A5

By Robert LaFrance

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

Speak Up

I have used the phrase ‘Quick summer observations' to describe this column and, by gar, they'll have to be quick. It's only been about two weeks since the snow was as high as an elephant's eye (To borrow a phrase from the musical ‘Oklahoma') so I mustn't tarry or the ‘Jan'war winds' (This one borrowed from Robbie Burns) will be winding around my lower back extremities, as it were. I thought about putting off this column until next week's paper, but sooner or later a man has to step up to the plate, take a slapshot, and put the horseshoe through the hoop for a touchdown.

The first thing I want to comment on is this business of ‘wishing our lives away' as Grampy the Sage used to say. We all seem to be careening toward our next event; I mentioned the past winter and that was a great example. Instead of enjoying a New Brunswick winter (and how!), we were almost all wishing spring and Mayday would arrive. Instead it was ‘m'aidez!' as we were treated to yet another storm, sometimes two in a day, until about mid-May.

Living in the country, we have various burglar alarms, some painful, and last week we discovered we had yet another living creature - besides the dog Kezman whom we only feed on even days - to guard the joint. My wife was just walking into the shed when she got stung by two hornets. I made a close (binocular) examination of the area where she'd been walking and found that under our shed step was a fine healthy nest of yellowjackets. And were they angry! It reminded me of the time I arrived home at 4:00 am from an 8:00 pm two-hour evening meeting at the club, but that's another story.

Last Christmas I received a Tilley hat - no doubt made in that community where I was born - and someone told me it must have cost around a hundred dollars. Of course the first time I went to the club while I wore the hat the boys gave me a hard time about it. Ed Keane the bartender said I should leave the hat on because that way my head would finally be worth a 3-figure dollar value.

In one of the few blistering hot and humid days we had this summer, I was uptown and sweating profusely in the parking lot of the grocery store when a few pals (liars) came by. We talked about this and that and we sweat until finally I said I had to get inside out of the swelter. I didn't need any groceries, but decided to go into the air conditioned grocery store and buy a litre of milk or something. It was crowded and contained a lot of riffraff; pretty much every member of the club was there including me. Quickly finding the milk - it was in with the dairy products for some reason - I paid for that and went outside where it seemed hotter than ever. "It wouldn't hurt to get another litre of milk," I said to myself, and finding no argument there, went back into the store. An hour later I was on my way home with $107.21 worth of food including $20 worth of quahogs.

There's a television commerical in which people who seem to be rather hard up for something to do take a pizza out of their oven in full view of the other brilliant person in the room who then tastes it and pronounces it not Delissio but ‘delivery'. As one who has had delivery pizza from Antigonish to Inuvik to Victoria, I can say that sometimes delivery pizza tastes as if it had been recovered from a wagon rut. I recall with not many fond memories the first time I ordered pizza over the phone in Vancouver. Little did I know that at that time the only pizzas available in Vancouver were made by Greeks. I had never before eaten a pizza made without tomato sauce, and the crust tasted as if it had been made in the kitchens of Firestone.

Cars sold nowadays, including the one we now have and can't afford, have something called ‘keyless entry'. I called Toyota and asked someone called Rashid O'Reilly why they use the name they do. "First of all," I said first of all, "it can't be called ‘keyless' since the buttons are on a key, and second, it's not ‘entry' but ‘unlocking', so you're zero for two."

It didn't do any good. His first language was apparently Spandex.

Somebody at the club was talking ecology when old Schadenfreude roared "ecological horse manure!" Flug said: That could be, but only if the horse manure is on the garden and not on your chesterfield.

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

Bob's website: http://personal.nbnet.nb.ca/lafrance/index.htm