a5

By Robert LaFrance

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

Speak Up

Many years ago I laughed at a standup routine by the late comedian Rodney ("Don't get no respect") Dangerfield who was talking about a cousin giving him directions to a house in a rural area. That sketch came back to me day before yesterday when I heard Mrs. Fred Albury tell Wayne Kleberson how to get to her cottage where he was to deliver a refrigerator.

"You drive up the Tobique until you see the place where Gary Henderson has the Christmas trees, but they're not there any more because he sold them to some people in Florida and they cut them all down. There's two houses there now - one of them red, and the other one - blue? I can't remember. Anyway, you'll likely see some kids playing by a swing set. No, wait a minute, I think that family moved and an old couple moved in."

"Which side of the Tobique are you talking about?" asked Wayne when she finally paused for a quick breath.

She looked at him as if he had just emerged from under the fence built around the Lutes Mountain Home for the Criminally Insane. "Well, the side where Sharon Smythe had that flat tire in 2006," she explained, as if to a rather slow-witted aardvark. "You must remember that, and it's also where the late Ethel Bunkum and her brother built that takeout back in the Eighties and sold it the next year because of her sciatica. Poor dear, she suffered with that, and her brother so lazy he wouldn't lift his hand unless there was a drink in it."

"I'm still not quite sure - " interrupted Wayne. By this time I, although a Victoria County resident for half a century, was just as bewildered.

"All right," Mrs. Fred Albury said in an exasperated tone, annoyed at the stupidity of the younger generations. Wayne is a mere 41. "I will start again." By the way, in case I get aggrieved letters from certain battalions still fighting the gender war, the lady insists on being called Mrs. Fred Albury and not by her given name Corinthonia. Go figure.

"Pretend you are at Carolyn's Takeout in Perth," she continued, as if to that aardvark, only this time as if he were in the mental range of Peter Griffin of the show ‘Family Guy'. He's the one who looked into his bowl of Cheerios and thought it was sending him the message "oooooooooo".

"From the takeout you go past where Baird's Restaurant used to be back in the 1960s, then past Sadler's Gift shop and up the hill to the right past where Wright and Everett's was and up that way. You keep going past where they fixed that pothole in the Gulch Road that time and up through Craig's Flat past Quaker Brook where they fixed that turn. I remember that turn well, because Mr. Fred Albury, my late husband, slid off the road with his Packard and he had to call Bertha Backmain's husband, also named Fred, to haul him out with his Oliver tractor."

At this point Wayne's eyes had crossed and he was looking like that deer I saw in my orchard last fall one evening I happened to be out strolling around midnight with my 6-cell flashlight and my 30-30 for protection.

It was time for me to step in and clear things up for good old Wayne. "Does Wayne go all the way to Arthurette?" I asked her, "and does he cross the bridge?"

"Why of course he crosses the bridge," she snapped. "How else would he get to Rowena?"

"But wouldn't it be easier - and shorter, and quicker - to go up Highway 105 from Perth and stay on it until he gets to Rowena?"

After six decades, I finally knew what a ‘basilisk stare' was. It was that look Mrs. Fred Albury was giving me. As far as she was concerned, that aardvark I mentioned had an IQ around the 135 mark. Not a genius, but certainly PhD material. "That road is closed," she said. "We who live in Rowena have to travel to Perth by way of Arthurette if we don't want to go all the way up to Brooks Bridge." She fixed me with Part B of that stare: "Don't you realize there is water over the road where the late Abner Paul had his Tobique Wigwam? I heard the announcement on the radio while I was visiting Mrs. Gwendolyn Smith-Jones-Dafinski. She and Samuel live in the old white house in Tilley where one of the Plant brothers used to live."

To make a long story slightly less long, I finally persuaded Mrs. Fred Albury that the road had only closed a few days in late April but was now passable; I also finally discovered the civic number of her house in Rowena.

When she had happily gone with the assurance that the refrigerator would arrive that afternoon, I said to Wayne: "Don't forget now, just past where the old sawmill used to be, only on the right." I didn't know I could run that fast.

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

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