DIARY
Marching
to the beat of a different drummer
by
Robert LaFrance
So all it took were a few hurricanes
to shut Donald Trump’s Twitter mouth for a week or two? Who knew? As I write
this, the American president has not tweeted a controversial sentence for what
seems like months.
Hurricane Harvey in southeast Texas
and later Louisiana, then Hurricane Irma followed by Hurricane and Tropical
Storm José flattened a lot of buildings and killed a lot of people who would
probably have preferred to have remained living even though Trump was sending
his stupid twits – I mean tweets – worldwide.
To bring the results of the
hurricanes a bit closer to home, I can safely say I went a little strange and
then stranger as I looked at all the television coverage of these disasters,
mostly of Irma.
I watched CNN a lot because they had
so many reporters on the scene to report on all the destruction in the
Caribbean and Florida; one evening I was sitting in my favourite chair while
some poor schmuck was standing out in the wind and rain at Miami. He had to
hang on to a lamp post so he didn’t get blown into the sea.
“WHAT’S GOING ON?” said my wife as
she came home from a church meeting or some such gathering. “Why do you have
plywood on all the windows? Also, I don’t appreciate having to crawl over a
lilac bush and in a kitchen window because you have the TV so loud and the
doors all braced shut.”
“I was just battening down the
hatches,” I defended myself. “You can’t be too careful.”
“Actually, you can be too careful,”
was her rejoinder. “AND YOU HAVE BEEN! Do you realize that it’s warm and sunny
here with only a breeze? You’re not in Florida you know.”
I shook my head in acknowledgement
of her comment. “I guess I went a little overboard,” I said, and she didn’t
argue. “There’s good news though. All that plywood…I’ve been needing a new
chicken coop for years.” But she was gone to unload the car whose back seat was
full of food she had bought ‘just in case’, and the trunk was full of gasoline
containers in case we had to mow the lawn with no advance notice.
**********************
Speaking of mowing the lawn, I think
people are weird.
My friend Flug (Richard LaFrance, no
relation) was out mowing his front lawn when I got home from town yesterday
afternoon. He was zooming around as if he were Hercules cleaning the Augean
Stables which I am sure you’ll recall from the Greek myth. Flug, like Hercules, did finish the job and
when he shut off the mower he walked over to say hello where I was pulling
carrots out of my garden. (If you want to dig carrots, a garden is an ideal
place to find them.)
“Glad to get that job done,” he
said. “Now I won’t have to think about it until May.”
That got me thinking (no mean feat,
as they say) about attitudes. In April everyone is drooling for the summer to
come so we can, among other things, mow lawns, but now in September people seem
to have given up and have thrown in the towel on summer as if they were eager
for it to end and eager for that 4-letter S-word to show up. This is all very
strange to a Tilley boy and we Tilley boys are known for our intellectual
achievements.
***********************
Warning: this is an entirely new
subject – barbecuing.
Around our estate here in
Kincardine, we (that is, I) are/am just as likely to barbecue in February as in
July. In fact, I can’t wait until the winter barby season to begin. When we
invite people to our Valentine’s Day event they are often startled, staggered
and amazed when they arrive and find me standing on the front porch and
brushing sauce onto burgers and sausages. The effect is increased if there is a
minor blizzard occurring.
Back to the subject: why should we
always barbecue the same things? I’ll bet the philosopher Henry David Thoreau
never barbecued hot dogs, or even cooked corn wrapped in tinfoil on the barby.
Here’s a quote from him: “As a single footstep will not make a path on the
earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.”
Excuse me, that had nothing
whatsoever to do with barbecuing. Here’s the one I was thinking about: “Many
men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are
after.”
That wasn’t it either. Maybe this is
the one I wanted: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it
is because he hears a different drummer.” And so last evening I barbecued
anchovies, sunchokes and peas. I’ll show him who’s a different drummer.-end-
