New Year's non-resolutions (Jan 6/21)

 

How to (easily) quit smoking

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            So now we are faced with the impossible task of arranging our 2021 New Years Resolutions, with the thought always in the back of our minds that a year from now we could be in some other plane of existence.

            My first one always has to be to quit smoking. I choose that one because it’s an unqualified success, as the phrase goes, because I smoked my last cigarette on February 10, 1973. I refer to tobacco of course. Anything else is none of your business.

            That year I was living in the St. Francis Hotel at the foot of Seymour Street in Vancouver. No one in the world is going to believe this, but it’s true; I was paying $15 a week to live in room 218, bathroom down the hall. It was a clean, well-kept hotel right across the road from the CPR station and on the edge of Gastown.

            The way prices go in 2021, that same room today would cost roughly $5000 a minute. It’s long gone of course.

            Here is the story of how I quit smoking. I got up that morning and had a coffee with my first cigarette of the day. It all tasted like the bottom of a farmer’s boot combined with a tablespoon of campfire ash stirred in with Sunlight soap, carefully mixed with dried dog excrement.

            It was time to quit smoking but I didn’t have the will power or strength of character. (Still don’t.) Then I went downstairs to the hotel lobby where my old friend – and I do mean old – Oscar Evoy, 90, was sitting there and puffing on his pipe while watching Sesame Street. Big Bird was his favourite. He grunted at me and at another denizen of the lobby, Cliff Gordon, age 80, who was just sitting there looking grumpy. He preferred Fred Penner.

            The first thing I noticed was that Cliff wasn’t smoking his usual Export A cigarette. I’m pretty sure I’ve told this story before, so I’ll make it short. Cliff had quit smoking that morning, he said, so I decided to quit as well. Four days later Cliff, who had smoked since he was fifteen, started up again but I never did.

            Cold turkey. That’s how I did it after smoking nine years. I had gotten in with bad smoking company in grade 12 at what was then Southern Victoria Regional High School and couldn’t quit until 1973, in spite of numerous attempts. The bizarre thing is that today many physicians will advise smokers not to quit cold turkey because it’s too had on the system. Apparently, like another weekend when I went to Las Vegas, I didn’t have a system.

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

            My second resolution – and I knew that wouldn’t be a problem because I had quit serious drinking 32 years ago – was to get rid of alcohol. I lived in the Hamilton, Ontario, area from 1967 to 1972 and broke a few minor records in imbibing Labatt’s 50 and Labatt’s Blue. Take note that I was not behind the wheel of my car at any point during the day during which I drank a total of 22 bottles of beer before supper. I was still able to navigate as long as I walked on my feet.

            Some years after this personal record, I quit drinking. That is, I quit drinking Labatt’s products because I had moved to Vancouver (see above) and later the Northwest Territories. Silver Spring was my favourite in Vancouver, and Nitchequon Sharp Ale while I lived in NWT.

            Another long story shoot, I quit drinking beer for good when I turned thirty and was infected with being broke. I had all I could do to pay my car insurance.

            (NOTE FROM MY FRIEND THE PERFESSER, OF KINTORE): “Bob, quit lying. I saw you drink half a dozen Alpine on New Year’s Eve.”

            Oh yeah, I forgot that.

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

            More on New Years resolutions: I checked and I checked and found that I am so close to perfect that I don’t need to make any more New Years resolutions. If I have any kind of character flaw, nobody tells me. On the other hand, I see more people at the grocery store than anywhere else and because of the masks we all have to (and should) wear and my diminishing hearing I can’t hear a damn thing and they can’t hear me. They could be praising me to the sky or calling me the lowest skunk in Christendon.

            “I’ll go along with the skunk,” commented the Perfessor. With friends like that…

            To be serious for a minute, I suppose there are a couple of areas in which I could improve, although I can’t imagine what they might be.

            Every morning I get up and thank whosoever is in charge for Donald Trump. I, and just about anyone I know, compare favourably with that despicable swamp rat, if that’s not being too nasty and harsh. Well over seventy million Americans voted for that particular swamp rat, but I think a lot of people forget that probably forty million of those were just voting Republican as they must. After this paper comes out though, there’s two more weeks of Trump and his crowd. Will he declare war on Iran in an effort to stay in power?

I wouldn’t put it past him.

                                     -end-

A long, long oil change (Dec 23/20)

 

A Cavalier attitude toward my 1983 car

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            Believe it or not, there are still people who spend whole portions of their lives in being Politically Correct, so I will begin this column with my non-PC wish of a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to one and all.

            I know, it’s insensitive to the Yodi ethnic dervishes of Kazachstan, and the Aberdeen Presbyterian Outlanders of San Marino, but there it is. We can’t please everyone.

            There was a time, fifteen or twenty years ago, when saying ‘Merry Christmas!’  was considered almost as bad as the worst racial slur, but we seem to have gone past that, so here I am, saying ‘Merry Christmas’ to one and all. And I sure hope the year 2021 is a lot better than its predecessor. At least it will be, or should be, Trump-less.

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

            My high point of the year 2020 occurred on Monday, December 7, when my wife laughed at one of my jokes – an original joke at that. No plagiarism allowed here.

            She was standing over by the microwave when I said: “I have just coined a new definition for an already existing word. Look at me.” I blessed her with a VERY quick hand wave, like instantaneous.

            “That was a microwave,” I said.

            She opined that apparently, because of the date, that was her Pearl Harbour. She never laughed again.

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

            I can’t get through a column without mentioning New Corona Virus COVID-19, so here it is: All through our lives we were told that being positive is a good thing; “be positive throughout your time on this green orb. So what if you just lost $12 billion in the stock market, be positive. Yes, somebody dragged a coin along the side of your Rolls Royce Silver Cloud and shot your favourite dog Rover, so what, be positive.”

            You took a test to get your pilot’s licence and came out with a positive result. Yahoo. Your carpentry work drew positive comments from the homeowner and your proposal of marriage to your favourite girl drew a positive response. “YES!”

            You go in for a COVID test that gets a positive result. Not the answer you wanted. Funny how words work.

            Changing the subject a bit to buying a used car (that is quite a radical change, isn’t it?), I am remembering the time I bought a 1983 Chev Cavalier station wagon from Lenny Barnes of Tinker.

            I don’t know why I absolutely had to have a station wagon, but I was positive. We had one child at the time, in the late 1980s, and we had a baby’s car seat from Hell that we used in our 1978 Plymouth Horizon so it was time we started trying to avoid killing all of us. New car seat.

            It was a good looking car, that Chev Cavalier, but there was one minor problem: its toxicity level was 9.7 on the Menier-Sockwer Scale. It was the car that Lenny used for his own errands and he smoked cigars, and I mean he smoked cigars. Remember that smokestack/furnace that used to be in Stickney? The one that would knock a cat off a gut-cart? Compare Lenny’s cigar smoke with that Stickney smoke and the latter would be like a small birthday candle.

            I happened to be driving in the Tinker area, near the dam, one day when I saw Lenny’s sign and saw that station wagon that I just had to have. I turned around and stopped in to see the car and Lenny, who urged me to take the car out for a spin. I got in, started the car and rolled up the windows. It was a cool day.

            It was a near thing. I coughed, hacked and nearly passed out from the cigar smoke that was clinging to every inch of the car. Rolling down the windows, I managed to take it for a spin over to the dam and back. Except for that slight problem that affected the olfactory senses (my nose and associated cilia and sinus cavities) it was a good car, and Lenny wanted to get rid of it – badly.

            He was asking $2800 and I am not kidding, he finally relented and sold it to me for $1950, cigar smoke free. I gave him a cheque from one of my many accounts and was on my way home to Kincardine. My wife could come up the next day and bring home the Horizon.

            “Find a way to get up there,” I said, “because I refuse to drive that Cavalier until it gets a good airing.” With the baby in her arms, she started hitch-hiking. I parked the Cavalier in the back yard, lowered all the windows, and let it sit there for three days. Luckily, it didn’t rain and there was lots of wind all that time. At the end of three days it was almost driveable.

            A prologue to that story: That car was one of the best secondhand vehicles I have ever owned. We kept it until our third baby arrived and we had very few misadventures with it except that about 1990 it needed a paint job and my elder daughter and I painted it (with a brush) a fiery crimson colour.

            Oh, and one other thing: due to a crossing of signals between my wife and me, we put 17,776 kilometres on one oil change. Like the faithful Model T Ford of the 1920s and 1930s, it just kept purring. I sold it for $400 in 1992 to an older gent (as I remember him; he was five years younger than I am right now) who soon drove it into a concrete abutment near the Johnville Roman Catholic Church.

                                             -end-

Hand me that piano (Dec 10/20)

 

My call is important to them

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            As I write these beautifully crafted words on December 9^th, snow is gently falling on my orchard, the orchard whose 175 trees yielded about twenty apples last summer. The bears, who counted on my windfalls for September/October snacks (leaving the digested meals on the ground) were not impressed with me I’ll tell you.

            New Corona Virus Covid 19 can be blamed for many things, but not this dearth of apples. No, it was two nights of deep frost in late May. It froze the apple blossoms and sometimes even the bees who were attempting to take some nectar back to their hives.

            Why am I talking about all this? I am just pointing out to myself that I – and all of us humans – are as helpless as babies when Mother Nature decides to be a bitch.

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

            Speaking of that virus, I have now come up with a new profession for those who want or have law degrees and much, much patience. The Study of Covid Law could be part of our university curricula, assuming students would be allowed to attend university,

            The downside would be that by the time the student attained this law degree, the pandemic would be over. We would all be vaccinated and waiting expectantly for the next pandemic. Yes, that would be a problem, wouldn’t it?

            The reason I think such a course of study should be started is that no one I know has much of a clue as to what the rules are now. They change every day. Where is “the Fredericton Zone” anyway?

            Our zone, that Fredericton zone, is now an orange one, recently changed from yellow. Or is it that the orange zone has changed to yellow? I know when I go into a store I am obliged to wear a face mask and I do, but what else do I have to do? Wash my hands 27 times a day, and I do, and don’t sneeze even into my own elbow?

            And that’s another thing. I can’t sneeze into my elbow either because I am heavily muscled (not likely!) or because my arm is too short. So do I sneeze into a handkerchief, into my face mask, or into a nearby hydro pole and take a chance on slivers in my nose?

            I just looked up the latest Covid information for New Brunswick and I will report it to you. This is not a joke. “There are 111 Covid cases in New Brunswick,” shrieked one headline, and I almost fell off my barstool. There was no information as to whether this referred to new cases today (as I had first thought) or it was the total number of cases in Bangladesh or what.

            I scrolled down the page to find the next report that said there were eight new cases in New Brunswick. This was the same number as yesterday. Then, farther down the page, was the information that there were only two new cases today, and it said “Saturday”. It actually gave me some specific information.

            Continuing to hope, I peruse every piece of information, but have decided to stay home and eat Kraft Dinner (I have 27 cases of the stuff.) until this is over. Lots of water in the brook, but I will wear my mask when I go to collect it.

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

            Changing the subject and not mentioning the ever-despicable Donald Trump, I was recently pondering the vast number of changes we have welcomed (and sometimes merely endured) over the past few decades.

            This line of thought derives from a 1960s comedy routine by the late George Carlin, who in one of his routines mentioned that there are words and clauses that cannot go together. An example was “Hand me that piano” which couldn’t happen back then because a piano weighed hundreds of pounds. Nowadays we can carry a piano under our arms.

            Note: I would sign an affidavit that no one could hand someone else a piano back then, because when we bought an upright piano in the early 1980s, it took two of us muscular brutes to move it from my pickup truck to our living room, meanwhile gouging the softwood floor in places. My wife’s nephew Curtis and I used every bit of our strength to move it. If someone had set a toothpick or a straw on that piano we would have had to admit defeat.

            More on the things that have changed over the years: I remember conversations with my late Aunt Ella Adams, who was born in 1905, the same year that Albert Einstein published his first papers on the Theory of Relativity.

            I doubt if Auntie thought much about this at that time in Tilley, but there have been a few inventions or developments since then that might have affected the rest of us.

            Car seat warmers – when I get into my Corolla, a little switch turns on a heater underneath my rear end. On a cold day, and we’ll soon see lots of them, it is a great thing. On the other hand, that same car’s windshield doesn’t get its ice melted until I drive about five kilometres. So which would I prefer? A warm bum or a clear windshield so I can see a vehicle driving along Kintore Road, perhaps a transport with a load of logs?

            Voice mail – It is rather frustrating to call, or try to call, a government department, a bank, an insurance company, NB Power, a drugstore or anything else with voice mail and be told that, although my call is important to them (vital in fact), they refuse to talk to me until it’s convenient to them, if ever. 

                                           -end-

Trump really gone? Not a chance (Nov 25/20)

 

We deserve a pat on the back

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            People are being very diligent these days in wearing anti-Covid masks, using hand sanitizers and taking a lot of precautions. I salute them and me.

            It’s no fun walking through stores while wearing a bunch of hardware on one’s face and trying to talk to people and be heard, but it has to be done.

            “Do you have any Kraft crunchy peanut butter?” I might say.

            “Low-salt bacon you say?”

            “No, Kraft crunchy peanut butter,” I might say.

            “This is a grocery store. We don’t carry copper pipe. Try the hardware store.”

            Meanwhile I thought he/she was directing me toward the dairy case. After a while, I found Kraft crunchy peanut butter. I think I did anyway. Is there such a thing as a peanut butter and dill pickle sandwich?

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

            Let’s not get through a column without mentioning the Great Canadian Subject – the weather. I worked for quite a few years at weather stations in what is now Nunavut and what remained Northwest Territories, and always looked back fondly on those years. When I resigned I held $25,000 in bonds and have often kicked myself for walking away from a job that paid well and was so far out in the back of beyond that there was nowhere to spend all that.

            Back to the present, I am baffled about the weather we share today. It was toasty warm for quite a few days in early November, then a cold snap took what remained of my root vegetables, and then we were back in toasty weather. Who’s in charge?

            Last Tuesday morning I arose about 8:00 am to a bright and shining day. A glance at the outside thermometer showed me that I wouldn’t be needing long johns (not to get too personal). I would even be able to rake some leaves and till them into my hopeful 2021 gardens.

            Twenty-four hours later I awoke about the same time and dressed cheerfully. Another nice-looking day! I went outside with the plan to rake some more leaves and work in my orchard. Wrong!

            It was –5º C with a brisk – very brisk – southeast wind. Brass monkey weather. I quickly went inside and put on fourteen layers of long johns, a thick undershirt and whatever clothes I could find including wool socks quarter of an inch thick. Brrrrr!

            Next morning it was +9º C but I didn’t trust the thermometer. Long johns it was. I won’t go on with this, but the point is whoever is in charge of the climate and weather around here is obvious batting above his/her abilities.

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

            In local news, I am quite pleased with the job done on the Perth walkway, formerly known as The Boardwalk.

            When that sidewalk was made mostly of wooden boards and planks and at a cost of $300,000 or so, it was a pleasure to walk on, but after a while, like the rest of us, it started to rot. Now, starting in mid-November, the scenery will once again be great, and the concrete sidewalk probably won’t rot any time soon.

            On some of those warm days I mentioned above, dozens of people have been trying out the new boardwalk. Or should I say “board”walk? Something to do with Covid I think. Get some exercise and maintain social distancing.

            Our province is fighting the good fight in trying to keep down the numbers of people diagnosed with New Corona Virus (one of the alternate names for Covid-19) but I get the sinking feeling that some of their methods are a little weird. We are in the “Fredericton Zone” which extends from Fredericton to Plaster Rock and possibly to Edmundston, depending on which bureaucrat you are listening to at the time.

            A show of hands – what possible use is the information that there is one case in the Fredericton Zone when it could be in Fredericton, Nackawic, Woodstock, Aroostook, St. Andre, St. Leonard or any point in between those places? Seems to me that it would be better to narrow down the locale a lot more so we can be extra protective of ourselves.

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

            Do we get tired of hearing a difficulty described as ‘problematic’? I think I am. Although I am a retired journalist, I blame reporters and others of the so-called Fourth Estate for foisting words and usages on us, the unsuspecting public. We hear “it is symptomatic of” instead of ‘a symptom of’ as if they weren’t the same thing. Something like ‘hot water heater’.

            And then of course this allegedly English phrase ‘he referenced…’ instead of ‘he referred to’. It’s all a bit distressing to someone who had devoted decades to the effort of writing properly constructed English.

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

            I cannot complete this column with some mention of Donald Trump. For almost four years I and other reporters and comedians have made a living reporting on this man’s tweets, blithering, speeches and just general bafflegab and I want to say I will miss him. If the world can reach January 20 without being plunged into a war by this psychotic individual, it will be a miracle.

            Donald Trump is not going to ever admit that he lost the November 3 election by the largest margin ever recorded. In 2016 Hillary Clinton beat him by 3 million votes and this year Joe Biden beat him by six million votes and yet Trump has no intention of stepping down until he is dragged out by his orange ears. What’s scariest of it all is that he received 71 million votes in the recent election and a good many of them are skating across thin mental ice. Let’s wish all Americans and their neighbour – us – the best of luck.

                                      -end-