Putting up a clothesline (Aug 5/20)

 

July drought. Is this Australia or what?

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            Those of us who are susceptible to depression are also susceptible to great happiness. The latter case occurred a few days ago when, after weeks of drought, it looked as if my three gardens were finally going to get some rain.

            We hadn’t had rain on Manse Hill for five weeks. My gardens and 275 apples trees – 67 varieties – were parched. The Sahara Desert was a swamp compared to our estate.

            You can see why I would be elated that rain was on the way; all the signs were there, the main one being that Ted Shapiro of WAGM-TV in Presque Isle had said it wasn’t going to rain. He has an unblemished record of being wrong.

            All the signs were there by 3:00 pm. I could hear the rumble of thunder in the distance. Bristol, due south about 25 kilometres, was getting drenched. I could see it from my porch. Mars Hill Mountain and its nearly thirty windmills looked as if it were drowning, dark clouds had taken over Perth-Andover and I could see a huge rain-filled cloud just coming over the hills of Bon Accord. I cracked open an Alpine and waited for the storms to give life-saving moisture to my gardens and me. I dozed.

            When I awoke the sky was blue from Bristol to Grand Falls and not one drop of rain had fallen here. A grown man shouldn’t cry, and I didn’t. The drops coming from my tear ducts were caused by Dry Eye Syndrome.

            I guess my question is: who’s is charge here and why is he/she so cruel?

            Addendum: There was a happy ending to the story. Exactly 41 hours later, after several more storms in those surrounding communities, Kincardine finally had a good soaking rain that lasted for several hours. In fact many hours. In fact several days. In fact it’s still going on. I just saw a cucumber plant float by.

            This must be New Brunswick. You know the old saying “If March comes in like a lamb it goes out like a lamb”? Our July “came in like an aardvark, went out like an eel”. In fact I just saw an eel going by.

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

            My old friend The Perfessor (no one knows his real name) gets some odd ideas. Last evening we were sitting at a Social Distancing outdoor table at the club and sipping on some beverages when he came out with this one:

            “You know, it must be embarrassing for an animal to be struck by a vehicle and become roadkill.”

            I must admit my jaw dropped to my knees on hearing that comment. It reinforced my opinion that the Perfessor is one weird duck indeed. “You’re a weird duck indeed”, I commented.

            “No, it’s true,” he continued. No one else argued. “Just picture, you are out in the middle of a public highway and you’re stripped and bare for all the world and Norway to see. Some people might even stop to take a photo – I know I do if it’s an unusual animal – like a porpoise or aardvark. It’s all very embarrassing.”

            “Well, do you shovel the roadkill off the road to save it further embarrassment?” asked Big Ed Keene the barkeep. The perfessor looked at him as if he had grown a third head and went on to another important subject. I believe it was the papaya harvest in Haiti.

            Some people are really weird, don’t you find? Except you and me of course.

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

            This year is a little different (don’t you agree?) from previous years but in spite of the inconveniences (no deaths around here so far) there are some moments of pure joy. Such was the case in late May when my spouse Diane, with the help of our neighbour Jerry, and I put up our outdoor clothesline.

            Ah, the pure joy and ecstasy! And my wife enjoyed it too, being able at last to hang out her underwear so that passersby were able to see it.

            She continued in that state of euphoria until the morning of Friday, July 31, when I emerged from a well-earned slumber, went outside to meet the day, and found the fully loaded clothesline had come apart and was lying on the ground. Oh, the language! And I  wasn’t pleased either.

            I motored to the hardware store to get some more clamps, welding rods, bolts, cotter pins, and beer and we went at that clothesline again. My wife climbed a ladder and put the line back on its pulley; I went down to the clothesline platform to do due diligence (or doo-doo diligence, considering the number of Rover’s land mines between there and there).

            Trouble was, I had forgotten that Diane was still up the teetery ladder and was clutching the pole so as not to fall and break some of the rocks piled around the steel clothesline pole. I jerked on the clothesline and next thing I knew she was hanging in mid-air, clinging to the pulley.

            I had a decision to make: should I run in the direction of town and hope for the best, or should I run the other way, toward those awful screams? I chose the coward’s way and headed toward the screams, where I put up the ladder so she could make her way down and kill me. Only she didn’t get a chance. I was just topping Bon Accord Mountain when she made it to the ground and down the driveway.

            Lesson learned? Yes, buy a clothes dryer.

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

            In conclusion for this death-defying column, I have been keeping my eyes wide open whenever I get near a big white-blossomed plant of the carrot family. Not Queen Anne’s Lace, which is just wild carrot, but an invasive flower called Giant Hogweed. It is a bad hombre whose flower, when it gets moist, burns the hell out of human flesh. Look it up in Google and don’t get any closer to it than that.

Good old Cliff Gordon July 22/20

 

Thoughts on porcupines chewing a roof

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            Walking across my backyard, I tripped over the dog, Fang, and fell headlong onto a pile of brush. “Why, you no-good pile of useless garbage,” I said gently as I reached for a club to beat Fang, then changed my mind (shifted my head) about canine abuse.

            It all reminded me of a story told to me by an old fellow named Cliff Gordon. He was one of the ‘pay by the week’ residents of the St. Francis Hotel where I lived in Vancouver and was a great storyteller. (He was the gent who persuaded me to quit smoking in 1973, and I have always been grateful.)

            One morning in 1972, I came down from my room and sat in the lobby listening to Cliff tell a story about a blind man and his dog in Ernfold, Saskatchewan. The blind man and friend (Cliff Gordon) were sitting on a front porch when the dog walked in front of the blind man, then stopped and unloaded both #1 and #2 on his owner’s new suede shoes. As a matter of fact, they were new, blue suede shoes.

            “Then I just about fell off my chair when the blind man – whose name was Gregori – reached down and petted the dog on the head. I asked him why he was petting the dog that had just peed and dumped on his new shoes. His new suede shoes.

Here’s what Gregori said: “I was just making sure where his head was so I could give him a good swift kick in the ass.”

(The reader will notice that in the second paragraph of this column I referred to Cliff Gordon as ‘an old fellow’. He was 74. I just suffered my 72^nd birthday. Makes you think.)

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

Ever read back-to-the-land magazines? The ones where a family, having tired of city life, chuck it all in the sewer system and move to the country. Every issue has a story about this city family who made that transition “off the grid” and lived happily ever after.  They had decided to live simply in a country home “off the grid”.

            According to the blurb at the front of each magazine, anyone can get out of their dead-end job in the city and live the good life in rural Canada. All it takes is some ‘initiative and hard work’. Within a matter of months they will be in their new  comfortable home..

            The thing is, those new houses in the country are in the $300,000 range in any man’s army, and is complete with pool and all the various accouterments we rural folks have come to enjoy, like a $75,000 windmill and solar heating system. We and all our neighbours have a similar system, but the electricity is mostly produced from hydro power and oil. We call it NB Power.

            This magazine and others like it as well as television programs like “This Old House” show renovations that are far beyond the average person’s wallet or purse. They talk about these wonderful heaters and cookstoves that save thousands of dollars a year in fuel but they forget one little detail: the heater costs $131,244.12.

            Anybody can build one of these homes, the article would probably go on, “if they have a Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering, a similar one in architecture, and a million dollars in the bank, plus a 6-figure balance in a Cayman Islands bank.                                                                     *******************

            Some people have bad luck, have you noticed? More than their share, and we all hope we don’t develop this condition. The Perfessor is one of those types.

            In 1964, when he and I were both in grade 11 at SVRHS (as it was then) we also were both in air cadets, the old 625 Squadron, and we were both picked to go on the Senior Leader’s Course at Camp Borden, near Barrie, Ontario. The Perfessor was already  a bit of a legend for his attire (always sloppy and stained), because no matter how hard he tried to be clean and neat, something would happen.

            In our final parade in which about 900 of us highly polished cadets were out getting inspected, one lone pigeon flew over and dropped his load of bombs. The white squishy material landed on one and only one cadet’s shoulder, and it was about ten seconds BEFORE General So-and-So arrived at the Perfessor’s location.

“Bad luck, old boy,” was the General’s only comment as he passed by quickly. He was British, and therefore prone to understatement.

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

Speaking of credit ratings (who was speaking of credit ratings?), many people with credit cards are paying interest rates well up into the double figures, say 27%. I won’t employ the word ‘usury’, but if the shoe fits.

It is said that Jesus drove the money-lenders from the temple, but times have changed I guess. Now those money lenders are honoured members of society, and rather rich. I refer to people like the CEOs of the Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Montreal.

This morning, something occurred to me that should not only make me a zillionaire, but should take those bankers down a peg. I was patching my garage roof where a porcupine had been chawing away when I thought: “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander”.

Nowadays one is lucky to get 1% interest on his savings account but his credit card may be charge 27% at the same time. If one were to have a credit balance on his VISA or Mastercard would they PAY interest at the rate of 27%?

My guess is ‘no’. Your thoughts?

                                                                     -end-

Lil ole wine drinker me July 10/20

 

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.

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

            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.

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

            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.

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

            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.

                                         -end-

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-