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?”
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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-