, I think it was the year your brother Lawrence wrecked your father’s Volkwaggen Deluxe. He was quite a good  driver usually, but that day he must have been distracted. So to speak.”
                                      END-

Gas 39.9 cents/gal in 1972

For Blackfly Gazette August 8/18

NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY

Ontario to Tilley for $1.50 (not counting beer)

                        by Robert LaFrance

            August already. I can’t believe it. There must be some mistake. Only last week I was looking out at my orchard and waiting for the snow to melt.

            Ah well, we must accept what we can’t change, and things are changing rapidly. For example, if you do text messaging you are aware that you no long have to use capital letters. Send a letter to Aunt Melanie over in Minto and you may tap out: “we plan to go to the lake this afternoon along with the putin family and some oligarchs from st petersburg. aunt melanie you would like vladimar and his pet mouse Donald j t.”

            Another thing that has changed greatly in the past decade or two is that most of us carry a water bottle around. Most of them are bought stores as if our tap water, though perfectly safe and healthy, is a combination of sulphuric acid and Strontium 90. This is an example of merchandising by some pretty brilliant folks. They have managed to persuade people that their ‘spring’ water is better than our well water that is clean and tasty and is even filtered by a $1100 UV device. Back in 1990 a water test revealed that there was “the potential of a trace” of fecal coliforms in it. That’s poop as we know.

            Then there is the booming pet food industry. Probably it was the bottled water sales people who first told the public that they mustn’t give table scraps to their dogs because scraps will give our canine friends Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or something worse – measles maybe? Also, dogs and cats should be kept inside or the world will end.

            Accordingly, because dogs and cats are now allowed to sleep on living room furniture, they tend to leave a certain aroma, but all is not lost. You just have to buy a can of Lysol and spray it everywhere to get rid of the pet smell. Nothing healthier than having every surface of one’s house covered in a chemical spray. Another commercial suggests that teenage boys may stink even worse than dogs and cats, so his room should also be soaked with Lysol to maintain that ‘fresh and clean smell’.

                                                *****************

            Indeed, most things have changed since I was a kid. If anyone had told me in 1961 that someday I would be able to carry my phone around in my pocket and even take photos with it I would have told them to lay off the Paarl brandy before lunch.

            My younger daughter recently moved back to Canada after almost two years in Asia, but while she was there I could take a photo with my mobile phone and send it to her mobile phone within a minute. Compare that to the mail delivery in the 1700s when my ancestors in what is now Quebec city, Province of Quebec, would send a letter back home to Paris, France, in the spring and if they got a reply at all it probably wouldn’t be until the fall. If Champlain had had email and could have received a warning that the English were coming in 1759, we would all be speaking French now. Oh, wait a minute, we are all speaking French aren’t we? Although my accent has been compared to aardvarks mating in a metal barrel.

                                                ********************

            The cost of gasoline today is horrendous, but we seem to be taking it in stride. Buying gas in spite of the high cost is similar to smokers’ continuing to buy tobacco products even though they are aware that smoking causes lung cancer and, as a double whammy, cigarettes cost a small (maybe not so small) fortune these days. When I quit smoking on February 10, 1973, I was paying about 60 cents for 25 cigarettes. Now that same number of smokes costs as much as $12 unless you come across a wrecked cigarette truck along Highway 105, just south of Riverbank, NB.

            Yesterday I gassed up our Corolla (I was aghast!) and had to mortgage our house just to half fill the tank. The gasoline cost $1.309 a litre. It doesn’t even help to change it to metric. If I had been buying by the gallon the price would have been four cents shy of $6.00 a gallon. Picture that.

            I lived in Ontario from 1967 to 1972 and in January of that year I sold my 1966 Falcon Futura sports (sporty?) car before I killed myself on the Queen E Highway between Burlington and Toronto. I remember the last time I filled that car with gas at a small gas station along Highway 20 near Stoney Creek, east of Hamilton. It cost 39.9 cents a gallon. Somebody has made a mighty profit since those heady days when one could drive from the Hamilton area to Tilley, NB, for a dollar and a half, not counting the beer one might buy on arrival in Tilley.
                                                       END