I am a 72-year-old retired journalist, busy recovering from a lifelong career as an unretired journalist. This year marks a half century of my scratching out little fables about life. My interests include genealogy, humour and music. I live in a little blue shack in Canada and spend most of my time trying to stay out of trouble. I am not that good at it. I also spent years teaching journalism. Poor state of journalism today: My fault. I have a family I don't deserve, a dog that adores me, and two cars the junk yard refuses to accept. My prized possessions include my old guitar and a razor my Dad gave me when I was 14 and which I still use when I bother to shave. Oh, and my great-great-grandfather's blackthorn stick he brought from Ireland in the 1850s. I have only one opinion but it is a good one: People take too many showers.
I’ve played guitar for 45 years but I have never owned a guitar amplifier. That changed a few days ago so today I went out into the garage and plugged it in. I experimented with it, turning all the buttons every which way and checking out the neat sounds it can make.
After a while, I became curious about how loud it would go. So, I cranked it up. All the way. I strummed my guitar strings a few times, didn’t care for the distortion, and shut everything off to take the dog for a walk.
I got three houses away from home and my neighbour came out of his house. “My power just went off,” he said. Another neighbour came out his front door, directly across the street. “Have you got any power over there?” the first neighbour asked him. “Nope,” was the reply.
Then a woman emerged from the house next door. She too had no power. “Have you got any power?” the first neighbour asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “I was just playing my guitar in the garage there and my amp was plugged in.”
Oh, oh.
The report arrived later that almost the whole city had been down for a while.
Oh well. I am hell bent on becoming a rock star and my neighbours are powerless to stop me.
This is turning into my best week ever. First an email announcing a boatload of $7.5 billion in cash deposited in my bank account by Western Union and Mr. Peter Campbell.
And just now I got another email from Justin Alexander with an incredible offer on a new hair restorer product. Two sprays on my scalp and all my hair will regrow in four days. Every last little strand.
I am so glad to be alive in this day and age. Next time you see me walking down the street, I will have a head of hair like Elvis and wads of cash falling from my pockets like Warren Buffett.
If bad things happen in threes, maybe good things do too. Can’t wait to see my third surprise.
My dog Toby is 13 inches high. And I like to sit in a lawnchair in my garage with the door open so I can watch life as it passes by. Toby likes to do that too. However, some of the life that passes by arrives in the form of squirrels, which Toby likes to chase. Sometimes they run right across the street with Toby right behind them. This is a recipe for disaster.
Nothing to do but to build a gate which would go across the garage door opening and keep my critter in. So, I did. First, I measured the height of the dog, then went to the board store. Brought home a bunch of lumber. Toby watched me construct his prison.
The first gate was too high and other family members complained it was too hard to step over when they entered and exited the garage. So, I took it apart. Made another one. A really nice one.
I bought two lengths of lattice and stapled them onto the frame. Then I painted the whole affair blue to match the house. The height was acceptable. I sat down in my chair to watch life go by while Toby sat on the floor beside me.
My neighbour came over to inform me that the dog would easily jump over the fence. My neighbour revels in breaking news like this to me. He would gladly tell me I had a huge whitehead on my nose that was ready to pop and that it looked like hell.
I have not murdered my neighbour yet but only because I haven’t been able to devise a painful enough way to do it. So, my neighbour shambled back to his lookout and I watched Toby as he tried to look through the lattice. I could see that the darned holes were too small and he couldn’t get a very good view of the squirrels he was never again going to chase.
So, I took the gate to the back yard and ripped off the lattice. Went to the board store for some more wood and restyled the whole affair to make it easier for my dog to see all the rodents go flitting by. It seemed to be acceptable so I painted it up.
My neighbour came over to tell me the slats in the new gate were too wide and that Toby would squeeze right through. I calculated that if I squeezed my whitehead at just the right angle, the contents might hit him in the eye.
So, the summer went by and man and dog sat in the garage. I watched the young women from the fitness centre next door jog by in their ponytails and spandex and Toby watched the impudent squirrels scoot across the driveway. Life was good.
Three weeks ago, we were packing up the car for our annual vacation to a hut situated in the middle of a bear compound up north because we don’t want to die natural deaths and as he always does, poor Toby lost his mind. He was sure we were going to leave him behind.
The garage door was open and we all stepped over the gate as we hustled stuff from house to car. I wandered aimlessly with a can of bear repellant in my hand while Toby continued freaking out.
But Toby is a fast learner and he stood in all his panic, watching us step over the gate. And then, in a style reminiscent of every mountain goat that has ever scaled a hillside leaping from rock to rock, Toby backed up, put it into gear and flew over all that lovely painted lumber I had bought at the board store.
Next week, I am putting up an electric fence. Not to keep Toby in. That’s hopeless. To keep my neighbour (and the bears) out.
And once again, I thank the Creator for all the good sense and balanced thinking I was blessed with. And for the joggers from the fitness centre next door.
This is a tale of tragedy, trickery, treachery and maybe even treason. Most of all, betrayal.
You might have to follow the bouncing ball here a bit but I promise I would not relate this story to you unless it was of some vital importance. And I am still a little too emotionally overwrought to write clearly.
Last night my wife and I attended a very nice event and sat down to a wonderful banquet, served at our table which we shared with several others. The most important feature of the meal was the gravy, of course. It is commonly known that if there is no gravy, it is usually not worth the effort to even pick up your knife and fork.
When this wonderful food was consumed and enjoyed, we were advised by the wait staff to hang onto our forks, that we would need them. That is a very encouraging sign at any meal. It means there is dessert on its way. The main course, after all, is just something to get out of the way so that you can have dessert. Tale as old as time.
I need to preface the rest of the story by setting some ground rules. People insist on concocting desserts, pies very often, out of various organic materials that were never intended to be served up to humans as an after-dinner confection. Here are some “foods” that are not suitable for consuming at any time, especially after a meal. Rhubarb tops the list, of course. What depraved person first looked at a rhubarb plant and thought, “That would make an excellent pie.”? Similarly, raspberries, suitable for jam only, are wholly wrong in a pie. Apples are a wonderful fruit but to use them in any way other than their natural form is just wrong.
And, it doesn’t even need to be said, that people who bake pumpkin pies should be incarcerated, hopefully with a breaking rocks schedule added to their sentence specifics.
But the good news is, the humble cherry can be used in any of a hundred ways and not one of them is wrong. The cherry pie is the human’s ultimate achievement, moon landing a distant second place. The first person to ever bake up a cherry cheesecake needs to be given sainthood status by the Pope.
Dessert came.
What the hell?
Two fluffy cake-like affairs that were unidentifiable and it is a truism that if a thing cannot be identified, it should not be consumed. My wife was helpful. The dessert I had been randomly assigned was some sort of rhubarb affair. Oh no! It had a redness to it that was not appealing. Little red things sticking out here and there.
The stranger across the table from me had some other substance. My wife declared that it was an apple cake of some horrific assembly.
“I like rhubarb,” said the man across from me, obviously deranged. He scared me a little.
I generously switched desserts with him. He could have my bloodshot rhubarb disaster and I would take his apple monstrosity. He tore into his newfound gift, I laboured over mine. When he was close to finished, he got a closer look at everything and declared, “Hey, this isn’t rhubarb. It’s cherry!”
I looked more closely at my dessert. There were green things sticking out of it, items that seemed horribly familiar. They were rhubarb chunks.
I had had a wonderful cherry dessert delivered to me and traded it away, on the erroneous information supplied to me by my own wife, for a rhubarb cake.
Here is the definition of hell. You eat a rhubarb cake, feel faint as you most assuredly would, then fall face first into a pumpkin pie. Fortunately, there were no pumpkins involved in this affair. The authorities have been keeping a close watch on the kitchen staff at this place, which has served pumpkin in the past and been warned not to do it again.
As you might expect me to do and will congratulate me for having the courage to do it, I made a big stink right there and then about my betrayal. The display of righteous indignation paid off. There was one more cherry dessert left in the kitchen and it was brought out in a special container and given to me for later.
There was silence between my wife and I all the way home in the car following the dinner. I am hoping we will be speaking again by Thanksgiving.
Well, isn’t that cute, I thought. One of the horses in the race we were betting on was called You Can’t Fix Stupid.
Six of us former college journalism teachers were sitting around a monitor and looking out the big windows at the racetrack, following the excitement and checking our tickets after every race. We had each thrown $20 in a pot and when that was gone, we’d quit betting.
This night, we were doing pretty well. In fact, by Race 5 we were up almost $500.
I’m new to this but nevertheless I was sent up to place our bets for Race 6. I took some money, approached the wicket and carefully placed $24 worth of $2 bets. When the race was over, there was great rejoicing at our table. We had won $499.80.
OMG we’ve made a thousand dollars tonight went the shouts and there were still six races to go.
One of the other teachers grabbed the winning ticket and went to the wicket to collect. He was there a long time and he seemed to be almost arguing with one of the women there. I suggested helpfully that maybe she didn’t have enough cash to pay us. Someone else said he looked like he was negotiating with the clerk.
Finally, he turned and came back to the table with a disgusted look on his face. He tossed the ticket on the table in front of me. “You bet on the wrong race,” he said to me.
It was quiet on the way home, all of us in the car. The only thing that saved me at all was the fact that our winning streak carried on for the rest of the night and we ended up ahead $800.
Nevertheless, there was some suggestion made that I would be left in a cornfield somewhere and the words “hide the body” were also spoken but I am not sure what that was all about. I didn’t want to know. I was grateful it appeared there was no shovel about.
All I do know for sure is You Can’t Fix Stupid didn’t win, place or show, and I felt badly for him as he and I seemed to be kindred spirits that night.
I’ve been around animals all my life, starting with my years growing up on a farm. Surrounded day in and out by four-legged creatures of various species, it’s easy to begin thinking that you know something about animals.
But the more I am around them, the less I think I know. One thing seems certain; they are capable of much more than we give them credit for.
Our old cat Mario (18) and our dog Toby (15) have never gotten along. Over the years, when Toby makes the mistake of getting too close to Mario, he pays for that with a series of sharp smacks to his body, although we noticed as time went on that Mario’s shots rarely found their mark.
But that never stopped Toby from carrying on like he’d just been mauled half to death by a ferocious tiger. He got lots of sympathy. That was the point.
On New Year’s Day, we almost lost Toby. He slipped into some sort of drowsy coma and we rushed him to a clinic for care. He was found to be diabetic and has been treated for that ever since.
But he was gone from our house for four days. Mario wandered the halls alone, having lost his own twin brother a few years ago. When Toby finally came home, he was sleeping on the recliner he loves so much. Mario was on the couch beside me, staring at the dog.
Finally, he jumped down and slowly stalked him.
“Oh, this isn’t going to be good,” I thought.
Up came Mario’s right paw and while it would often descend on the dog in several rapid-fire swats, something was different this night.
Mario put his paw on Toby’s head, patted him gently once, and walked away. The dog slept on.
We think Mario missed his brother from a different mother that has been a part of his life for so long. What must he have thought when, like his real brother Luigi, he suddenly disappeared?
It amazes me what the tee-shirt industry has managed to get away with these past few decades. While virtually no one (except me) was watching, the makers of these classic and simple garments have been steadily shrinking the material they put into them while expanding the designations they assign to their clothing.
I remember, when I was a boy, my earliest tees being sized “small” and even at that, they fit pretty loosely. Then came the mediums, and same thing – hardly snug, just right. But the devious manufacturers began pulling the wool (cotton? polyester?) over our eyes when they began churning out “large” tee shirts.
I swear these newer shirts, in an earlier time, were actually mediums or even smalls, but there I was walking around in large tee shirts which, eventually, somehow, didn’t seem large to me at all. In fact, they felt more like mediums and on hot, humid days, even smalls.
And there were times on hot summer days when I actually needed help to pull these larges up over my head and off my sweaty torso.
The day I put on my first extra large tee shirt was as close as I have ever come to writing a hostile letter to a clothing maker or taking even more drastic action but I was too depressed to do it. The fact is, the extra large shirt fit just fine, which obviously meant that in reality, it was a large or even a medium size. How, I wonder, are these greedy capitalists able to get away with such a swindle?
Finally, on Saturday, I put on a new “two times extra large” tee shirt and I was crestfallen to realize that the Great Tee Shirt Scandal was now tipping in a new direction. Rather than being too small, this darned thing was way too big. I wore it to a family reunion anyway, having nothing else that was clean. Since then, I have seen photos of myself from the event and am shocked to realize that I was wearing not a tee shirt at all but an actual moo moo.
So now, the tee shirt makers are passing off moo moos as tee shirts. And I refuse even to discuss the size designation of “three times extra large”. That one is big enough to do double duty as a barbecue cover.
I hope someday our politicians in Canada, some of whom I swear are possible three times extra large candidates or even four times – yes they exist) will take on the tee-shirt industry. They could at least get them to come up with new designations after large such as “beach size”, “tent”, “blanket”, “moo moo”. At the very least, get rid of that ridiculous “extra” specification. The connotation of that awful descriptive term suggests that the wearer of such a garment is walking around in an “extra large” body, for example.
I have been looking for a cause to champion and realize all the really good ones are gone. With the advent of the tee shirt/beach blanket/moo moo, I think I might have just found the one that suits me to a tee.
This week, Canadian Lawyer magazine published a list of the best and worst judges across the country and editorial writers have been lining up to condemn the legal profession ever since. Judges, the newspapers say, are in the business of dispensing justice. They shouldn’t be involved in popularity contests to win the approval of lawyers.
But maybe we’ve been a little too quick to jump at the throats of the lawyers. Because, after all, they’re about to get as good as they’ve given. Next week’s issue of The Average Joe magazine, coincidentally, will carry an article about the best and worst lawyers in the country. Following is a sample of some the ones the magazine says are the worst.
Mr. Bob N. Weeve
The lawyer who said his client didn’t mean to toss his best friend over Niagara Falls, arguing the accused had been momentarily overcome by an attack of Rushing River Fever, an obscure disease which grips its victims with a terrible urge to throw other human beings into large bodies of water.
Ms. Sue De Panzoffum
The lawyer who acknowledged that, yes, her client did confess to stealing 47 television sets during a one-night wild spree of break-ins, but who went on to argue that when he was a boy, his parents abused him by denying him his own television in his bedroom. He finally snapped and was simply acting out the juvenile anger brought about by this childhood deprivation and which had been festering inside him all these years.
Ms. Bea Leevit-Iffucan
The lawyer who said that, incredible as it may seem, her client was indeed sleepwalking when he got up in the morning, went downtown and bought a gun, hijacked a bus, shot up the town, took four hostages, burned down city hall, stole a car and smashed into the mayor’s house, finally waking up in the cruiser on the way to the police station and saying, “Hey, wait a minute. What’s going on here?”
Mr. I. Deltok
The lawyer who said that, while it was certainly a rotten shame that Junior had blasted Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, Sis, Rover and his poor Aunt Bessie out of their beds in the middle of the night, to punish the unfortunate, misunderstood lad for his one, momentary mistake might rob him forever of the feelings of dignity and self-worth which he would need in his struggle to carve out a useful life for himself.
Mr. Bill E. Dinghart
The lawyer who said it was pretty evident to him that most of the people with whom young Brutus Bilgewater had had anything to do with in the past five years before he blew up the courthouse had been guilty of name discrimination. Studies show, the lawyer said, that less than one-tenth of one percent of all jobs in Canada are held by people named Brutus and an astonishing 99.9 per cent of all jobs are held by people of other names. Quotas are needed, he said, so that by the year 2000, every employer with more than 10 employees has at least one Brutus on staff.
On the bright side, the best lawyer award went to Ms. Dawn Toourth, the solicitor who told her clients to quit their scrappin’, forget about suing each other into the poorhouse and go home and grow up.
At least that’s what she told me when I wanted to sue my neighbour who I saw peeing behind his shed in broad daylight, thereby robbing me of my ability to enjoy my property and probably contaminating the groundwater in the area.
I really thought $50 million might ease the distress.
I have mentioned before that I know exactly how I will die someday. The last image I see will be the big ugly face of an angry bear. I am deathly afraid of bears and they say that what we fear we attract, so I am doomed.
But I was reminded today that there may be an alternative exit waiting for me.
My neighbour asked me to come over to his house and replace a light switch. I am as qualified to do electrical work as Donald Trump is to run a country, but I am nothing if not up for a challenge. I told him to make sure the power was off.
I showed up for the job with wire stripper in one hand and needlenose pliers in the other. I wanted to show my neighbour the awesomeness of my electrical skills. Ten seconds into the job, the one strand of hair that is left on my head stood straight up, my eyes turned into lasers and I could see right through the wall. I also broke into song – the Polish National Anthem, I believe it was.
The hydro was still on. Oops.
Undaunted, we finally found how to turn the power off for real and I finished the job. Funny thing though. I went to put a frozen meat pie in the oven for supper but after holding it in my hand for 30 seconds, it was done.
This is the fourth time I have electrified myself over the years. I am starting to think it’s good for me. I feel completely energized afterwards. Seems to jazz up my heart. And I can read in bed after dark without turning on the light. So that’s a bonus.
In light of all this, this is the likely outcome: I will be electrifying myself by accident some day with more juice than I can handle when a murderous bear will break in just at that moment.
I went for my daily walk yesterday morning and had a few things on my mind. I can’t remember what things, exactly, but I know one thing that I wasn’t thinking about when I left the house. I had absolutely no plan to get more furniture for the rec room.
Along the streets I walked, turned a corner and there they were: Four, perfectly good, solid wooden TV tables, all standing in a wooden case. Interesting. As I was looking them over, Frank, the crossing guard, who was sitting in his car nearby, said, “If you want ’em you better take them ’cause I’m going to throw them in my trunk when my shift is over.”
“You can have them,” I said, nervously.
Then I continued my walk, and this thought began to obsess me. I had to have those tables. Had to. The thought that Frank was going to get them started driving me crazy. As I walked, I pictured two futures: one with the tables and one without and believe me, the one that included those tables was much preferable to the one without.
I picked up my pace and was practically running by the time I hit my driveway. I ran into the house, grabbed my keys, drove the van like crazy over to the street with the tables and raced down there. Frank’s car was still there, but he wasn’t inside. I couldn’t see, couldn’t see, are they, what is that?
YES!
No one anywhere on Earth at that moment was happier than I was as I loaded them into the van. Funny how something I didn’t even know existed 10 minutes before became the whole focus of my existence until they were safely tucked away in my garage.
Next year, they’ll be sitting out at our curb with a “free” sign on them.
I bet Frank comes by and gets them. I just bet he does.
