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By Root 464 0

’t mind my being so familiar, but out here on Vancouver Island we tend to think of you as family. So here goes. Blush blush blush. Forty years ago today I was on the “yellow brick road” to Banff with Donald on our honeymoon. We drove a Plymouth Compact. It was blue, my favourite colour. I also like ochre, silver, and lilac. I don’t mind canary yellow on some people, if you know what I mean. But I simply can’t stand maroon. It was raining cats and coyotes. And then, what? A flat tire. I was fit to be tied. Donald, then in the early stages of multiple sclerosis, although we hardly suspected it at the time (I thought he was just too clumsy), wasn’t able to fix it. And little me? Well I wasn’t going to risk getting axle grease on my brand new two-piece polka-dot suit with semifitted top ending just below the waist. It was turquoise. Then along came a Good Samaritan in the nick of time to save our bacon. Whoops. I’m sure you don’t eat it with your name, but no offence, eh? We were exhausted by the time we arrived at the Banff Springs Hotel. All the same, Donald insisted that we celebrate our safe arrival with a couple of Singapore Slings. The bartender had his radio on and Jan Peerce was singing “The Bluebird of Happiness.” I tell you it gave me goose-pimples. It fit our mood to a T. Today is our fortieth wedding anniversary and Donald, who has been confined to a wheelchair for years, is feeling blue (my favourite colour, natch). But I want you to know he still retains his sense of humour. I call him Shaky, which makes him giggle so hard, I then have to wipe his chin and blow his nose. Oh well, for better or for worse, isn’t that what we pledged, although some wives I could name don’t honour it.

Please play Jan Peerce’s recording of “The Bluebird of Happiness” for Donald, as I know it will lift his spirits. Many thanks from a faithful listener.

Yours,

DOREEN WILLIS

Gotcha, I thought, pouring myself a big one, slipping into a soft-shoe shuffle. Then I sat down and began to scribble notes for another letter.

In my declining years, I continue to linger in Montreal, risking icy streets in winter in spite of my increasingly brittle bones. It suits me to be rooted in a city that, like me, is diminishing day by day. Only yesterday, it seems, the separatists officially launched their referendum campaign with a show performed before a thousand true believers in Quebec City’s Grand Théâtre. Their prolix, if decidedly premature, Declaration of Sovereignty, recited by a spotlit duo, owed more to Hallmark Cards than to Thomas Jefferson.

“We, the people of Quebec, declare we are free to choose our future.

“We know the winter in our souls. We know its blustery days, its solitude, its false eternity, and its apparent deaths. We know what it is to be bitten by the winter cold.”

We are dealing with a two-headed beast: our provincial premier, a.k.a. The Weasel, and his minions in Quebec City, and Dollard Redux, the fulminating leader of the Bloc Québécois in Ottawa. Dollard Redux has lit a fire here. Soon the only English-speaking people left in Montreal will be the old, the infirm, and the poor. All that’s flourishing now are FOR SALE/à VENDRE signs, sprouting up every day like out-of-season daffodils on front lawns, and there are stores with TO LET/à LOUER signs everywhere on once fashionable streets. In the watering-hole I favour, on Crescent Street, there is a wake at least once a month for the latest regular who has had his fill of tribalism and is moving to Toronto or Vancouver. Or, God help them, Saskatoon, “a good place to bring up children.”

Dink’s is the name of the bar I repair to for lunch just about every day, and again at five in the afternoon, an hour when the place is thick with sour old farts. That adorable gamine who is my personal assistant at Totally Unnecessary Productions, the indispensable Chantal Renault, is familiar with my routine. Ignoring the men, who are always stirred by her presence, she tends to come and go with cheques that have to be signed and more exasperating problems. Happily Arnie Rosenbaum is