Canada Is Weird!

Monday is Canadian Thanksgiving.  It’s just the same as American Thanksgiving (turkey and everything) except we don’t celebrate it on the same day because – uh – we don’t have to.  So there!  And that kinda sums up Canada.  In the great scheme of things, we’re a nation like everybody else: we sit in the halls of power, we make treaties, run a decent international economy, send athletes to the Olympics, bitch about China and all the other stuff normal countries do, but … back home, we’re weird.  Here are just a few examples.

Canada is a bilingual country which means people here speak both French and English.  We don’t! The truth is, way back when (just so people would quit yipping about it) English-speaking Canadians promised to learn French in school and never think about it again (kinda like algebra) and French-speaking Canadians promised to continue speaking French.  As a result, the only truly bilingual Canadians are flight attendants and the woman who answers the phone for the federal government.   

For 30 years the CFL (Canadian Football League) had two teams with the same name – the Ottawa Rough Riders and the Saskatchewan Roughriders.  When they played against each other it was practically impossible to tell who was winning.

We have this huge area that is still called the Northwest Territories.  It’s as if we showed up there sometime in the Age of Discovery, couldn’t think up a decent name and then just forgot about it for 200 years.

Canadians hold their hockey commentators to a higher standard than their politicians.  Last year, a hockey commentator, Don Cherry, was filmed pointing his finger and saying “you people.”  He was fired within 24 hours.  Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was photographed in “blackface” — not once, not twice, but on three separate occasions.  He was not fired; he was not even asked to resign; in fact, he was re-elected!

Canadians are polite.  We’re not!  Yeah, we say “sorry” all the time, but all that actually means is we haven’t got time for your bullshit, so we’ll just give you this fake apology and move on.  Plus it’s a sneaky way to get a high ranking on all those idiot “Best Places on the Planet to Live” surveys.

You can buy marijuana pretty much anywhere in the country, but you can’t buy a bottle of wine anyplace but a designated liquor store.

Canada, like 99% of the world (I’m lookin’ at you, America) uses the metric system.  However, our athletes are still measured in feet and inches, our golf courses are measured in yards, and there isn’t a soul in this country who knows what a hectare is.  On the bright side, for six months of the year, it’s so cold it doesn’t matter whether we give the temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit.

Our currency is called the loonie because our dollar coin has a loon on it.  (Oddly enough, our two-dollar coin, which has a bear on it, is not called a bearie.)  Anyway, international money managers must laugh themselves stupid whenever they’re told the Canadian Loonie is “unstable” or “fluctuating wildly.”

All time zones in the world are based on the hour — except for one: the Canadian province of Newfoundland which runs on the half hour.  And, BTW, it’s pronounced “Nufenland” – all one word, as if you’re in a hurry.

Since 1973 (47 years!) Canada has been in a border dispute with Denmark.  Both countries claim sovereignty over Hans Island in the Arctic Ocean.  However, rather than dig in and start shooting, whenever the Canadian military shows up on the island (Rumour has it they phone ahead) they take down the Danish flag, fold it neatly at the base of the pole and raise the Canadian flag.  They also leave a “Welcome to Canada” sign and a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey.  The Danish military does the same, except they leave a bottle of Schnapps.  When you’ve got civilized countries, who needs the United Nations?

But the weirdest thing about Canada is our schizophrenic attitude towards the United States.  On the one hand, we think of them as our best friends.  For example, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Canada was the first country to declare war on Japan — even before America itself!  There’s also the Iranian hostage crisis (Ben Affleck got that seriously wrong) and the Canadian response to 9/11 (They even wrote a musical about that!) and a ton of other stuff.  We vacation in America, we work there and thousands of us live there (including me, for a while.)  We’re basically North American siblings (English mother/father unknown.)  However, ask any Canadian about America and we come totally unglued: “OMG!  It’s like livin’ above a crack house, a biker bar, Westboro Church and a redneck trailer park — all at the same time.”  Then we’ll recite a litany of advantages to being Canadian — starting with the War of 1812 and ending with gun control and Universal Health Care — and the only reason we ever stop is we gotta pack cuz we’re taking the kids to Disneyland.

Autumn — Part 3

When you’re just past forty and ex-husband/childless, you take October seriously.  It’s time to haul out the big socks, buy a few books and start planning the excuses to avoid Thanksgiving with the family.  It’s time to shop – for dinner party wine and those old-fashioned Christmas cards because it’s fun to be the old-fashioned aunt.  It’s time to go back to the park – crisp-cold and quiet.  Walk home in the dark.  And make all-day Sunday soup that simmers the entire apartment until the guests arrive.  It’s time to hide the summer clothes and put a tea towel over the bathroom scales and think about yoga – in January.  It’s time to devour pages of Nordic detectives, deep into the twilight of an early afternoon.  It’s time to drink kick-off-your-heels tea and check what’s on TV.  It’s time to take your lunch in a thermos and go for drinks after work and fend off well-meaning blind dates.  It’s not that she didn’t like well-meaning blind dates; they were fun, too.  But when one turns into two and two turns into more, it’s better to move on before normal turns into a nuisance.  The truth was she had no intention of taking on the open-ended responsibility of making someone else happy, because she was already happy, perfectly content to be covered by her own life like a cozy knitted afghan thrown over her shoulders.  Content to choose her own friends, never wash anybody else’s underwear or negotiate what to have for dinner – especially on the nights when it was going to be sweatpants and ice cream and Rosamund Pike.  She was content to do what she wanted, when she wanted — without lame explanations or nagging regrets.    

Of course, she did have some regrets.  She’d gone to university like all the women in her family and had had high expectations.  She thought it would be nice to live in a retro-poor apartment with too many stairs and a cat named Sniffles.  Maybe have some adventures.  Maybe be seduced by a poet who would leave her broken when he went back to his own bohemian tribe.  Then collect all his verses and put them in a shoebox at the back of the closet for her children to find.  But instead, she’d settled for four years in a dorm room — plastic and new — and sex with a waiter, a boyfriend and Rachel’s brother Danny (but she’d married him, so that didn’t count.)  She did have a shoebox, though, but there were no secrets in it and no children to find it, so….  Sometimes, she thought she should regret the years of her marriage – but she never did.  It had been serious and it had been fun, and she hadn’t overstayed her welcome, moving on before she’d completely lost herself in their married routines.  Although she did wish she’d taken the bread maker – that would have been nice.  But she was young then and unaware that, after some months alone, on a chilly kick-leaf October morning, she’d fall in love with her own future, and, like a fairytale princess, live happily ever after.

Autumn — Part 2

Photo – Carolyn Bourcier

Somewhere in a slate grey morning, fog-deep in the quilts and pillows, they decided to be friends.  It was in the middle of her Vonnegut years, (so there was that) but mostly it was a hedge against the growing November darkness.  She secretly vowed to learn how to cook (but didn’t mean it) and he considered writing poetry (but didn’t do it.)  Mostly, it was buttoned-up coats and kicking leaves, and once, they got lost in their own town when they went walking without watching.  Sometimes, they dreamed of dusty old bookshops full of dusty old books with finger-worn pages and faded covers, and they wondered how romantic that would be.  But she had a library card, and it was three stops on the bus, so they spent their Saturdays curled in the bedroom, reading books they didn’t have to search for.  There was an old-fashioned restaurant, though, with bow-tied waiters and empty tables, that turned the lights on in the late afternoon.  It was on the way home, so they would stop there and have hot soup or old world meat pies.  Sometimes, they would bring their own candles and would order one dessert with two forks and drank wine — so they could explain things to each other.  And that was romantic enough for them.  Along the way, he taught her French (because that’s what he did) and she taught him numbers (because that’s what she loved.)  After a while, they decided they liked walking in the rain and, forever after, looked forward to cloudy days.  Once she went home for her brother’s wedding, and the sun shone large and cold every day, and he missed her and slept on her side of the bed.  She brought him back a piece of the cake with a squashed red rose on it.  She said she was sorry for squashing the rose, so he ate it to be polite.  One Sunday, they decided to go to church (just in case) and one night, for no reason they could remember, they ended up listening to French jazz in a damp basement club.  Occasionally, they would have other adventures as well, but they both knew they mostly preferred buttoned-up coats and walking in the rain – so that’s what they mostly did.  Even after she got over Kurt Vonnegut and got a job teaching mathematics; even after they moved to a bigger apartment; even after they were married and had children and bought a car and had to cut the grass and had regular vacations; even after the years scattered behind them like autumn leaves in the November breeze.  Even after all that, the thing they loved the most was buttoned-up coats and walking in the rain — because one slate grey morning, fog-deep in the quilts and pillows, they decided to be friends.