Marmalade Daydreams

I must say, I have overlooked Canada for years. While I have largely seen our neighbor to the north as the source of an amusing accent, a place where eighteen year olds can drink, and a repository of natural resources that would grow rich off of America and China once the rest of the world had depleted its timber and bauxite, that has all changed. “Only 59 kilometers to Ottawa,” a phrase that until recently would be worthy of ridicule because it seems to have a poor sense of what is to be desired, this turned out to be the key in my conversion, a phrase I do not use lightly. I ask myself, why fly halfway around the world to meet nice people, eat great food, be surrounded by interesting architecture and beautiful landscapes, when this wonderland of civility, culinary delight, and used record stores lies just across the state border?

Oh, yeah. It’s because I probably couldn’t afford to support my traveler lifestyle for very long in a first world economy. Well, when I get rich off of the New York City taxpayers, Canadia shall suffer my loud American ways, from the Maritime Provinces to Nunuvit. Yes, someday they shall suffer.

So school’s out for summer – the last week or so was kind of a joke. Although I had some cool activities to demonstrate the astounding crushing mechanism of molecular weight we call air pressure, who am I to compete with the antics of predictable Hollywood comedies that exploit our all too human fascination with intergenerational or interracial culture clashes with such aplomb, including Daddy Day Care or Bringing Down the House. For the teachers, these films afford a more degenerate form of fascination: we gaze transfixed at the car wrecks of yesteryear’s groundbreaking comedians retreading this worn fare, and shudder, subconsciously wondering if Sarah Silverman and Stephen Colbert are destined for the same downward spiral, a symbol of our own mortality. Or maybe that was just me.

Anyway, as soon as I could, I got the heck out of the sweltering city, my gallant steed being the Adirondack Trailways bus to Montreal, most assuredly the most comfortable bus ride I will take this summer. It was a successful journey; I served pro bono as a translator between a Quebecquois lady and a Slavic cashier to acquire a fried fish sandwich for the woman, and purchased a liter of Kentucky bourbon at bargain basement prices at the border. A friend from college, one Dan “Canada” Reitman, lives a stone’s throw from the bus terminal on the Plateau de Mont-Royal, a neighborhood blessed with great restaurants and bars, affordable housing, and tons of used bookstores. Fine, so the books are in French; why must you be so critical? Just enjoy the cheese curd gravy cheese fries and smoked meat sandwich and don’t ask so many questions.

Saturday being Canada Day, a holiday celebrating England’s renunciation of sovereignty over this beautiful land (kind of a crap move by Britain if you think about it, but that just shows the character of these north country folk – you just look into their sweet faces and say, dammit, I’ll give you the better part of a continent without a bloody revolution, and they say, well, thank you Queen, we’re really flattered, eh, can we keep referring to your reverentially as if you were a demigod and keep you on our currency for the next couple of centuries, and you say, yes, yes, I’d rather fancy that), we took a road trip to Ottawa, the capital of this fine country (which I wouldn’t have known if their hockey team wasn’t called the Senators), and it was super-cool. Rolling three Americans deep, we invited ourselves to a party that is such a Canadian institution that the people who throw it every July 1 no longer live in the house, but have a stipulation in the lease that they will return with a hundred friends and barbeque and booze and jump in the pool (although we were whisked away, somewhat prematurely in retrospect, by a schoolbus to the downtown mobs of provincial folk wearing funny red mapleleaf paraphernalia before the intoxicated started diving off of the roof or performing acts of public nudity, which we were assured were perennial hallmarks of this party).

Alright, three parenthetical asides later, all I’m trying to say is that I had a right good time on Canada Day, so much so that I was delighted to curl up with my rainsoaked towel on a set of marble stairs to catch some shuteye before another kind Canadian let me, a derelict-looking stranger, into her apartment building where my friends could not hear the squealing buzzer through the substantial barrier of drunken sleep. Stay tuned, gentle readers. Enjoy your celebrations of American independence, and take a lesson from my late-night angel – the drunk sleeping in your stairwell may indeed, like the beasts and paupers of fairy tales, be a prince in disguise. Go on and give him a kiss.