The Perfessor’s great grandson
by Robert LaFrance
I just spoke to the Perfessor in his front yard. Since it was a nice sunny day (it’s spring after all) we talked in his front yard where he and his dog Pinky were taking a stroll. We three have been self-isolating because of Covid-19, the Trump virus.
He, Trump, insists on calling it the Chinese virus (is there another kind, other than the common cold, and that probably came from Shanghai?) so I will call it the Trump virus. He was warned in early January about its seriousness but chose to call that warning a Democratic hoax.
Back to the Perfessor’s yard, he was quite pleased that his great grandson, who has finished his own quarantine, will be visiting him on Friday. “You wait until he sees the cartoon Pinky and the Brain, that I just found on a VHS tape.” commented the Perfessor.
Little Gladstone is eight years old and lives in Plaster Rock; the Perfessor is 87. “There’s one cartoon where Pinky who, for some reason, has an English accent, is listening to his sidekick The Brain, who says: “Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?
Pinky, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, says: “I think so Brain, but how are we going to get Katy Perry and the Dixie Chicks to come here in a helicopter?”
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That more or less describes how things are up the road, where the Perfessor’s son Elbert lives with his family and three kids, all of whom take piano lessons from Prius, the bartender at the Kincardine Legion. I had just come from visiting Prius, who had just come from giving the kids – Wanda, Claris and Earp – a piano lesson in cyberspace.
Prius insists that the kids come to the Legion for their lessons, but he hardly sees them. Each of them has a room to himself or herself and they each have a laptop where they can see Prius and play the licks he directs them to.
Those kids are a little scattered, to say the least. One day I – who was watching from my own living room – heard Prius say: “Wanda, have you practised The Viennese Waltz?”
She replied: “The capital of Denmark is Prague.” Because they also take geography classes online, it’s hard to get them to concentrate.
Prius said to Claris, who is a girl: “Claris, would you play the first four bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony?”
“About two and a half metres,” Claris told Prius. She’s into math.
Later Prius said to Earp, who had been named after an American criminal from the 19th century: “How is your day going so far?” Earp said he thought it was Saturday afternoon as far as he knew. It was Tuesday morning.
Is it television, computers, our diets, nuclear testing, or is it
just me when I say people rarely LISTEN to one another any more? I have heard
whole conversations whose participants appear to have only one common
characteristic - total hearing loss. Planet Neptune meets Chuck Norris. And if
you think yours truly is excluded from this lineup of non-listeners and short
attention spanners, you had better...
What? What am I doing here?
I know of a person - and it's not necessary to mention her gender - who paid so little attention to her 1981 Gremlin that she put 35,000 miles on one oil change. It could be that there's so much information out there that every last one of us is suffering from overload. If we could just re-format our hard drives (clear out the old brain to you non-computer types) back to a point where we could start learning again it would help our general well- being. Or not.
My friend Oscar says ‘lying fallow’ like this sounds like a good idea. (I’m good at the lying part.) "You're halfway there already," he told me last night at the Legion as we sat on the porch sipping lemonade we’d brought ourselves.
One day a few decades ago I stopped in to visit a chap who lived alone in a cabin near Tilley. He had a pain in his stomach and was thinking about going to Los Angeles to see Dr. Marcus Welby about it. Dr. Welby was a television doctor who did wondrous things onscreen.
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Here is a question I would like someone to answer: Why is there a government employee called the Chief Medical Officer of Health? Why should the powers that be add the words “of Health” at the end?
As you know, I think a lot, but I could not come up with a reason for this, other than the automatic redundancy of humans, as in ‘hot water heater’? Why should we need to heat water that is already hot? As I have said before, we hear over and over again about someone who ‘first started’. How many times did they start?
How about this: “Chief Medical Officer of Secondhand Pianos”? “Chief Medical Officer of Highways and Infrastructure”. I guess I will once again have to gather up a 400,000 person signature petition to try and persuade the government to quit being redundant.
My friend, acquaintance really, Clivemore from Downsview, part of Toronto, stopped by the other day to see how we were weathering the Covid-19 pandemic, and I told him it was overcast some days and other days it was sunny.
Smiling broadly, he had just finished fourteen days of self-quarantine spent with someone named JellyAnne, a 29-year old stripper who, through a bureaucratic mistake, was forced to stay there with Clivemore. One of the workers assumed she was his, Clivemore’s, wife, and said she couldn’t leave for a fortnight. Old Clive said she was some kind of coarse for the first few days, until she learned he could cook and he learned she could wash walls. Nuptials are planned for the day this pandemic is declared over.
-end-
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