My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny

By Robert McBryde

Featuring personal tales originally prepared for a radio audience, My Time With You Has Been Short But Very Funny is infused with frenetic humour along with undertones of wistfulness and edgy sadness. In a series of sketches spanning two continents and seven decades, the author introduces readers to a rollicking cast of characters from everyday life, including the iconic Pesticide Pete and Barbecue Billy, as well as a series of off-kilter incidents, both hilarious and disquieting. Sometimes compared to David Sedaris for his snarky autobiographical satire, Robert McBryde is most of all a manic master of self-deprecation whose sketches will induce cackling, and perhaps a few tears.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Sep 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781779410696

Robert McBryde

A geezer launching his first book, tossed like a message in a bottle into an uncharted turbulent sea, Robert McBryde is a professional translator with a master's degree in English literature and a passion for the arts of the stage. A product of Toronto, Ontario, educated in both Canada and Switzerland, he taught literature and theatre at the junior college level in Quebec City for 35 years and worked as a writer/ broadcaster for CBC radio for 10 years, honing his storytelling skills through a weekly recounting of absurd yet poignant tales of everyday life, which a number of listeners urged him to publish. Crafted in his current home in Dijon, France, My Time With You Has Been Short But Very Funny is a belated response to those requests, and includes an array of other humorous and quirky sketches besides. Awarded the Most Embarrassing Winter Garb Award in perpetuity by his offspring, along with a gold medal for the weirdest accent in a foreign language, Robert McBryde has turned to storytelling for solace. He hopes that his two sons, who figure prominently in these narratives, will not find his tales to be flat seltzer.

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My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny

Copyright © 2023 by Robert McBryde

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-1-77941-070-2 (Hardcover)

978-1-77941-068-9 (Paperback)

978-1-77941-069-6 (eBook)

978-1-77941-800-5 (Audiobook)

For Anne, Dan, and David with all my love and gratitude

Everything is funny; the greatest earnestness is funny; even tragedy is funny. And I think what I try and do in my [writing] is to get this recognizable reality of the absurdity of what we do and how we behave and how we speak. – Harold Pinter

Table of Contents

Short but very funny

Radio daze

The Russians are coming

Bringing up our wedding

This is your Father

I swear… I’m going to Hell!

Mythic family figures

Reigning cats…and dogs

Unsafe at any speed

Christmas tears

Being alone with Dad

Bully for you

Up Yer Kilt

Choosing the right club

Excremental vision

Them’s the breaks

Noisy neighbours

Excuse my French

Butting in and butting out

Fragments April 2020

Perturbations and social movements

We’re so sorry Uncle Albert

Acknowledgements

About the author

The end is in the beginning

Short but very funny

Even before my Slovak father in law reached my age, he would repeat with ritualistic regularity, In a short time I be dead. (Za krátky čas budem mŕtvy.)

This refrain has become especially meaningful for me over the last three or so years, and particularly since I reached the age of 70. The surreal dystopia that suddenly emerged full-blown from the depths of a preternatural realm of nightmare in March 2020 has served to foreground the haunting fragility and evanescence of life itself.

These days, each time that I listen to a favourite piece of music, re-watch a beloved film, or re-read a personally meaningful book or article, I’m acutely aware that this may be the last time around. A bizarre and unsettling experience, which is both profound and strangely banal.

Memories are of course consciously prompted by a sort of mental rewind button, or arrive on their own, stimulated by sights, sounds, or smells. Rewinding memories is part of my ritualized last lap.

I once had a student who wrote at the end of term, My time with you has been short, but very funny. A fitting title – and epitaph – to share with you.

Dijon, France, July 2023

Radio daze

The phone call came as a bolt from the icy blue on that frigid Monday afternoon in March of 1987. The afternoon show producer from the CBC radio community network in Quebec City rang to inquire if I would be interested in doing a weekly arts and movie roundup on his program. It will be more of a look-ahead than an update, he explained helpfully, while also informing me that the previous reviewer had dried up, suffering from the on-air equivalent of terminal stage fright. The producer had heard a few interviews that I had done about theatre productions at my Quebec City college and decided that he wanted to slam me right into the programming breach.

So began my ten-year love affair with broadcast storytelling.

A couple of days later, I met with the producer, a rattled, chain-smoking chap with the wonderfully apt name of Martin Stringer, at the CBC studios, which at that time were located in the basement of the Hôtel des Gouverneurs in downtown Quebec City. The premises of this august branch of Canada’s national broadcaster were a stinky, fuggy, cluttered locus for rumpus, with harried employees beetling about the cubicles, looking dog-tired as they emerged from the billowing tobacco smoke that enveloped their nether realm. Pensively puffing his trademark coffin nail, Martin immediately apologized for the miasmic stench – other than the cigarette smoke – that permeated the workplace, claiming that unidentified vile odours had infiltrated the studios from the hotel on high. We’re on it though, he added confidently. The CBC brass has instructed us to keep a smell log.

With the prevailing stench now thoroughly explained, Martin turned to the business at hand. We cover the entire province of Quebec except for Montreal, so every Friday afternoon, you’re going to look ahead and update all the major museum exhibits, plays, and movies taking place across our entire network. Then he handed over a file folder brimming with phone numbers and press releases and specified that I would have to choose the most enticing events, contact sources by phone, and write my own script, complete with questions for the program host, on these yellow paper pads replete with carbon paper for copying making.

I soon realized that in order to provide entertaining and informative updates, invention and guile were the order of the day. Taking my cue from those mythic early broadcasters of baseball games, who concocted play-by-play accounts from ticker tape feeds, I described productions and exhibits in faraway locations as though I had attended them, dazzled and enthused. My first accomplice in this state-of-the-arts subterfuge was a wonderfully witty host and writer- broadcaster, to whom I confided my impossible update mandate. Not a problem, he declared. Just fire up the bullshit bazooka and program it to fine mist.

As Leonard Cohen once said about the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, This was a universe I understood thoroughly and I began to pursue it.

The young researchers and writer broadcasters that I worked with had all sorts of heterodox duties. Soon after I began to crank out the updates, the brilliant host and writer-broadcaster Bill Brown and his incisive and clever colleague Marcel Calfat were tasked with disposing of the executive producer’s deceased dog, Muggins, whose corpse they lugged to the south shore community of Charny, the rigors of rigor mortis notwithstanding, to be melted in the soap factory of that charnel house town.

In keeping with such versatility as the station required, I eventually became a fill-in host, deriving particular pleasure from spicing up stock market reports (which were soon discontinued) and especially weather forecasts. The icy fang and churlish chiding of the winter’s wind will bite and blow upon the community of Sept-Îles, I would intone, shamelessly plagiarizing Shakespeare…. until higher-ups in the CBC hierarchy told me to cut the crap.

During its all-too-brief summer season, the province of Quebec plays host to a vast array of festivals. With a kind, gentle, and patient producer, Glenn Wanamaker, I criss-crossed the vast territory of the community network, interviewing playwrights and performers, before focusing on the Quebec City summer festival, during which we interviewed a wide assortment of geriatric hippie performers and drug-addled rock and rollers. Quebec City has always been the last refuge of retro.

I had to learn to conduct ingratiating interviews and, most harrowing of all, to cut and splice tape, condensing 45-minute conversations into a series of 5-minute reports and 30-second sound bites. In those days, program material was edited using a razor blade and scotch tape and I have the small-muscle capacities of a 400-pound gorilla. But the CBC sound technician of the day, Alain Gariépy, a hail and hearty fellow with no shortage of self-confidence, had little pity for my Herculean struggles with that primitive precursor of cut and paste. Everything can be learned, Bobby, he asserted. Even humility, Alain? replied a waggish colleague, Patricia Field, who was witness to my gory finger-slicing tribulations.

Eventually I discovered my radio niche…or, more precisely, had it thrust upon me. When serving as a replacement host, I would occasionally recount anecdotes about my family and the absurdities of our life in the Quebec City suburbs. A producer, Hardeep Dhaliwal, suggested that this ad hoc storytelling be turned into a weekly chronicle, which her successor, the puckish Jill Walker, endorsed and encouraged. And so it was that I had the immense privilege of working with the afternoon host of Breakaway, the irrepressible Jacquie Czernin, who introduced me as Breakaway Bob and read the scripted questions that I prepared for her as though they had popped spontaneously and full-blown into her own head. To quote Leonard Cohen once again, Jacquie was born with the gift of a golden voice and she used this liquid asset to seduce everybody and everything; children, domestic animals, inanimate objects, folks of all ages, shapes, sizes, and genders, and the entire spectrum of listeners, including the most invasive and bizarre, were well and truly smitten.

My favourite Jacquie story was told by eye-witness Bill Brown. The program used to have regular ticket giveaways, as radio stations are wont to do, and the lucky winners would often clamber into the studio to pick up their precious loot. One such fortunate listener was greeted by Jacquie, who immediately began to warble mellifluously, sharing with the visitor the minutia of her day. "I didn’t manage