Happy birthday, Canada. Squeaked through another year, didn’t we?
With Canada Day falling on Saturday—the perfect setup for a three-day weekend—by the time you read this, most of the grocery stores in town will be sold out of hotdogs, burgers and the buns in which to hold them. Every campsite and picnic table within a two-hour drive will be taken and, once again, there will be no national pride parade through the village to spoil the holiday.
Why? The reasons, or reasoning, is a bit murky. Supply-chain problems, staffing problems, municipal staff too busy figuring out new ways to squeeze fees, fines and taxes out of us—and with the announced higher costs to spend eternity in Whistler’s cemetery, they’ve even upped the cost of dying—or just a general sense of anomie has led to the cancellation of Saturday’s parade.
Or maybe there was a rip in the temporal fabric at muni hall and they just forgot it was coming up until it was too late.
It brings to mind my brother’s faux pas one Valentine’s Day. Being, for reasons that escape me, a hockey fan—they escape me because other than me he has no connection to Canada and he lives in the desert—he had two tickets to the Coyotes game. On Feb. 14. He planned to go with a buddy. Until his wife informed him the 14th was Valentine’s Day.
The smart move would have been to claim temporary amnesia, give the tickets away and quickly whip up something suitably romantic... perhaps staying home and watching the game on TV. Did he? No. Perhaps conflating Valentine’s Day with Easter, he said, “How am I supposed to know what day it falls on?”
When it was explained the day wasn’t, in fact, a moveable feast, he backpedalled, cancelled his buddy and took his wife to the game. I guess that counts for something. More than the lame excuses we’ve heard about why the Canada Day parade was cancelled.
But let us be positive, if for no other reason than to not further upset our visitors who can’t find hotdogs at the store.
I am, and have been for some time now, Canadian. Which is to say I’m no longer American. I never imagined when I moved to Canada it would become my forever home. I’d have scoffed at the suggestion. Actually, I’d probably not have responded at all, because it was -40 C outside when I moved to Canada. I’d never experienced -40 C, but I knew that was the point where it didn’t matter whether it was measured in Celsius
or Fahrenheit. Cold is cold.
But I found some alluring things in Canada. The first thing I liked about Canada when I moved here 50 years ago was stubby beer bottles. You remember them, don’t you? Short, squat, brown, no neck to speak of. All beer, at least in Quebec, came in them. All the breweries used them. It didn’t matter which beer had been previously bottled in them when it came time for a refill. Some of them were so old they looked like pieces of glass that had been drifting in the ocean for years and had washed up on shore, sandblasted and opaque. The only difference between one beer and another, to my uneducated palate, was the label on the bottle.
So environmentally friendly. So easy to recycle. I thought it was Canadian brilliance. I didn’t realize it was just an outward manifestation of the fact Canadian brewers were way behind the curve when it came to product differentiation. When they finally figured out how infatuated people were with different shapes and colours of bottles, stubbies disappeared. But I let that slide. I was still impressed.
I was overwhelmed by Canadian optimism. Every single person who I met who’d been born here was unerringly optimistic. I realized this during the first month I was in Montreal. That would be the month it was -40 C. To a person, every Canadian, upon stepping out of their heated homes into the deep freeze would, within about 10 seconds, say, “It’s not so cold out.”
I thought they were a hearty breed. Hearty and optimistic. Slowly I came to realize they were either slow to register just how bone-chilling cold it was or, and I suspect this was the case, they simply lived in denial, waiting for the week they’d too fly somewhere south to the sun and warmth, unwilling to vocalize their enduring despair of winter.
Yet, even in those sub-arctic temperatures, Canadians dutifully lined up—queued, as I learned—in an orderly single file for busses. Shifting from frozen foot to equally frozen foot, they waited patiently, mumbling, “Not so cold,” to no one in particular. I thought it was quaint, until a precocious 12-year-old poindexter in posh, private school uniform let me know I shouldn’t be wandering around but, instead, patiently keep my place in the queue. I suggested he might benefit from more bran in his diet. He didn’t understand what that had to do with anything.
I experienced several things later that first year I’d never imagined possible and learned a great deal about the spirit, grit and collective weirdness of the people who, even after conducting an investigation into my background, had welcomed me into their country. I watched grown men gather around a barbecue and diligently sear hamburgers and hotdogs to the point of immolation… notwithstanding a persistent drizzle of rain that threatened to douse their coals. I nearly froze to death—on the first day of July! I listened with rapt fascination to a group of intelligent people earnestly discuss what it means to be Canadian, without ever reaching a conclusion. I saw a woman eat a hamburger with a fork and knife. I exploded my first “safety” firework. I was admonished with ostracizing stares when I yelled loudly at an umpire at an Expos’ game.
But even with all that, I still imagined my stay in Canada wouldn’t be a lifelong adventure. It wasn’t until my second year in Canada I began to realize I might never leave. Ironically, the defining moment in what would become my pathway to Canadianness had nothing whatsoever to do with Canada.
It was the election of Ronald Reagan as president of the U.S.
It was, what I thought at the time, a low point for the country. Were I prone to nostalgia, I’d probably paint it with the soft light of the good old days, given all that has followed.
So parade or no parade, local or visitor, Canadian or other, Saturday we’re all Canadians. And we have much to celebrate... even though we lose sight of it with all that’s going on.
