The party has started
A new year, where I will be a captive audience for a year-long festival of navel-gazing. The city is four hundred years old; renovations are welcome. Seriously though, we’re off on a spending spree that will be one for the history books. Unlike the rest of the known world, where people have managed to keep house for thousands of years, the New World has an abbreviated memory. Only those who sailed in with canvas sails can claim to have done anything memorable, and this city holds the record for constant settlement by people from a neighbouring continent (deliberate poke at the revisionists of a place near Jamesville, or James City or James Town, or something similar… Wiki left me confused as to the real story).
I’m not one who needs a crowd to celebrate, so at the appointed hour a portion of my immediate family gathered on a hilltop looking south. We were not disappointed. Free fireworks, for three solid minutes. The sound of a band, albeit bereft of any high frequencies after a trip of 8.5 km (about 5 miles across the way). Since sound and light travel at different speeds according to my science class in grade eleven, the synchronicity was minimal. No wind chill, no wine; a perfect combination for a New Year’s Eve that didn’t have Dick Clark or a falling ball on the tiny living room screen. For the fifteen (or fifty) thousand who gathered at Place d’Youville, it will leave memories of being packed together that should last a century.
In fact, we’ve done like others in the province of Quebec and we’ve watched (more than once) the Infoman and the RBO and the final Fureur. We’ve laughed at ourselves, because the content was, you guessed it, firmly planted in the navel. We are oranges at heart. Some good barbs, though, and Mahée Paiement may have found her niche. Florence K. and Claire Pelletier were wonderful. The final act of the night, Pascale Picard, suffered (we suffered more) from a bad sound system; I was unable to decide if she was singing in either of the two official languages. Mercifully, Radio-Canada cut the feed.
As I said, I’m captive so I’ll see other public outbursts of celebrating before the next year begins. My tax dollars will certainly not be used to pay down the accumulated debts. And when my descendents go into whatever sort of newspaper archives are available in a half-century (head’s up display, podcast, who knows?) they will see that the city does throw a long and expensive party.
