NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY
Can you really call that a beard?
by Robert LaFrance
The
Perfessor and were I sitting in the sunshine on the front porch and looking
down at two buck deer eating apples. All of a sudden one of the deer walked
head-first into a big Golden Delicious apple tree and fell right over, just as
the other buck got too close to the edge of the front lawn and fell
‘ass-over-teakettle’ as Aunt Ella used to say, into the ditch and flailed
around there.
“Fermented
apples,” commented the Perfessor as he took another sip of his fermented
potatoes, otherwise known as vodka. “You see that every spring.” I couldn’t
help but agree with that because I’ve been living here since 1984 and have seen
my share – more than my share – of drunken deer. Not to mention drunken
Perfessors.
“It won’t
be long before we start seeing the summer birds arrive,” he continued. “A
fellow in Hillandale, I believe his name is Earlon something or other, saw
several robins on April 10th. I myself saw a Vell-crow yesterday
evening and just before that a pork hawk flew over my house.”
After
almost forty years as a journalist before being told I was no longer vital to
the Irving empire, I thought I had heard them all, but I had thought a pork
hock (spelling) was meat and Velcro was something that sticks to itself and
nothing else, like Donald Trump.
******************
As one who
has sported a beard since the 1970s, when the hippie era was winding down, I
object strongly to the ‘beards’ one sees today on television.
These are
called designer beards. Sometime after the latest turn of the century (Jan. 1,
2001) somebody in Paris, London, New York or possibly Tilley decided that the
height of fashion for males was to appear in public sporting a 2-day growth of
beard. When I was a younger gaffer anyone looking like that would simply be
called scruffy and unshaven. A bum.
Probably
the last straw was last evening when I was watching a show called
something-or-other (they all seem to be the same) and the female star’s boyfriend
appeared on the screen. He was tall and dark haired, wearing a designer beard.
A few minutes later the star’s brother showed up. He was tall and dark haired,
wearing a designer beard. You get the picture, so to speak.
In the next
ten minutes three other men entered the story and guess what? They were tall
and dark haired, wearing designer beards. I really think that TV casting
directors and others need to take some sort of course and learn that not every
male in Christendom needs to look like that.
Professional
sports are having a similar problem, except it’s the opposite one. Every hockey
player in North America is now wearing a full beard. Perhaps it’s a safety
thing. If the player gets hit on the chin with a stick or a puck it won’t hurt
as much as it would if the player had one of those designer beards.
******************
I often
rail about the plethora of electronic instruments that now rules all our lives
and I think I should relay a comment my friend the Perfessor uttered this
morning after he spent fifteen minutes trying to get his car out of ‘park’. It
got so exasperating that he actually cursed (“darned blasted thing!”) and
walked almost half a kilometre over to my house to see if I, against all odds,
might be able to help.
It did
happen that I knew the way to get him out of his conundrum. You have to put
your foot on the brake before you can take the car out of ‘park’. The perfessor
had a comment about that. (I guess anybody called a perfessor should have at
least one comment ready to go.)
“One of
these days they’re going to make electronic flush toilets and we’re all going
to have to put in a password and then tell the flush if we’re about to do
Number One or Number Two,” he seethed.
On to
another annoying feature of television of which I am soon going to have to
start watching less of, if that is a real sentence. A show of hands: Who among
us is sick and tired of hearing the phrase ‘Game of Thrones’?
I don’t
watch that show, if that’s what it is, and have no intention of ever watching
it unless someone holds a Uzi machine gun to my left ear. The same with ‘Harry
Potter’, ‘Star Wars VIII’, Rocky XXX or any of those repeat shows. Can’t they
think of any other names for their movies? And then there are people like
Justin Bieber. I have never heard a song by that guy and don’t feel as
if I’ve unduly suffered. Perhaps he’s a computerized meme creation who only
exists digitally.
“I hate the
thought of getting old,” commented my cousin Elbow yesterday afternoon.
“Forgetting things, forgetting people, forgetting how to…”
“Shut up,”
my friend Glennard said politely. “You are talking like an Indonesian starfish
that has been run over by a tractor. It’s great getting old. You can sit down
and watch a TV show you just saw a month ago and think it’s brand new, you can
read a book for the fifth time and think isn’t that great, Agatha Christie just
finished writing a new novel, and you get in bed with a different woman every
night even though you’ve been married to the same one for sixty years.” A bit
sexist there, but you get the point.
An
Indonesian starfish?
-END-
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