O' Canada or: The Canadian Kilted Yaksmen, Pt. 1

Sometimes I wonder what it'd be like to sleep with a Canadian girl, bed a'rockin' and her screaming, "Ooh, ooh! Fook my coony, eh! Eh! EH! EEEHHH!! Ooooh, yea, eh."


During the summer between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, my cousin got married. This worked out to be a pain in the ass, because my friends Jay and Mike Kesselman and I were planning on driving to Canada from New York the next day, and my cousin lived in Maryland.

After much finagling, my mother and I drove three and a half hours down to Maryland, then realized our formalwear was still sitting on her bed at home and drove three and a half hours back. Then we drove through seven hours worth of traffic back down, arriving at the hotel around a quarter to midnight. The next day we went to the wedding, had a blast, and immediately drove home so I could get up at four the next morning to sit in another car driving seven hours to Montreal. Thanks, Mom.

Now there is a very good reason why all this seemed like a worthwhile idea at the time, and that reason is that Montreal is part of French Canada. Since Quebec keeps failing to secede, it asserts its independence by undermining national standards and keeping its legal drinking age eighteen. This is very important as Jay–I believe he was the youngest–was about eighteen and four days old on the day we trekked on up to the boarder.

Aside from lunch at an A&W restaurant and a bladder-churning wait at the border, nothing much happened for a good long while. Sitting in traffic, blasting “O, Canada” and “Enter Sandman” from the car stereo, we mused over Ontario license palates. Eventually, we realized that none of us spoke French, and no one had bothered remembering to bring a French phrase
book, so we would, for the duration of our stay in Canada, be forced to act like young, stupid American tourists. We accepted this, and with tails between our legs we approached a native of the land. We pulled up to a Range Rover and asked.
“Hey! Hey! What’s your license plate say?”
“What?” The man was understandably confused.
“Your license plate! ‘Je me rappellerai!’ What does it mean??” He starred blankly into space, apparently trying to remember what, if anything, was scrawled across his car’s plates. Conceding that there must have been something written there, he shouted back, embarrassed.
“... I forget!”
“What?” we asked over the din of traffic.
“I forget!” His wife tapped him on the shoulder repeatedly. She whispered. The man flushed, and shouted back, “I’ll remember!”
“What??” we cried in unison.
“‘I’ll remember!’ It means, ‘I WILL REMEMBER!’”

There was a brief moment of silence. Even the Cars got quieter. We all stared blankly at each other, two cars–two nations–sitting together, and then we laughed so hard we had to roll up the windows and drive away from each other.


Come back tomorrow for Part II of the adventure. Return repeatedly to read the rest of it. Return in the middle of next week if you want to skip all this and come back when I post about puns and my shitty day again.