All the mixed feelings.
So Canadian. Mostly Chinese families, waving Canada flags and dressed in Canada T-shirts and Canada hats. South Asians in their teens and twenties with their dates. A few white folk, sprinkled in for contrast. A Japanese woman, gorgeous in a black kimono.Food trucks and tents from everywhere. Baba's House Polish sausages and pyrogies. Another truck with Greek and Mexican food. The Namaste Indian food truck, Persian saffron ice cream from Cazba Restaurant, pancake breakfast for Ukrainian relief, southern barbecue, grilled cheese. Salmon from British Columbia. And Japadogs and Teriaki Boys. A world's worth of food arrayed in the Japanese Cultural Centre parking lot.
The kimono woman conjured for me the memory of Steveston's fishermen, and their families who worked the cannery, rounded up after Pearl Harbor and interred far inland, far from the sea, far from the homes they could never return to. A friend once wrote a poem about the graduating class photos that lined the halls of his alma mater, Steveston High. Year after year, so many Japanese faces. Until the class of 1942.
Canada Day. I've always been wary of patriotism, which makes me as Canadian as a Canadian can be. All the more so in recent years, and much more since May 2021, thinking of the people who lived here before we showed up and shoved them aside, and worse. I was sad not to see any of those folks there in Steveston on Canada Day, Musqueam or Tsawwassen or Kwantlen people. Maybe they were there, I didn't see everybody. But maybe not. There would be more than enough reasons for that.
There was "a police presence," very Canadian cops strolling the streets, smiling, nodding to the people. I didn't see any guns. The Sikh officer with the beard, some other guys, a few policewomen, standing around in the shade of a tree having what I guess was a cop coffee break? Double doubles all round? Like the Boston Red Sox infield converging on the pitcher's mound in the bottom of the eighth clinging to a one-run lead with two Blue Jays on base, but much more relaxed. (Don't talk about the ballgame.)
A block down Moncton Street, kids gathered around a fancy cop car, a couple officers showing off all the gadgets. A few blocks north of beautiful downtown Steveston, one solitary guy patrolled the residential streets, writing enough parking tickets to offset most of the extra police department expenses for the day.
My daughter's American friend asked asked if Canada Day celebrates the day we defeated the British. I thought that was charming. As Katie said, "a very American question." In more than one way. I responded that, no, it celebrates the day we defeated the Americans! (Red Sox - Blue Jays notwithstanding.)
But I was only joshing. That wouldn't be July 1, it would be August 16. Or August 24, though we really don't get to claim that one. Or October 13. All things considered, 1812 was a bad year for south-of-the-border dudes who picked fights with Canadians. But we've mostly gotten along since then. (We won't talk about the Women's Hockey...) (Which, by the way, was called "ice hockey" on a little quiz I saw today, a test to determine How Canadian You Are. Demonstrating that the quiz was cobbled together by a Yank. ICE hockey? There's not a Canadian alive who calls it ICE hockey. That's like saying "water swimming." Jeez.)
(And also by the way, I must note that the test rated me as only 75% Canadian, because I scored only 18 out of 24 - an honest and self-deprecating admission which identifies me unequivocally as 100% Canadian, regardless of whether I've had a double double or been up the CN Tower. And the CN Tower, I must point out, is in TORONTO, which every Canadian in the rest of the country knows is NOT in fact a part of Canada. So the test was totally bogus.)
Apart from Aaron Wong's Elvis tribute, all the musicians I happened to hear today who weren't in the Steveston High School band were as white as I am, and at least as old. Probably singing their folk songs and playing their jazz in Vancouver parks and on Kitsilano coffee house stages half a century ago, long hair and bellbottoms, when they were the revolution. Now they just look like Old White Folks. Just like me. What we used to call "The Establishment." One fellow dated himself by mentioning Bobby Gimby's Centennial ditty, "Ca-na-da..." but it didn't sound like anybody in the crowd besides me had any idea what he was talking about. "Now we are twenty million..." Or the three white guys in the quiet little garden by the Steveston Museum - hey, the fiddler couldn't have been much more than thirty, a kid! - who played Irish tunes on Uillean pipes and the bodhran, and sang the tragedy of the Irish people, centuries of genocide and enforced famine and exile, and I thought, we really don't treat each other very well.
But everybody was treating each other just fine today in Steveston. There was plenty of food to go around, which helps, and nobody was at war with anybody, not here, not right now, anyhow. Bygones were, apparently, bygones. So Canadian.
Tonight, fireworks bursting in the night air. Which won't remind most Canadians of bombs, or rockets' red glare, won't be mistaken for gunfire. Unless they immigrated from Ukraine in the past year or so, or from a major American city almost any time, or served in the Canadian forces to "keep the peace" overseas somewhere, sometime.
All the mixed feelings.
