Sat., July 10, 1999
"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?"
British Columbian Graciously Accepting
American Foreign Aid
"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.
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