"You know that these two nations [England and France] have been at war over a few acres of snow near Canada, and that they are spending on this fine struggle more than Canada itself is worth." - Voltaire, "Candide"

"We tended to imagine Canada as a kind of vast hunting preserve convenient to the United States." - Edmund Wilson, "O Canada"

"'I'm world-famous,' Dr. Parks said, 'all over Canada.'" - Mordecai Richler, "The Incomparable Atuk"

    There are 1405 pages in my copy of "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations" yet the above are the only references to my pleasant neighbor to the north that I can find.  Spread evenly, that's roughly 0.002135231 references to my pleasant neighbor per page.  In contrast, there are no fewer than 136 references to England, the English, and Englishmen despite England's being more than 28 times farther away from me than Canada is. 
    It's things like this that convince me that the world is mad. 
     I mean, just imagine how many things people would be saying about you or me if we took up 3,851,809 square miles and had over 30 million people living on our surface (plus another few thousand darting above us in planes that make noise).  Certainly more than 3 of those things would be quotable!  
     Why, Yogi Berra alone merits 7 quotes and he's not even a tenth as fertile as the plains of Saskatchewan!!

     This state of affairs has bothered me for a long, long time, but it is especially bothering me now because my wife has just returned from a two-week trip to British Columbia.  By all accounts, that Canadian province in and of itself deserves at least as much recognition as Kansas (two quotes) or Sesame Street (also two quotes).

     Not that I've had much time to express my concern since she got back.  No, I've had to spend hours and hours trying to get over the shock of her having survived the plane flights.  
     Everything I know about plane flights I've learned from movies and "An Evening At The Improv" and so I thought she was a goner the moment she'd left.  Amazingly, none of the 6 planes she was on crashed, was hijacked, disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle, or was done in by a bomb, a missile, a storm, an unsecured door, a meteor, pilot error, faulty radar, a flock of birds, inadequate maintenance, illegal smoking, rough rest room sex, or improper lane changes.  Not one pilot had a heart attack.  King Kong did not grab hold of the fuselage and hurl it to the ground.  She didn't even get to see a monster on the wing as she looked out the window.  Hell, she wasn't even terrorized by one of those little packs of stale peanuts I've heard so much about.  
     And to top it off, they didn't even lose her luggage!
     My whole conception of an entire industry has been sent plummeting to the ground in flames.
     I walk dazed and confused among the ruins of my preconceptions, not knowing what to do or where to turn to replenish my supply of misinformation.... 
     And as I wander, lonely as a cloud that has missed its connecting thunderhead, one thing my wife had casually whispered in my ear as I welcomed her back with a hug echoes and re-echoes through my mind:
     "One plane I was on had a row two-seats wide on one side and a row one-seat wide on the other, while another plane I was on had a row three-seats wide on one side and a row two-seats wide on the other."
     Zounds! 
     How in the name of Newton did those planes ever keep their balance??

    As our hug continued I tried to distract myself from this deeply disturbing question by surreptitiously checking her hair for stray strands of the aurora borealis and her pockets for renegade salmon.  
     Finding nothing more significant than the handful of bear poo she'd promised me on the phone, my mind drifted back to when Neil Armstrong became the first Ohioan to set foot in Canada almost 30 years ago.  I was just 10 then, but I can still recall the tension as the nation watched on TV and held its breath for fear that he'd sink into the Quebec secessionist controversy with the first step he took.  Thanks to advanced computer navigation systems he didn't, of course, but at the time one didn't know what to expect from a guy born in a place named Wapakoneta.  It sounds silly now, but some people actually thought he might have blown all his brain space learning how to spell that mouthful in his youth.  As luck would have it, he'd merely lost his manual dexterity from having to write it out countless times while training to pick up girls in Cocoa Beach.
     As our hug continued some more, I thought back to how federal officials had isolated Armstrong in an Airstream trailer for two full weeks after his return from Canada just in case he or his fellow travelers had unwittingly brought back an infectious slang term.  I now suspect that they were just giving Neil and his two buddies some time to get their stories straight so that their wives would never suspect they'd actually spent the bulk of their time at Woodstock. 
     Could I really trust my wife to be any less deceitful?  Maybe she hadn't been to BC at all.  Maybe she had really gone to some secret film festival showing the only remaining copy of that "lost" Hope-Crosby classic, "The Road To Manitoba, Eh?" 
     I tried to push such thoughts far away from me by hugging her all the tighter.
     And by scanning the bags at her side for some sign that she'd brought me back a mountain - the only thing I'd asked for. 
     "Sorry," she whispered, having caught a glimpse of my hungry eyes as I'd crushed my nose into hers.  "The best I was able to do was bring you 32 rock ambassadors from Kamloops."
     "What took you so long?!" I attempted to hide my disappointment behind a wall of childish impatience.
     "Well, first I had to convert all my remaining Canadian hours back into American ones before I left," she sighed.  "At the current rate of exchange, you only get 40.7 minutes U.S. for every 60 minutes Canadian you can scrape together.  On the other hand, American hours go a lot farther there.  What would have been just a 20-minute nap here turned out to be a full 29.466-minute nap there."
     "Hmmm," I vented my skepticism exactly as they'd taught us in health class.
     "And then I had to go through customs, explaining everything.  Canadian customs - no problem.  But American customs - ugh!  Have you ever tried to justify your practice of screaming 'USA! USA!' for no apparent reason while a man is threatening to plumb the depths of your maturity with a strip search?"
     "I'll have to check my records," I hedged just in case she was a secret agent of the Queen merely wearing the body of my beloved.  "In any case, it's ok.  I'm sure those 32 rock ambassadors will serve me just fine despite your slowness in allowing them to present their credentials to me.  Right now, I'm just happy you're home again, safe and sound.  Guess you remembered my parting advice, huh?"
     "You mean, 'If you stub your toe, be sure to swear in both French and English'?"
     "No, 'Never try to pet a Mountie while he's eating.'"
     "Oops - forgot that one.  But it turned out ok, anyway," she assured me, taking a photo from her purse without ending our hug. "Maybe this local I befriended put in a good word for me?"

     "You're scaring me, Babe," I chastised her, taking the suddenly significant Mountie hat off her head and tossing it onto our cat's before Interpol could mobilize a SWAT team.
     "C'est la vie," she whispered through her smile, then sashayed into the bedroom.
     "Indeed!" I yelled, racing to let the ambassadors out of her bag before they eroded all over her nylons in protest of their confinement, then rushing to thoroughly check her for Eskimo infestation.
     Note to self: Better try this one more time soon using an ice cube lure.