The things I want to do
by Robert LaFrance
The weather
today is relatively spring-like and I have a list of jobs to do when it improves even more. This list was written
gradually over the winter months.
First,
patch my gum-rubber boots so I can go out and prune some apple trees without
getting wet feet. The only trouble with that is, I would have to do the
patching in the house and wouldn’t get to enjoy the nice day. I had better look
on my list again and find an outside job.
Second, prune some apple trees. I would do that very
thing but the snow is still deep in the orchard and I have holes in my
gum-rubber boots, holes big enough to give me wet feet once I go inside.
Third, I think that at the age of 71 (I know, I
don’t look a day older than 70) it is time I wrote another book after the
success of my first, The Fishladder Gazette. I told that to my
old friend The Perfessor and he commented: “Did you ever do anything interesting?”
I found this a bit insulting, coming from a man whose greatest accomplishment
was delivering a pie into the face of the late Richard Hatfield – while he was
sleeping on a park bench in Boston. The Perfessor wasn’t protesting anything;
he just tripped. Yeah, I may start that novel in May if I don’t find something
else I want to do more. What name should I give it? How about Wine, Women
and Thongs?
Fourth,
deal with a bunch of trash that needs to be cut up to make it fit in my black
garbage bag. The only problem there is that my chopping tools are all located
in my old henpen which itself is located 75 metres out in my orchard. Wet feet
I don’t need.
Fifth, I
should make plans to put a roof on my former root cellar and make it into a
tool shed, except that my riding lawn mower is too wide to fit through the
doorway and it’s in the orchard anyway. Anyway, there’s two feet of snow and a
bunch of frozen gravel in that building because it hasn’t had a roof all
winter. So I’ll leave that until May if I don’t get Covid-19.
********************
I think I
will pause in listing all those jobs I intend to do someday – the day I see
pigs flying over on their way to Ernfold, Sask. – and move on to the subject
that is on everyone’s lips these days – that Covid-19, or New Corona Virus.
This is
supposed to be a humour column so if I want to continue earning my big fat
paycheque I had better leave the subject of jobs to do and go on to the
hilarious subject of a virus that can kill us all.
Well, maybe
not that hilarious. We all know someone, usually an older person, with “a
compromised immune system”. There’s one of those right here in my house and I
know it’s very scary to her, even more than it is to me. This house is
‘self-quarantined’ as the phrase goes. Although neither of us has that flu, we
take all kinds of precautions including washing our hands 1000 times a day and
trying to avoid germs like the plaque, no pun intended.
One thing I
would like to see happen – once this crisis is over – is for China to start
implementing a massive effort to stop its citizens from coming up with a new
kind of flu every few years and when it does happen anyway to control it
without trying to cover it up.
When
something like SARS, H1N1, or Swine Flu happens it gets old real fast when half
the friggin’ world suffers from quarantines and millions die. I have done a bit
of research on the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu (so-called) that killed 60 million
people worldwide and was astonished to learn that it almost certainly
originated in China.
I hope we
emerge from this pandemic without meeting the Grim Reaper, but if we do, we
will not be able to thank China and certainly not Donald (“It will be okay”)
Trump who cares only for his re-election chances rather than how many people
Covid-19 will take.
******************
Changing
the subject to something a little less lethal, I want to recount some of the
difficult days I have had to endure. People don’t realize how violent and
he-man a past I have had and at my present advanced age I continue the brutal
pace.
A lot of
husbands don’t believe this, but about ten days ago something happened that
caused me to nearly injure myself not once but four or five times.
The
batteries in my TV remote control went dead.
I do not
lie. I was watching a rerun of Murdoch Mysteries from about 2010 when it
happened. The volume wasn’t quite high enough, so I grabbed the remote to
remedy that serious situation. No response, no reaction, no remote that worked.
I could
feel the sweat beading on my forehead as I took out the four AAA batteries and
cleaned them, first by rubbing them on my flannel shirt and then using rubbing
alcohol. Nothing, Nothing!
I searched
high and low as the saying goes, but I wasn’t really high. I was definitely low
when I was unable to find any more than two AAA batteries in the basement
behind the axe, one of them dead according to my tester.
This all
occurred in the late evening and there was still the M.A.S.H. rerun at 11:00.
What could I do? At 10:55 I walked over to the satellite receiver
and changed the channel. I barely made it back to my chair.
Next
morning I was uptown at 8:00 o’clock to buy batteries. I hope I never have to
repeat that ordeal.-end-
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