NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY
Always follow these two rules of life
by Robert LaFrance
There was
only one guy I would listen to when I was a teenager and that was my
grandfather Nelson (Muff) LaFrance (1881-1976) of Tilley.
My Aunt
Ella would tell me that fried eggs were no good for me and I would add two more
to the frying pan; my brother Lawrence (once the best guitar player in New
Brunswick and now living chord-less in a nursing home) would tell me I should
play A Minor as I accompanied at a certain
spot in a fiddle tune and I would play C Sharp even louder than I had been; my
school bus driver Byron Paris would tell me to go sit down and I would stand on
my tiptoes, but when Grampy suggested something I would say “Yessir!”
He had two
major themes in his life – to try and exist on an old age pension of $28 a
month, and to try and get along with others. While lots of other people had
themes, he actually followed his.
As to the
first one, he had an iron-clad rule that made certain that $28 a month would
keep him and his dog Bill in style: never, NEVER go into a grocery store and
shop while you’re hungry. Go in when your stomach is bulging from a recent
meal and you wouldn’t be able to tamp down a speck of icing sugar.
“Bread? No
need to have bread until Friday. Sugar? I’m sweet enough – too sweet. Milk? I
will venture down to Goodines’ dairy farm just as Donnie is starting to milk
his Jerseys.” I always wondered why Donnie Goodine never questioned why Grampy
happened to arrive then every afternoon and with a small tin cup.
Before you
ask, and not meaning any slander toward our friends over there, Grampy did not
have one drop of Scottish DNA.
Now for the
second of his major life rules: ‘If you see a chance to keep your mouth
shut, take it.’
I don’t
think I have ever met anyone who was better at keeping his mouth shut than
Grampy. Tell him a secret and it was in concrete, never to emerge again from
his mouth. So, if he were around today, and an acquaintance passed on to him a
piece of juicy gossip, the man or woman mentioned in the story would not be
likely to hear all about it at Tim’s the next morning.
Lucky for
me, and believe it or not, I have inherited Grampy’s attitude about keeping
confidential information just that. In three and a half decades as a newspaper
reporter, editor, columnist and radio reporter, I can safely say I never
betrayed a confidence. On the other hand, maybe it’s just that I am so old I
can’t remember anybody’s secrets anyway.
*******************
For a while
there last week, I thought bears were stupid, eating the sour cranberries and
leaving the tasty apples on the ground, but they quickly demonstrated which of
us was a little short in the cranial area.
(In case
there’s any doubt, I was the loser in that IQ encounter.)
I looked
out the kitchen window to see two deer eating apples off the orchard floor. I
think they (the apples not the deer) were Empires, one of my later varieties.
Or they could have been Colletts, a sweet variety.
There had
already been a couple of frosts, but apples can take that as long as the Polar
Vortex hasn’t arrived for the winter. Meanwhile, ten metres away, about a dozen
highbush cranberry bushes were groaning under the weight of a thousand red
berries and the deer were ignoring the whole thing.
But the
bears weren’t. A mother bear and two cubs were chowing down on the cranberries,
and continued chowing down for at least twenty minutes until they saw my face
in the window. By this time the deer departed, so to speak, and the bears
started in the direction of the woods. One of the cubs immediately ran head-on
into a pear tree and fell headlong onto a small pile of brush.
Concerned,
the mama bear ran toward her kid and on the way collided with my Beacon apple
tree, whose trunk diameter was twice as big as a can of French’s tomatoes. The
apple tree won that contest and continued to stand upright, something the bear
wasn’t able to accomplish for almost a minute. By this time the first cub,
followed by her sibling, was almost to the woods. Eventually all three of them,
using zigzag routes, were out of sight.
By that
time I was brave enough to go outside and walk over to the cranberry bushes.
“Sour, but certainly well fermented,” I remarked to myself after tasting a few.
It was then I realized that those three bears were drunk. Imagine! Those cubs! I resolved to have a talk with the
mother bear as soon as her hangover abated.
******************
I am
writing this on Tuesday, November 22nd, fifty-six years after the
day that John F. Kennedy met his maker in Dallas. I admired JFK when he was
alive and continue to admire his brilliance and political acumen. We knew he
couldn’t keep his hands off women and so what? Look what’s in that same office
today – look and compare. No, never mind, there’s no comparison.
end
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