Leigh's Views

As many of you know, I had the opportunity to travel to Canada recently. Cool – a country that’s exactly like ours. Ha - not so much. Okay, let me give you a little primer on our cousin to the north. You may think we share a language. Not exactly. They truly are a bilingual country. Road signs, ads, radio stations, even products are all in English and French. And then if you wander into an area where there’s a large population of First Nation people, you may find their language thrown into the mix as well. Oh, and if you’re thinking English is English – nope, try again. Centre, cheque, colour, whisky, and on and on. Then there the whole metric system -hope you’ve brushed up on your math skills. Try buying a kilo of grapes or a litre of gas or figuring out how fast you’re driving in kilometers. Can’t forget about food, you need to eat, right? Walk into just about any fast food restaurant and they’ll put gravy on your french fries. You can buy potato chips with ketchup flavoring. In

Have you ever told someone to ‘Suck it up, buttercup.’? Okay, so maybe not in those exact words, although I have heard people use the phrase. Now sometime it’s fine to say this. You know, saying it to a child who's not doing what they should. Like clean their room when it looks for all the world like a bomb went off in there. Hey, they’d rather be somewhere with their friends instead of being at home any day of the week, don’t you know. Or, when a kid won’t get up for school and the parent tells the inevitable tale of the walk to school in the chin high snow. However, there other times where it simply isn’t appropriate. Take for instance something I heard the other day at a soup kitchen. A person, who it was rather obvious hadn’t had a meal in a while, comes in. He’s rather impatient and doesn’t really want to go through the whole rigmarole of having to say name, etc. Hey, a hungry man just wants to go where there's bread and eat. One of the volunteers basically tell

Okay, I’ve lived in the south several years now and still can’t speak southern. I’m fine with that and have come to accept the fact everyone and their mother will ask me where I’m from. It’s all good. Thus the other day when I got stopped in the grocery store by a stranger who wanted to know where I’m from, no biggie. I let him know, and then made sure to tell him I’ve made this part of the world my home for several years now and, as far as I’m concerned, the move is permanent. However, his reaction was a new one for me. He proceeded to tell me about the one time he went to Texas. And ended up driving something like 10 miles on a dirt road. He lamented how his car never was the same after that. Apparently, he could never get the grit out of the upholstery, the engine always ran rough, plus he needed new tires after the experience. Thus, there was no way he was ever going to go to my original state because he’d heard it was nothing but dirt roads for mile after endless mile. Yikes.