Bye to brother Lawrence June 24/20

 

Lawrence Frederick LaFrance 1939-2020

He was one great musician, not to mention life saver!

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            My brother Lawrence Lafrance died two months ago and I never did say thank you to him, for saving my life – twice.

            He was 78 years old when he died, or as he would put it, 78 and a half years old. His birth date was September 28, and if you disagree with my math, go and get your own brother.

            The first time he saved my life (I never asked if he regretted it) occurred when I was in my late teens. One of my father’s drunken friends was spinning his pickup truck out our driveway in Tilley and lost control of the vehicle. He headed straight for where Lawrence and I were standing.

            Although it was a hot summer day, I froze. Lawrence stepped back out of the way but I stood there like a hypnotized aardvark. As the pickup got closer, ever closer, I froze a little harder.

            The next thing I knew I was lying on my face in some hazelnut bushes. Lawrence, taking his own life in his hands, had grabbed me by belt buckle and thrown me about ten feet into that bush. The truck missed him by inches.

            The second time he saved my life was only about six months later. I had just returned from a year in the Northwest Territories where I had been working for Canada’s weather service. Once again it was a pickup truck barrelling across a parking lot and aiming straight for me. Lawrence, who never played football, executed a great flying tackle so that the truck missed me by about an inch. My ruggedly handsome face was all cut up from sliding on the pavement, but I was alive. “What did you do that for?” I said out of my bloody mouth. He pointed to the pickup truck that had gone over a hedge and ended up wrapped around a City of Edmundston hydro pole. Unfortunately the driver was unhurt.

            So far this column in tribute to my brother was mostly about me, but I felt I should remind myself and others that if not for Lawrence I would never have been able to sit in front of this word processor and mention these things about his life. The reason I never mentioned these incidents to anyone else was because I didn’t want people getting mad at him for allowing me to continue my career.

            Totally unlike me, he was a mechanic. When he was growing up he could fix anything, just like his sons Terry and John are today. I hate them all. They got all that from Fred LaFrance, my dad and Lawrence’s dad, and I had better mention my sister Joan. Fred was another one who could fix anything; he built a generator in the late 1940s so we had electric lights before most other Tilleyikers.

            Lawrence worked for A.G. Campbell in Andover for quite a few years and then took a woods working job with Fraser Company where he made about three times as much money as he did working in a garage. Picture the year 1976 when he made about $600 a week. He had six chainsaws and I swear he could run three at a time.

            That year he bought a new Ford Explorer pickup, a yellow one, and I remember one day when I was home on vacation from Sachs Harbour, NWT, when I went with him to Perth. I had never had a smoother ride in a vehicle. I’m not sure why I remember this; probably because some of the vehicles I had ridden in, in the NWT, could have been compared to a double wagon driving over a rockpile.

            Now to Lawrence LaFrance the musician and how mad he made me back when I was ten or so, the late 1950s. George Maunder’s band had hired him to play guitar and who knows what else, because he could play anything he touched - harmonica, Hawaiian guitar, dobro, fiddle, mandolin, piano and banjo. Give him a zither or xylophone or a pitchfork and a foot-long dowel and he could make music with it. He was in his teens and playing lead guitar for the band and later for John Maunder’s band, the Common People based in Nackawic.

            He was highly respected for his musical ability and is best known as a great fiddler and composer of beautiful fiddle tunes. He is a member of the NB Country Music Hall of Fame.

            In giving my late brother all this praise, I have (so far) neglected to mention one fact. I hated him, nothing to do with his mechanical ability. Well, I hated him for a certain length of time anyway. He was in his late teens and playing with George’s band one or two nights a week, besides working full time in the woods, cutting down and loading 4-foot pulp by hand onto a truck or boxcar. That was when I grew to hate – no, despise – him. After a dance in Arthurette, Glassville or some other hall somewhere he would arrive home in the wee hours, sometimes as late as 3:00 am. What did he do then? He would bring in his electric guitar, take it out of its case, plug it in to his big Fender amp and start playing ‘Wipe Out’, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ or ‘California Sun’ and I would jump right clear of my bed in the upstairs room I shared with him. “*&^%$#*&!” I would say gently, but I was the little brother and therefore ignored.

            One final story: You can ask John Maunder about this. Lawrence could play the guitar while he was asleep. With a cigarette dangling from his lips, he would be sitting there on the stage and playing some complicated tune when one couldn’t help but notice that the cigarette in his mouth was mostly ash but still hanging together. His eyes were closed. He was asleep. John would play a loud flourish on his drums and Lawrence would wrap up the tune. Time for the cigarette ash to drop on his pants.

            He was a great musician and certainly helped a lot of people become good ones, and, by the way, I haven’t hated him for many years.

                                                               -end-

Pity in my garden - June 10/20

 

I should have had that BULL dozer

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            As the Coronavirus rules creakily begin to loosen, I find myself going into stores that I never would had ventured into in earlier days.

            Not exactly a store, but Caterpillar Heavy Equipment Sales of Upper Kintore sells D12 bulldozers. Last Tuesday I found myself walking through their yard and trying to decide if I needed a piece of equipment that big to scrape off my garden, or would a D9 do the trick?

            “Let’s go home, Bob,” my wife gently took me by the arm and led me to the gate. “Your Husqvarna tiller is enough. You only have three rows of potatoes, half a row of string beans and some marigolds.”

            I was all the way home before I stopped trembling, imagining that D9 Caterpillar bulldozer scraping the earth all around my garden. NOTE: In addition to what my wife said, I have a full row of string beans and even some radishes.

            It’s amazing how all this quarantining and isolating and watching the news can make one lose all semblance of perspective. She’ll be better when the worst of it is over.

                                                ****************

            There is some major construction going on at our estate, even though it doesn’t involve a bulldozer. We are putting a roof on my former root cellar and turning it into a tool shed, or equipment shed as certain spouses of mine insists. ‘Tool shed’ is not high-class enough I suppose, or maybe she knows too many people who are tools and she doesn’t want to hear that word any more.

            The former root cellar ceased to be a root cellar in the 1990s; one winter morning when I went in there (after an absence of ten days or two weeks) and saw that (1) all the insulation had been torn off the roof, making it a bit brisk in there since it was about –15º

C outside. In truth, being inside the root cellar was about the same as being outside.

            Ah well, I sighed philosophically, maybe a few of my carrots, potatoes and apples are still edible. I lifted up the Styrofoam insulation and was presented with the shocking sight of half-eaten vegetables and fruit. The mice, rats and squirrels had discovered the Holy Grail, it seemed. Not one carrot or anything else had escaped the molars of those blessèd creatures. When I say ‘blessèd’, I mean &^%$#(*&#$.

            I closed the root cellar door and didn’t return to that scene again until last year when certain spouses of mine decided that I would tear down my present equipment shed (a former henpen) for the flimsy reason that there were about 47 holes in the roof. That was part A. Part B was that I must tear off the rotted root cellar roof and replace it with good lumber. Even shingles or something that wouldn’t let the rain in.

            In May I took delivery of nine trusses and enough boards to make an actual roof, and when some carpenters were here working on one of our wind-damaged house roofs (rooves?) I asked them to put up the trusses. I could have done it myself of course, but I wanted it done right. Not that I would have done it wrong; it’s just that I wouldn’t have done it at all until I was nagged beyond all semblance of sanity. No comments please.

            So on Sunday, yes the Sabbath, my wife and I were up on that little boarded-in roof and putting on stuff called Ice and Water Shield. We got-‘er-done in a little over an hour without mishap, so far. It was a struggle, but we’re hoping for the best. However, I can’t help thinking we should have called the carpenters back.

                                                ******************

            Last week I was looking over some issues of the Tobiquer Magazine, the venerable publication from the 1970s and 1980s, and I noted all the names of people who are no longer with us, but who, at the time were active members of their communities.

            In the late 1970s I started writing for the Perth-based Victoria County Record and one of the assignments I had (The late Mary Jane Savoy was editor at the time) was covering Perth-Andover council meetings. Burpee Wagner (still going strong) was mayor and presided over some feisty meetings. At some point in my early newspaper career, Richard Jamer and Rusty Matheson were on the council at the same time and didn’t they  have fun!

            I doubt if they hated each either, but they sure had some mighty battles. I couldn’t wait to attend those council meetings to see the fur fly. Other councillors who added a lot to the interesting meetings included Susan Murchison, Jim Baird, Nancy MacCauley, Bryce Bishop, Jimmy Armstrong (Farmer Jimmy as opposed to Rich Jimmy), and Bud Doherty.

            When I was out west, I knew several World War I veterans, but I only knew one in Victoria County. Harold Gallop (I think that was his name) lived in or near Arthurette and I found him an unusual man in that he would talk a bit about the war. Not much, but a bit.

            Nowadays, in 2020, there are very few World War II veterans left and I don’t know any Korean War veterans. I know several Vietnam War veterans and I know the parents of Aaron Williams, who was killed in Afghanistan.

            It’s really quite amazing to see that so many people I used to know are no longer here, including my brother Lawrence, who died in April. He was quite possibly the best guitar player I ever knew, and played the fiddle like a sonofagun. His name is on the rolls of the New Brunswick Country Music Hall of Fame and he deserved to have it there.

                                                                 -end-

A collection of euphemisms (May 27/20)

 

Who is that masked man?

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            As we all try and dodge this Corona Virus, we are seeing that ‘first responders’, doctors, nurses and other brave people are on the front lines and are to be much admired; we all must do our part, maintaining that 2-metre distance, yet doing all the things we should be doing.

            One thing I would like to see happen is that the health professionals decide once and for all whether we should wear face masks. One day it’s yes, and the next day it’s no, even in Canada, but in the States it’s a total mishmash with each of the fifty states doing their own thing. And every day that bloated demagogue with the red tie is up there in front of a bank of microphones and giving people his opinion gleaned from his vast knowledge of medicine.

            Since the Blackfly Gazette hasn’t been seen in public for a while, I have grown lazy and indolent, but there’s good news. I looked on my computer and found that I had written part of a column, so I can use that today:

            “As I write this column, it is Good Friday, except that last night about 25 centimetres of snow fell on my driveway, and, as I look out some other windows, I see that it also fell in my orchard, on the roof of the garage, etc. Everywhere I look except inside the house.

            The first robins showed up here on Tuesday, April 7^th. Did they ever look happy! This morning as I look toward the Kerr crabapple tree (the middle one of three) on our front lawn I see four robins perched on its branches. They look bewildered and appear to be glaring at me as if the storm were my fault. Note: It wasn’t.

            Scanning over to the left, on my Honeygold apple tree, I see a murder of crows. Isn’t that a weird collective noun? Recently I looked it up on Uncle Google and found that the term came from Europe in the 15^th century. After a big blitzkreig the dead soldiers lay on the battlefield as thousands of crows had lunch and turned the field black.

            Back to 21^st century Kincardine, NB, while the robins and crows sulked in apple trees, chickadees, junkos (junkoes?), and purple finches empty the bird feeder on the porch. It just goes to show you that brain trumps brawn every time.

            Sorry about using that verb, but I have already typed it now.           

                                                ************************

            Changing the subject for a while, I have been collecting euphemisms for quite a few years as I have heard or saw them in various media.

            I was at the grocery story yesterday and as I was going through the cash (in more ways than one except they only take plastic cards) and remembered a euphemism from long ago. That cashier behind the glass was a ‘financial trust administrator’. That could also apply to a bank teller.

            When I lived in Vancouver many years ago, in the St. Francis Hotel on Seymour Street, I was whisked up to and back from my floor by an elevator operator. He was a ‘vertical transportation engineer’.

            Many decades ago I might have found myself in bars, where there was usually a big hairy guy who threw out those who caused trouble. He was a ‘security appraiser’. The  bouncer.

            A few months ago, pre-Covid-19, I went with my wife and two of my kids to a movie in Woodstock. The person taking our tickets was a ‘cinematographic administrative executive’. After the movie a guy carrying a broom appeared. He was the ‘miniscule particle surveillance engineer’ (janitor).

                                                ********************

            I might as well get back to the Covid-19. That’s the only thing on the news these days, for good reason. Any of us could disappear at any moment.

            Cabin Fever seems to be the biggest effect of the days and weeks of isolation in some cases, quarantine in others. For the past several years I have been used to having restaurant meals two or three times a week and now, even though some restaurants have re-opened, it’s still breakfast, lunch and supper at Bob’s Diner.

            Speaking of food, I am finding that people who had never so much as boiled an egg now consider themselves gourmet chefs. My neighbour Clyde Barrow has been telling everybody and his dog – especially the dogs! – that he now has developed four recipes for boiled eggs. Clyde and his wife Bonnie are now considered established chefs down at the dog pound.

            And what is this business about hoarding toilet paper? I saw on TV that a couple from Brampton, ON, bought a tractor-trailer load of Delsey from a Costco in Toronto and were trying to unload (so to speak) it at twice the price they paid for it. It worked well until the police stepped in and confiscated it.

            Gasoline use is down because we don’t go anywhere so that huge source of provincial sales tax is down. People are grinding their molars down to the gums because in normal times with gas prices down forty cents a litre, they would normally be running the tires off their cars.

            Have you been to the house of someone who is in isolation or quarantine? Those people (I look in my mirror) are fat. Nothing to do. Also, here’s a prediction: nine months from now the obstetric wards will be full of crying babies because the pharmacies can’t get a certain kind of pill. Good luck!

                                                                               -end-

A piano lesson in cyberspace (April 1/20)

 April 1/20

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?”

                                                ******************

            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 19^th 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.

                                    ******************

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-