A Cold Spring in a Hot World

Sylvia Shawcross

Of course it is all orchestrated. Or it seems so. For example, why is this Spring here in this fair country the coldest since 1967? Why that year?

I’ll tell you why: it was the year that Baby Boomers were tortured into patriotism and now it is whirling and twirling and swirling us all back into remembering even as many of us are desperately trying to stay in the present mostly.

So we can figure out how to operate our cellphones if nothing else—in case we fall down and can’t get up or something.

The year 1967 was Canada’s Confederation year and it was saturated with activities and promises and love of country up the yin yang and down the St. Lawrence. They invented a Canadian logo for the occasion; a maple leaf made up of little triangles and it was plastered everywhere—on posters and in papers and magazines and etched on pencils and every other piece of merchandise they could think of.

We kids all doodled those triangles in our notebooks while listening to the history teacher telling us all about Upper and Lower Canada and the Acadians and the Plains of Abraham. We would even doodle it on ourselves during recess if we could find a ballpoint pen.

We would go to music class and have to sing that wretched song they created for the year. And in another class we learned how to sing it in French. It became the top of the charts that year. They made it so, not because it was a brilliant piece of work, but by playing it endlessly on the radio and television. There were parades and pageants and fireworks. Old farm houses were given little signs for being 100 years old or older and they were hung in pride beside the postal boxes at the end of the driveways. The fate of people 100 years old that year must have been a daunting one.—the hoopla publicity probably did them in for sure.

The organizers festooned and filled a train that travelled the country with a Canadian historical exhibit. My little town at the time only got the caboose but we all bundled and trundled into it with great expectation and ultimately perhaps boredom. We were only children after all and history was just memorization for most of us at this point so we could at least get a “c” for trying. We would never forget that Canada became a country in 1867 at least. Around the campfires we sang “This land is your land, this land is my land; from Bonavista to Vancouver Island….” Oh my the heady days.

And if we were lucky… extremely lucky, we would be taken to Montreal for Expo ’67. It was a Category One World’s Fair labelled “Man and his world”. The best of the best the world could offer. The marvels there were beyond imagination. All those pavilions from countries like the Soviet Union which was apparently the most popular. (Back in the day when we loved the Soviet Union for helping win the war.)

For some reason I can mostly remember the jumbled cement blocks with windows that foretold our futures supposedly. Habitat ’67 I think it was called—an “architectural wonder.” There were other things but I can’t recollect them just now. So many other things.

And so our generation, the Boomers were thrown from the dust, death and sadness of World War II into a world that was passionately only getting better and better. And yet with all that celebration, that Spring was a cold one.

And it is a cold one now.

I have not been, but the site of Expo ’67 is much reduced and possibly gradually being forgotten for what it once was. Of the 98 pavilions that were, only six remain with new purposes including casinos, race car tracks and a bus stop. Habitat ’67 is residential.

And Baby Boomers remember all of this and more because of a weather forecast. They remember this at a time when our country is threatened with separation of three provinces from the union. And the sadness in this cold spring weighs heavy on those who remember the rush of pride and passion.

Even our sadness will fade into obscurity. We may have been driven mad with patriotism at the time but we haven’t the energy now apparently. We make tea and doodle triangular maple leaves on the paper placemats. We are not the ones to build now. We couldn’t seem to even preserve as it so happens.

An ear worm to drive you mad for a few days. If you’re a Canadian babyboomer.