Well, not exactly. Bear with me.
Returning to Lethbridge from Ottawa last year, I got caught in a weather delay in Toronto. Realizing that I would miss my connecting flight in Calgary, I worked my way to the front of a long queue at the gate. Air Canada had only one later flight scheduled to Lethbridge, and I did not want to leave to chance that I would, over the course of the next six hours, get automatically re-booked to it. Passengers beginning their journeys in Toronto were concerned about missing their own connections, their own bus journeys to Banff, their live events in Calgary that night. Some were abandoning their trips, resigned to simply take cabs back home.
With about a half-dozen people queued behind me with their own questions, I heard paged to our gate Catriona LeMay Doan, the Olympian. I suspect she was awaiting an upgrade, and so I was not surprised to see a tall, strikingly athletic woman materialize immediately at my side, and she quickly walked forward to approach the agent.
"Hey! There's a line here!" one woman yelled. "Wait your turn!" snapped another man. Ms Doan stopped in her tracks.
Now, I believe that I was, at that moment, in the midst of a genuine Canadian incident, one way or another. Were the angry individuals behind me not ready to make a concession to social hierarchy? I actually think that, as stressed as they were, they did not recognize Ms Doan, had not heard Air Canada summon her. Was Ms Doan, a legend in Canadian sports, deferring to the angry mob in a way that, say, an American celebrity might never do?
Ever the Canadian gentleman, of course, I stepped in. "Folks," I said. "She's been paged." We made eye contact for a moment -- I wish she'd thanked me, I must admit -- and the multiple gold medalist passed on without further comment.
Now, without that simple courtesy, itself a profoundly Canadian gesture, might Ms Doan have been overtaken by an angry mob? Unlikely. But during that interminable wait for the hydraulic cauldron to assemble itself in Vancouver on Friday night, I liked to imagine that I helped contribute to the health and good fortune she has experienced, the series of events that brought her, over the period of the past eighteen months, to stand again in front of a world-wide audience. Happy to have been of assistance, ma'am.
The announcers for NBC coverage of the Opening Ceremonies at the Winter Olympics marveled at the participation of prominent Canadians from different walks of life. And I wondered, of course, that, if one had heard Sarah McLachlan, would one know Romeo Dallaire? Would one who remembered Betty Fox have ever seen Steve Nash play? Do people have albums from both Measha Brueggergosman and k.d. lang? I too often hear the cultural snobbery (or reverse cultural snobbery) of people who claim to be ignorant of certain elements of our culture, popular or otherwise. My brush with Ms Doan in Toronto was made possible because someone who spent his formative years locked away in a library still places great importance on maintaining his cultural literacy. While it might be to some a badge of honor to not know who is Britney Spears, that is, to me, as puzzling as being proud never to have spent money to watch a subtitled film in a theater. What I took from Friday night is a reminder that our citizenship is rooted in an awareness of all elements of our culture.
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