Interfacing with Golden Diana
By Robert LaFrance
I expected cards and letter – even old-fashioned phone calls – after I wrote two weeks ago in these pages that my brother Lawrence was 78.5 years old when he died in April, but so far, not a peep or a murmur. Not a whimper or a whisper.
You see, he was 80.5 years old. That was his little joke and we should cherish it, because, you see, he wasn’t really a jokester and a liar like his little brother.
Where that all came from was some interaction with the RCMP back in the 1970s. I was driving my 1961 Falcon, a present from my Aunt Ella, and had just made a beer run – Golden Diana wine in his case – when flashing lights and a siren suggested we pull over to the side of the road.
I wasn’t drinking but he had had a few swigs of his rotgut. I handed the officer my driver’s licence and insurance card while the other officer – whose name was, I think, Herman Saulis – and Lawrence talked. In that casual conversation Lawrence’s age came up and he said he had been born the month the mighty German ship the Bismarck had been sunk by the British – May 1941 – and our sister Joan was born the month that Hitler marched into Poland to start World War II, September, 1939.
That was just opposite of reality – not an unusual occurrence – since Lawrence was a little hazy by then. For years he would refer to that incident and laugh. Oh, we LaFrances are a hilarious lot.
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We’re all VERY tired of hearing about that mess to the south of our international border – I refer to the present occupant of the White House – but every once in a while we see, hear or read a perfect description. Here’s part of one.
“He hated to read paperwork and would regularly make important decisions without even looking at the documents his aides had prepared for him…
“His government was constantly in chaos, with his officials having no idea what he wanted them to do, and nobody was entirely clear what he wanted them to do…he would often rely on gut feeling, leaving even his allies in the dark about his plans…This meant that rather than carrying out the duties of state, they spent most of their time in-fighting and back-stabbing each other in an attempt to either win his approval or avoid his attention altogether…
“It’s hard to shake the feeling that it was just a natural result of putting a work-shy narcissist in charge of a country…He was obsessed with the media and celebrity.”
Those quotes were from a book called “Humans: A brief history of how we f**ked it all up” by Tom Phillips. The gentleman he was referring to in those quotes was a certain Bavarian chap named A. Hitler.
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Is there any chance that we will see the backside of the Novel Corona Virus (Covid-19) sometime in the near future? I would sure like to see my grand-daughter, who lives in Montreal, but that ain’t gonna happen for a while. She needs to be on my knee while I read a story, a hundred stories. Thinking of my little grand-daughter, I remembered a poem by E. B. White. It is called “Conch”.
Hold a baby to your ear as you would a shell:
Sounds of centuries you hear
New centuries foretell.
Who can break a baby’s code?
And which is the older—
The listener or his small load?
The held or the holder?
Hundreds of scientists from Norway to Australia to Tilley, NB, are working on finding a vaccine and stand a good chance of finding one – eventually. I am just afraid all those scientists are under so much pressure that they will skip a step or two and come up with a med that will cure canine hangnailus and that’s about it. There is a lot of money at stake here.
Then there’s the fear, usually unfounded, that the vaccine will end up murderizing more people than the disease it’s supposed to prevent. I hope that’s not the case with Covid-19 because it would be quite inconvenient to those it kills. It is said that the first vaccine for SARS, which is a respiratory virus, killed more people that it protected, but things like vaccines and masks against Coronavirus have become political in some countries. Well, one country, to our south. “Wearing a mask means you don’t like me,” said one highly-placed official, initials Donald Trump.
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On the more domestic side, I was nonplussed this morning to go out into one of my three gardens and find that one of God’s woodland creatures had eaten every Brussels sprouts, kale, spinach and beet plant right down to the ground. The B. sprouts were pulled out by the roots.
Was I a trifle annoyed? Was I chagrined? Was I totally P.O.ed? Damn right to all three. It wouldn’t have been quite so annoying if I could have figured out what entity was guilty. There wasn’t a track of man nor beast in or near that garden.
I (with help from the distaff side) put up a scarecrow and installed a rubber snake and two rubber owls. Too bad I hadn’t done that 24 hours earlier.
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