Up in Ontario

The Maple Leaf/The Maple Lure

An email arrived in my inbox this morning from MT. She wrote to a few choice email addresses:

So I had this craving for Tim Horton's Coffee this morning....I just had to go get one.

While standing in line with my friend Rich a guy in line whispers to us....."do you know who that is?" We quietly look around....."who do you mean?" "Wayne Gretzky," he says. Finally we clued in to the fact that we were standing right next to a table where Wayne, Janet and two of their children sat enjoying donuts and coffees. Wow. Very cool.

Very Canadian of him, don't you think? And the best part was that no
one was hounding them. They were left to enjoy their maple-dip donuts
in peace.

In a related observation, a Tim Horton's advertisement is currently playing in heavy rotation between the rodeo action of NHL playoff hockey. The ad features a Canadian ex-pat in the middle of giving a presentation in Chicago. "As you can see the blue piece is significantly larger," he says and points to a pie chart as the meeting attendees nod. An emergency call comes through to him from his friends back in Canada. "Buddy!" They shout into the phone. "You have to come home. Tim Horton's has brought out a whole line of maple products." The ex-pats lower lips trembles. "Maple..." he says. The next scene shows him gathering his charts and fleeing the meeting. "Gotta go," he says, his arms wrapped around the rolled up papers.

So what? Well, nothing really. Just connecting the dots of thematic convergence and offering one thought: you might think that this is all there is to Canadian culture, if you didn't know better, if you didn't know about the compromise and pain of moving away from home for work, if you didn't know that a game can be a culture, if you didn't know that people cry when they see their team skate out onto the ice to start the game, if you didn't know that everything goes better with maple.