NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY
Sleeping with a certain farm animal
by Robert LaFrance
No matter
what you or I ever thought of Pierre Trudeau, the late Prime Minister of
Canada, everyone has to admit he was rather intelligent and at times even
brilliant. One of the most famous quotes in Canadian modern history occurred on
March 25, 1969, when he was addressing the Washington Press Club at their
annual dinner and bloodbath.
Referring
to the huge American economy compared to the rather smaller Canadian one, he
said: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No
matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one
is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
These days,
times have changed a bit, but we are still affected by each twitch and grunt
from south of the 49th parallel. One thing has changed: although
Canada is still a mouse – economically but certainly not culturally – the beast
to the south of us has changed from being an elephant to another farm animal.
Not to be too rude, but since January 2017 I would say our Canadian mouse now
has to sleep next to a horse’s ass.
*****************
Still on
the edge of the same subject – trash – I must say that the new ‘Region wide
curbside recycling’ program the New Brunswick government has produced seems a
little – shall we say? – illogical.
A quick
visual scan - I think that means I looked at it - told me that things that we
have been recycling for years can not be put into the official recycling barrel
that we’re all supposed to get before June 30.
Plastics
#3, #6 and #7 are no longer accepted and nothing that hasn’t been cleaned (like
dirty pizza boxes) will be accepted. No more putting plastic shopping bags into
the recycling and no film plastics, by which I guess they mean Saran Wrap and
its friends.
I put quite
a bit of thought into this, so much that my head is now hurting, and I have
come to this conclusion: we will now be able to recycle about one-third of the
volume that we recycled before. Hey, that’s real progress. Within a few more
years, if things keep heading in the same direction, we will just put
everything we want to throw away into the trash – partying like it’s 1985.
Still on
the subject of roadside trash collection, we find that the company that has
been collecting our trash (almost) every Wednesday morning has gone bankrupt or
has met with some other fate and has been replaced by another company.
It was
probably a seamless handover in most places, but Murphy’s Law prevailed for
good old Bob LaFrance. When I awoke at the crack of noon that day, my 45-gallon
steel barrel was Missing In Action. The only thing I could think of was that
the new trash-sters, or garbologists as Jon Gee used to say, thinking I was throwing
out my disreputable barrel, had tossed it into their truck and crushed it.
Oh I’m not
mad, or at least not angry mad, because that old metal barrel didn’t even have
a bottom. The fact that it was metal kept the scavengers away.
Bottom
line: I don’t have a metal trash barrel now and the raccoons, skunks, aardvarks
and unicorns are having a great time devouring all those delicious food
wrappers even though they have been washed. This morning I fried half a dozen
eggs and a pound of bacon to keep the raccoons occupied, but those animals
walked right by the plate I had left on the garage floor and headed straight
for my trash.
******************
I used to
hunt, so I don’t have any philosophical objection, but it was quite startling
last week when I heard that some bear hunters had killed a large male black
bear who was travelling in the Lower Kintore area.
A few days after they killed that
bear, some kids from down the road in Kincardine here reported that during a
bike trip they saw a mother bear with three cubs. Not something I want to see
when I’m fishing in Bubie Brook near Burns Hall. I’d say those kids are lucky
they didn’t surprise those bears.
The bear shooting reminded me of
when I was living in Birch Ridge and working in Perth-Andover as editor of the
Victoria County Record. I came home one day about 4:30 pm and there in my
garden, fifty feet from my porch, was or were the guts of a ‘harvested’ deer.
It wasn’t an appetizing sight. I decided to have supper at Finnamores’ takeout.
-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment