Pride and prejudice

Iphis texted me earlier this week.  He wanted to drop by our house for a meal.

- Neat! I responded.  - Are you in town for Canada Day or for Pride?

- For Pride! I don't celebrate Canada Day.  What are you up to on Wednesday?

- Younger daughter and the Resident Fan Boy usually hit the library on Tuesdays, but, because of that holiday you don't celebrate (clutching my pearls, which makes it *really* difficult to text), they'll probably do it Wednesday -- unless you have a really exciting suggestion for lunch....

- I know, the scandal!  Not liking nationalism and big crowds of loud strangers!?! I could do dinner Wednesday. 

I agree to the Wednesday dinner, but think to myself:  Nationalism and big crowds of loud strangers?  Isn't that a description of Pride?

From far and wide -- redundant

It's a Canada Day with an interesting vibe. 

The usual clichés, but with a slightly siege-like feeling. 

This year, I started seeing red teeshirts and maple leaves early, appearing on the streets around our home in the week leading up to our national holiday. 

The Resident Fan Boy, jet-lagged from several hours spent with Air Canada (long story), hung up our flag on what we laughingly call the patio, and tuned into the ceremonies from Ottawa, the usual sea of red-and-white, alarmingly resembling a MAGA rally -- except for the gentle smiles and effusive, but polite applause.

This short offering from the National Film Board of Canada is fourteen years old.

I don't care.

Made to mark the presentation of the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement to William Shatner in 2011, it features Shatner out-Shatnering himself.  It doesn't get old.  (Except for the tweeting bit.)

Stay for the credits.  It's worth it.

Stand on guard?

The Resident Fan Boy and I are taking the two-minute stroll to check on Demeter, about dinnertime in the warm sunshine of a rather lovely Canada Day.  As we pause to determine a safe time to cross the street, we are taken aback.

A young man on a motorized skateboard sails by.  He is shouldering an enormous Canadian flag on a wooden pole; it flies out behind him, catching the early evening sun. On the other shoulder, he's strapped some sort of ghetto-blaster, blaring out a song that sounds faintly country, but we haven't the time to register it, because, in a matter of seconds, he's a block away.

We come to our senses, and once again, check carefully before crossing.  As we approach Demeter's building, the RFB muses about motor on the skateboard, and the rather terrifying speed at which it's travelling.

"Well, you can't say he isn't visible," I point out.

Degrees of hesitation

So I'm sitting at the secretary desk in the bedroom, when I hear the familiar popping and cracking that means either New Year's Eve or Canada Day. 

It's Canada Day this time, and I leap up and leave the apartment, taking the stairs three flights up to the roof. Three neighbours are already there, one tucked up in a blanket on a collapsible chair. 

Which promptly collapses. 

She's not hurt.

Over the western horizon hangs a pale gold crescent moon.  Below are a line of ancient trees, which effectively block our view of the fireworks.

Damn inconvenient trees.  Providing us with oxygen, but depriving us of the show.

Some fireworks are high enough for us to see the curved brilliant edges, and we can make out the outlines of the enormous domes of red and white exploding light through the branches.

The neighbours chat and comment, as I think about these past three pandemic Canada Days:  the muted non-holiday of the early pandemic as we realised this was for the long haul; the muted non-holiday of last year, when the discovery of hundreds of graves in the schoolyards of the old residential schools had everyone abandoning the traditional wearing of red-and-white for the orange teeshirts of indigenous solidarity.

This year, there seems to be a degree of hesitation about how to dress for our national holiday.  The staff in the local coffee-shop, along with most other restaurants, have opted for the orange, while groups of families with small children have hauled out the Canadian flag teeshirts and wave miniature flags, as they make their way home from the festival at Ship's Point, hosted this year by the Lekwungen Peoples:  Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations.

We've quietly hung out our flag again this year, worrying, just a little bit, if this will be seen as supporting the truckers, and their organisers, who seem to have co-opted the maple leaf for their own furious and defiant ends.

To the west, a final powerful fire-flower.  The Resident Fan Boy appears, two seconds too late, having just figured out where I was.

I invite him to enjoy the crescent moon.  It's really damn lovely.

Raising the red flag

 

If you don't live in Canada, you may not be aware that, a month before our national holiday, Canada Day, 215 bodies were found buried in the grounds of the former "Kamloops Indian Residential School". 

All kids, some as young as preschoolers. 

 The crummy thing is, I wasn't surprised. 

150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools between the 1870s and the 1990s. 

Estimates very on how many children died while at the schools, the number is probably between 4,000 and 6,000 - possibly higher. 

How did they die? Tuberculosis, a lot of them. The schools were government-funded and run by churches, so they weren't well-funded, and the children weren't well-fed. They were powerless, and miles from home, and in such situations, predators close in. Many were abused, beyond the draconian school rules. Some committed suicide; some died trying to escape. 

And it was deemed too expensive to send their bodies home, so they were buried in the school grounds. 

"I'll bet your school didn't have a graveyard," said a survivor years later. 

So, in the aftermath of this "discovery" - there were more to come, and they'll keep coming - it was decided to forego the Canada Day stuff. Not that much would be going on anyway, given the pandemic. 

I had my second Pfizer vaccination that day, which seemed an appropriate thing, y'know, protecting my fellow Canadians. The clinic was awash with orange shirts. I had to explain why to an English cousin, when I mentioned this on Facebook. 

The same day, also on Facebook, a friend mentioned that she was flying the Canadian Native Flag (designed by Curtis Wilson of the Kwakwaka’wakw People of northern Vancouver Island). Only she didn't call it the Canadian Native Flag, she just posted the picture, like the one above, and a "Facebook Friend" commented, from her home in Arizona: "Yes, the Inuit flag." 

Oh, crud. Well, you'd think I'd know better than to put my oar in --- and you're right; I didn't put my oar in. Someone else did, but she and my friend explained very kindly, that the word was "indigenous". 

Arizona Lady informed the friends that she'd lived in Five Countries, and why would they think she didn't know what "indigenous" meant? 

And my friend, being Canadian, tried to placate her, and Arizona Lady said: "Well, you all are just so smart..." and logged off. 

It would have been such a better idea to blame predictive text...

Gifts from the Maple Leaf Fairy

The Resident Fan Boy has resumed his custom of draping our dwelling with a flag for Canada Day. He had stopped during Stephen Harper's Reign of Middle Management. I awoke this morning and it was like the Maple Leaf Fairy had left a blessing for the homes of good little Canadians.

So how is one a good little Canadian? Well, there's this much-shared video, which has much that Canadians might recognize, although some things have changed in the three brief years since this was first produced. Note the outdated references to the Raptors, Donald Trump, and Stephen Harper himself.



I was wondering why some of the actors looked familiar, and realized I'd seen them in the YouTube series Convos with My Two-Year-Old, which operates on the strange conceit of a father recreating actual chats with his toddler daughter -- who is played by a grown man.

Hoop-la

Sometimes a theme just emerges from a day. It doesn't always have much meaning, but there it is.

For Canada Day this year, my mystery theme appeared to be hoops.

The Resident Fan Boy was determined to see the Ottawa festivities, so we hurried from our house-sit to Demeter's house. And there were hoops in the opening moments, as various First Nation dancers bounced and whirled around the Eternal Flame to the rhythm of the Spirit Drums.

July 1st 2017 - First Nation Dancer performing while the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cambridge and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his family look on.  The dancer is possibly Ojibwa, as hoop-dancing is associated with that nation.

(Bono and The Edge also sang "One", which was nice of them.)

We had lunch at the only sushi restaurant we could find open on Canada Day, then made our way to Centennial Square to see what we could catch of the free concerts.

Well, actually, we couldn't see much of anything, because Demeter, very sensibly, is using a walker these days, so we couldn't clamber into the stands. We found a table under a small parasol by the fountain, and chatted amiably with a volunteer, while people-watching and half-listening to a jazz fusion band who claims Pat Metheny as an influence.

During the final number, which was apparently a well-known number, but since we couldn't see the band and couldn't hear everything the announcer said, I'm not sure what it was. I did like it -- it had a steady, travelling sort of rhythm, and, lulled by the music and the heat, I dreamily watched two people off in the distance, tossing and dancing with hula hoops, which seemed to hover around their bodies, as if they were in suspended wheels of bright colour.

Maybe it was this number.



In the evening, Cirque du Soleil whirled in hoops of steel and fire.



Meaning? Coincidence, probably. But Joseph Campbell pointed out that the way of escaping the ups and downs of the wheel of fate was to move to the centre -- something like the dancers, performers and acrobats of this one day.

Sequential and sesquicentennial

I so wanted to snap a picture this afternoon.

I went to use the facilities at the Bay Centre in downtown Victoria and found a line-up snaking out nearly to the corridor.

It was a winding curve of women of many colours and shapes. I saw an older woman in a sari, a young redhead with sunburnt shoulders, and two Japanese students using the waiting time to maple-leaf each other with tap water and temporary tattoos.

Almost the entire line was a whiplash of red and white. One girl used the time-honoured out of wearing a Canadian flag as a cape, but it was mostly scarlet tops and white or cream trousers, or red caps and sun hats, or patriotic hair decorations.

And I thought of how Canada has changed, and especially, how Victoria has changed. It was once said that there was nothing wrong with Victoria that four hundred Ukranians couldn't fix. It was a bit homogenous when I was growing up here.

But I didn't pull out my phone.

Taking pictures in a women's washroom borders on the creepy.

So I took this one.

Boom went the moon

Canada Day Fireworks - Ottawa - 2009, a photo by Young_Jared on Flickr.

In the years since I came to Hades, it's been my custom to slip out of the house close to ten o'clock on the evening of Canada Day and wander down my street in the odd afterglow of the summer sun. Peering down the street, between buildings, I can see the upper half of the fireworks show that blazes behind Parliament Hill over the Ottawa River to the north-west of our New Edinburgh neighbourhood.

Some years ago, one of younger daughter's "guardian angels" mentioned that a good place to see fireworks is from the vantage point of Stanley Park which occupies the left bank of the Rideau River just before it tumbles into the larger Ottawa River in a curtain of water (hence the name "rideau").

Finding myself short a few steps on my daily pedometer minimum, I resolved to see if this were true. The day had been hot, but not particularly humid (unusual for Hades in the summer), and the evening air was as comfortable as a second skin. I made my way through the streets of New Edinburgh, making out  silhouettes against the not-quite-dark sky, shadows of those atop the taller apartment buildings waiting for the pyrotechnics. I heard the popping and crackling of firecrackers from the nearby streets, and as I passed two young men who had just shackled their bikes to a dark veranda, they tossed the first of two small fireworks into the air behind me, startling me with a showering of blue and green embers.

As I got closer to the park, I was joined by more and more pedestrians walking in the same direction. Just as my feet hit the grass leading to the riverside path, the first explosion boomed ahead and the sky glowed scarlet. Immediately I heard shouts and shrieks and tall pale figures pelted from the street toward the river while smaller white figures raced in the exact opposite direction. Younger kids startled by the noise, I supposed, and perhaps drunk on the excitement of being out after dark.

I picked up my pace, my view obscured by the thick foliage of the river bank. Soon I reached the paved section opposite the tennis courts where several family groups had set up camp chairs while younger ones sat on the cement edge and dangled their feet over the river. I could have pushed farther in to the open area near Sussex Drive where I suspect young Jared Young took the above photo in 2009. (I suspect he's young; how many people over the age of 25 are named Jared?) However, I'm not a fan of crowds and this grouping was small and civilized. I planted myself behind a woman slightly shorter than myself and peered through a triangle made by the limbs and trunks of a birch tree: blossoming balls of twinkle, showers of sparkle, and, new this year, odd sideways umbrellas of glitter.  Appreciative gasps and murmurs all around.

The river was like glass. Every time there was a boom, the full moon hanging over the opposite bank seemed to echo it. I half expected to see it burst into a million bright shards. Sitting with her back to the brilliance, a young woman checked her text messages.

The fireworks rarely last longer than twenty minutes, so I retraced my steps in order to beat the stampede back to the cars. I passed a boy on a bench, shielded from the show by huge beeches. He too was engrossed in his phone.

As I came to where I had entered the park, I remembered I had seen the first fireworks reflected in the bend of the river. Even now there was still someone sliding carefully down the rocks to the river's edge where a dozen people were perched precariously. I peered through the leaves at the final large bursts of light, doubled by the almost perfectly still waters of the Rideau.

Even as I hurried back into the side streets, I could see a long line of recreational vehicles joining the line-up along Crichton Street to wait for the traffic light at the intersection leading either to St Patrick's Bridge or the Vanier Parkway. I looked up and noticed that the moon was now muffled by mackerel clouds, booming no more.

Patriotism Canadian-style

I've experienced Canada Day (this year being the 141st anniversary of the confederation of four provinces into a new country) in two capital cities now. Well, three, if you count Edmonton, but that was way back when it was still called "Dominion Day" and I have no recollection of it. I don't know how many other communities go all-out on Canada Day, but it certainly seemed more low-key in Victoria. This is our eighth Canada Day in Ottawa where it is a Big Deal, mainly because we live in a capital city that takes its capitals seriously. Ottawa is The Nation's Capital, and there's a lead-up to July 1st, something like Christmas. About three weeks beforehand, Canadian flags appear everywhere: draped from balconies, taped up on windows, plastered to walls and the sides of office buildings.

On the day itself, I'd say one third of the population dresses in red and white. Fellas of all ages sport red tee shirts, anything they can find in the right colour. You see a lot of Coca Cola tees; the Resident Fan Boy hauls out his McGill University top (his dad's alma mater). Those without red or white shirts stick flags in their caps or straw hats. Younger men simply drape a Canadian flag over their shoulders and stride along like Superman (who, incidentally, was created by a Canadian). Women go with white tops/red shorts or red top/white capris. You see many, many cute little summer dresses in red and white prints, or solid shades of scarlet or crimson. Those lacking red in the closet stick flags in their ponytails or wear darker shades of pink.

On our first Canada Day here, I was startled to board an OC Transpo bus (red and white year-round) to be confronted by rows of passengers clad in the same hues. Downtown Ottawa closes the streets leading to Parliament Hill which look like veins and arteries with red and white corpuscles.

Nope, I don't remember Victoria being quite that gung-ho, though things might have changed since the war in Afghanistan. I mainly remember picnics, open-air citizenship courts, and the international Folk-Fest which emphasized food and entertainment from around the world.

Alas for poor Resident Fan Boy who loves to ramble about the Nation's Capital like a carnival-goer soaking up the atmosphere. He spent his first Canada Day in Ottawa nine years ago without us, wandering from the citizenship court to Parliament Hill to see the RCMP musical ride, dreaming of doing this with his family. Once he had hauled us in from the west coast, he discovered that his decidedly Taurean wife and daughters didn't care for standing in the hot sun for hours on end, nor meandering aimlessly in the humidity of the central Canadian summer.

RFB was in for more disappointments in the shape of Remembrance Day, Winterlude, and the Tulip Festival, but let that pass. This Canada Day, he was determined to get us out, and since it was really a lovely day (that is, sunny and not overly hot), we decided not to resist him. We hopped on the bus and watched two gal-pal mums both with red tops and capris with white flip-flops and pearl toe polish standing alongside matching kids in car seats piggy-backed into strollers. One mum was blonde and impeccably groomed, the other plump and elaborately coiffed. Baby of impeccable blond mum appeared to be three months old and kept kicking off her sparkly red-and-white Mary Janes. Elaborately coiffed mum turned to reveal her top was slashed up the back and artfully retied at bottom. (Who was watching the babies while these women dolled themselves up? I had trouble finding time to wash my hair when my daughters were small.) Both became aware they had an audience and crooned lovingly to their babies for our benefit.

We disembarked at Rideau Street filled with red-and-white crowds milling around ramps featuring slammin' skateboards and divin' dirt bikes plus blaring music. Slipped into Lone Star for Tex-Mex (how Canadian!), just beating the ravenous red-and-white crowds descending from the midday ceremonies featuring the Prime Minister and assorted musical acts at Parliament Hill.

Resident Fan Boy, desperate for his Canada Day family excursion, led us to Confederation Park to hear snatches of JazzFest, only to find empty pavilions and a milling red-and-white crowd. So we headed home, through throngs of red-and-white shoppers at the Rideau Mall. Alas, poor Resident Fan Boy....