And, by the way, one “has coffee” in the United States; in Canada we have “a coffee” (doubtless with a doughnut).

An idle car-guessing game is to list all the American states, but Canadians do even this differently. We tend to go alphabetically – Alaska, Arizona…Wyoming – while Americans invariably go geographically, from east to west, west to east, or in a circular pattern around the coasts, spiralling into the middle to – Kansas!

Canadians are the world’s best American-watchers. I’ve said this before, but American-watching comes naturally to us, the way Italians know opera, the way the French know wine. I’ve always been grateful that we look over our border fence at Americans and not, let us say, Norwegians.

My daughter and her husband live in lower Manhattan, in a neighbourhood known as the Battery, down the street from Ground Zero. I have a sister in Kenyon, Minnesota, (pop. 1,500), who moved there to be with my nephew, his wife and their three boys. I have another sister in Tempe, Arizona, with a niece and my niece’s children. I have another niece in San Diego.

I have another nephew in Arizona, who lived in a place called Globe, which actually is a jail where he waited for a third trial on a murder charge. The first two trials ended in hung juries – the first 6-6, the second 10-2 (in his favour). He has since been released for lack of evidence, and he is a free man.

These are only my family Americans. Like most Canadians, I also have friends scattered across the U.S., and memories.

As a 12-year-old I played baseball for the Pirates, a Little League team in Winnipeg named after the Pittsburgh Pirates. I followed the Pirates with utter devotion until 1960 when, thanks to Bill Mazeroski’s heroic blast in the bottom of the ninth at Forbes Field, they won the World Series against the Yankees. For some reason, my interest in the Pirates disappeared after that.

So American-minded was I that after my wife and I married on a 28-below day in November 1964, we took off on a honeymoon to – Minneapolis!

Then there were all the springs in Florida writing about baseball for various newspapers and magazines and one memorable book I wrote with my son. There were many good times, all related to baseball, none especially to Florida, a state I regard as some sort of Saskatchewan-by-the-sea (without the charm of Saskatchewan).

Over all, we’ve done well by the Americans. We gave them Guy Lombardo, they gave us urban guru Jane Jacobs. We’ve given them John Kenneth Galbraith, Wayne Gretzky, Mary Pickford, Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, Rich Little, Hank Snow, Paul Anka, Joni Mitchell; they've given us – hmmn, let’s see, ah….

Marlon Brando says in his autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me, which he wrote in the early 1990s with journalist Robert Lindsey, that he regards America – from his perspective in Tahiti – as an unhappy country, largely because unlike most of the rest of the world, one bad thing ruins an American’s day. In most of the rest of the world, one good thing makes a person’s day.

Americans are more likeable in person than they are in general. Maybe Saddam and his henchmen should spend a few weeks camping by the Grand Canyon or surfing at Big Sur or prowling the French Quarter in New Orleans. They’d meet different Americans than they see on CNN.

My longest stretch in the United States was a year in northern California, living in a cottage on a vineyard. One of my neighbours was Warren Winiarski, a former professor of political economy at the University of Chicago, who quit his academic job and moved his family to the Napa Valley.

He bought property on the south side of the valley, called his vineyard Stag’s Leap, and began growing Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. In a remarkably short time, only two seasons, he produced a wine so luscious that in a famous wine-tasting in Paris Winiarski’s Stag’s Leap wine emerged as the best red wine in the world, topping the finest estate reds of France. This was no fluke, as all the judges in the blind-tasting competition were French.

Winiarski for years had a feud with a neighbour who called his vineyard Stags’ Leap, as opposed to Winiarski’s Stag’s Leap. They fought it out in court, battling over which form of the possessive was correct. Winiarski eventually won, which meant his neighbour had to find another name.

Did they threaten one another with Scud missiles? Did they mass forces on one another’s borders?

No they did not. The year after the court decision, the two winemakers worked together, using grapes from both their vineyards to produce a lovely red wine. They called the wine “Accord.”

^TOP