An
elastic for Christmas
by
Robert LaFrance
In last week’s column I ranted about
whatever bad points I could think of about Christmas. I was sure there weren’t
any good points, but, because I was in a rotten mood, I took a drive up around
Kilburn and its suburbs. There I saw that Christmas had its good points after
all.
At the upper end of Kilburn was the
cheerfully decorated house of Elizabeth and Leroy Davenport and I couldn’t help
but smile at all the coloured lights and how they obviously do not say “Bah
humbug!” when December comes along. It lifted my gloomy mood unto the hills (of
Kincardine) and flang (flung?) it into the poplar woods.
Last evening my wife and I drove by
there and she uttered a sexist remark. “Elizabeth sure goes all out on Christmas
decorating, doesn’t she? Beautiful!” She just assumed that it must have been a
woman who did all that and I resent it very much, as would Leroy if he had
heard it. He has by now. Last year I took a big hand in decorating around our
house. I plugged in a set of outdoor Christmas lights, if I recall.
Looking in the notebook that I
always carry around in my shirt pocket, I didn’t find much about Christmas. It
took me a while to figure out this shorthand: “Henbutt”. At first I asked
myself now what could that mean? It came to me after a while. I was admiring
the courage – or total lack of stomach queasy-ism of the first person to eat
the egg of a hen or other bird. Consider where it comes out. The same with the
first person to try cow’s milk.
Speaking of doing things for the
first time, I recently read in a novel that the ancient Greeks had been the
ones who invented curiosity. Can that be true? Of course I couldn’t let that go
by without doing my investigative reporter gig. I went to Mister Know-It-All (Google)
and it turns out that the Greeks did invent curiosity. Before the Greeks showed
up in Athens and its environs, other civilizations just tended to accept the
way things were. Go ahead, admit it - before I mentioned this just now, you
didn’t think about it either. You weren’t a bit curious, were you?
Like just about everybody I know,
yours truly is almost always confused about what foods are good for me and
don’t cause all kinds of dread diseases. Did that poutine I just finished have
Omega 3, Probiotics, gluten, fibre, protein or any of the 4000 things that will
either cause my ears to fall off or make me well? Or was it a sure cure as
envisioned by the Internet site known as FoodSucker.com? When I was a kid going
to a one-room school in Tilley the teacher made us eat cod liver oil tablets
every day. She said it would make us good looking. We all objected, but
apparently it worked, at least in my case.
When my kids were just that, kids, I
used to enjoy telling them bedtime stories. The stories always featured the
same characters, two girls - coincidentally the same ages as my daughters – and
a large rabbit who wore yellow sneakers and caused trouble in my orchard. Later
on a character was Claxton, a rough-voiced spider who only had one sentence in his
verbal repertoire: “Git outta here!” The reason I mention this is that
yesterday when I was burning a pile of brush in my orchard I came across a very
old and tattered yellow sneaker. Just one. I wonder if those stories I thought
I had made up could all have been true? I told my elder daughter about this
when she called last evening and she said: “Better sit down, Papa and relax for
a while. And no more brandy in your gingerbread cookies.”
Still on that subject of bedtime
stories, one of my stories was about my own childhood and was perfectly true –
as true as any of my stories ever are. When I was about nine, I was hoping and
praying, even being a well-behaved boy (now you know it’s a lie) for a croquet
set, but we were desperately poor, so poor we couldn’t afford to give our
chauffeur a holiday bonus. My story to the girls was that my entire haul that
Christmas was an elastic, one of those that wrapped up a bundle of toothpicks
or something. That was it. The girls laughed so hard they both fell out of bed.
I should mention that
when our son came along he didn’t enjoy my stories and I’ve always hated him
for that. Not much of a kid, but anyway, I’ll always remember the girls falling
out of bed because their father had only received an elastic for Christmas.-end-
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