Keeping my eye
on what I am doing
by Robert LaFrance
I mowed lawns like a son-of-a-gun on
Saturday, June 8th, and then I headed for my orchard to mow the
grass there. “Shouldn’t take long,” I said. “It’s only three acres, otherwise
known as 1.25 hectares. Piece of cake, then I will start writing my June 12
column for the Blackfly Gazette. People have to be informed.”
Gee, I wish I had said these words
instead: “Go inside and write that column because if you don’t you will surely
get struck in the eye by the branch of a low-slung apple tree.”
Three hours later I was sitting in the
Emergency Room of Hotel Dieu Hospital in Perth-Andover and wishing again that I
hadn’t gotten struck in the corner of my eye (as if there were such a thing as
the corner of a sphere).
The genial MD got it all wrong though.
One third of my visible eye was red with blood and he went and called it
“subconjunctival hemorrhage” instead of “blood in your eye, soldier”.
In all seriousness (for a change) I
really appreciate the treatment and examination by the RN and the MD on duty.
That calmed me down right away and sometimes it takes a while to get me to
relax. It’s not fun to look in a mirror and see all that blood in one’s eye.
****************
To segue away from my appearing in
town with blood in my eye, a recent headline in my daily paper caught my eye
(both eyes really, including the eye later to gain fame by being whacked by an
apple tree branch) and it went like this: “All but one of the province’s 20
cannabis stores lost money last year”.
I grew up in the 1960s, and when I saw
last week’s headline I cast my mind back to those times when cannabis was
around but not quite legal. I knew several folks whose normal business models
included the sale of that weed. Here’s a daring statement: Not one of those
folks lost money unless it was because they had to undergo losses on their
motorcycle repairs. Their profit margins were healthy on the sale of cannabis.
If we examined why this occurred I
think we could soon figure out that the fact that cannabis was illegal back
then was the big deal. Today people like my Aunt Bellicose can walk into the
Cannabis NB store and walk out without being nabbed by les gendarmes.
Therefore contrary people like Aunty don’t use cannabis any more because the
thrill has gone out of it. Before last October and legalized cannabis, it
wasn’t unusual on a Saturday night in town to see Aunty meet Lefty over behind
one of the apartment buildings where they exchanged cash and cannabis.
******************
Every time I look at a water bottle or
a heat pump I get to thinking (if this can really be called thinking) about
things that didn’t even exist 25 or 30 years ago.
While I was waiting for a few minutes
(see above) in the hospital’s ER, I glanced around with my good eye as well as
my bad one, to see at least ten of those hand disinfectant devices on the
walls. I doubt if there were many of those hanging around even fifteen years
ago.
I mentioned heat pumps; now it seems
that 90% of the households have heat pumps that have replaced, in many cases,
wood burning stoves. We have two heat pumps and my back has thanked me ever
since we bought them. Previous to this innovation, I had to throw furnace wood
into the basement via a window slightly larger than a breadbox. Then I had the
fun of piling (or ‘stacking’ as they say on TV) up that wood in a basement
where I couldn’t stand upright. That was not fun.
Car seat warmers, now vital for our
nether regions when the temperature dips below reasonable, as well as backup
cameras, are now vital. I am of that certain age when cars – at least the ones
I could afford – had very little in the line of bells and whistles. At the age
of 71, I can still remember the days when cars didn’t come with signal lights.
Rain or shine, the driver had to stick his or her left arm out the window to
signal a turn. That meant that there were four possibilities for error: the
driver signaled left but turned right, or the driver behind thought he
was turning left but he was turning right. I am not much of a cook, but that
was a recipe for disaster.
A final note on this modern stuff:
Some civil servant in the New Brunswick government looked at all the figures,
checked this and that in early 2018, and estimated that New Brunswickers would
buy one thousand electric cars in the next year. Here’s another headline
in my daily paper last week: “Only 200 electric cars sold in NB last year –
government expected 1000”.
So I checked Google to see how much an
electric car costs. A certain model of KIA listed for $45,000 plus tax. It gave
me pause to ask one question: Exactly how much do civil servants make anyway,
if they think a thousand people would pay that much for a KIA electric car?
-end-
