NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 2, 2005
Anniversaries
Ottawa is celebrating her sesquicentennial and the Citizen her 160th anniversary and to get out of their way my "Sunday Spectator" column has been moved over here. Happy birthdays all round. Some people are born Ottawan a few are made by Senatorial appointment but I belong to that majority of Canadians who will always be passing through. My affection for both the town and the newspaper has grown however over (can you believe it?) eight years of gainful employment. There are two Ottawas that I love. One is the capital of my country Canada and the other the capital of the Ottawa Valley. They meld. My elder son is now six-foot-six (that's a lot of centimetres) but I distinctly remember standing on Parliament Hill by the flame looking up at the Peace Tower when he was a little guy on my shoulders. It was one of those reproducible moments for it hearkened back to when I was little on my own dad's shoulders and by inference my father on his father's. You look up at that clock (supposing yourself to be the little guy of the moment) and your dad says: "Canada." In the background there are the Gatineau Hills and as it used to be the logs on the Ottawa River the way they looked on the back of the old one-dollar bill. And the War Memorial which you used to see as you emerged from old Union Station. My dad and his dad fought in the wars. I cannot pass that monument without saluting crisply. And the fiddles. A friend an old drinking companion married a Korean girl some years back. He from the Ottawa Valley up there near Renfrew she from some valley in Kwangju or wherever. Both tribes assembled in a farm house in their native costumes though in different rooms -- for the Koreans were feeling pretty shy even after the wedding. The mother of the bride in her fine hanbok: you have to picture the scene. The fiddles had already struck up the Canadians wanted to dance but the parties were still separated as in the first moments of a high school formal and by this thick plaster wall. The ice was broken when the groom crossed the threshold all by himself and asked his new mother-in-law onto the dance floor. She resisted politely; he dragged. But the fiddles had struck up an old Scotch tune and it was as if she recognized it. And my God could that old lady dance! Within moments all the Koreans and Canadians were twirling each other around in the lines and you couldn't tell East from West if you tried. That's the Ottawa Valley. It is what gives the city her cosmopolitanism. Now a century-and-a-half is not a long time. The train still stops here -- still doesn't go any farther. You look North forever. Or in the words of Daisy DeBolt's song Take a Train to Europe : Gotta get me to Moosonee: Dog train to Germany! Queen Victoria in one of my favourite apocryphal anecdotes was shown "Bytown" on some topographical maps while her advisers explained why it was being proposed for the capital of our new Dominion. "That's brilliant gentlemen she is said to have observed. The Yankees will never find it." And we are still looking for Ottawa and finding it on this grand river at the frontier between our French and English facts. More than a million have now moved in. And for all my objections to the faux-cathedral of the National Gallery the faux-tepee of the anthropological museum the poured-concrete accident of the National Arts Centre the crownless Pearson flag the political correctitude (I'm a Canadian buster: I'm allowed to object) it still translates to: "Canada." As for the newspaper it was the old Grit rag. The Ottawa I first knew contained the now long-defunct Ottawa Journal which was the Tory rag with its sharply literate editorial page under the direction of the magnificent Grattan O'Leary. Between the Citizen and the Journal the town was covered and their rivalry was a generous thing. We may forget that Liberals were once perfectly decent people. And that Conservatives once owned all the parliamentary ridings around here. I think of myself sometimes as a voice from the old Journal ghost within the composite Citizen grateful to editors not merely for giving me space but for consistently watching my back in the crossfire. I've been well-treated here. That's not an empty statement. I am also an artefact of the editorship of Neil Reynolds the man Conrad Black installed with the project of making the Citizen fully worthy of "the capital of a G-7 country". Neil and his successor have built the paper to punch well above its weight. It has more in it that is worth reading than you could shake a stick at and I'm proud to find my footprint in its sandbox. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top