Helllooo my hermits, and welcome to Week 7 of The Great Sequestration … and they said it wouldn’t last. Well it won’t. Not forever. But we are still in the thick of it. I know people who know people who know things, and the general consensus is that we are in until the end of May, at the very least. All eyes on Saskatchewan, the Trapezoid Province that Could. Along with New Brunswick, it will slowly re-open its economy while the rest of the country anxiously watches on.

 

A few stories about Saskatchewan. I’ve never been, but I have a few. My father, who was an intellectual with a droll sense of humour, spent his entire life collecting jokes about Saskatchewan. They had to be Saskatchewan specific, which is to say they could not be about the Prairies, or farmers, or anything generic. They could only be about Saskatchewan – no substitutions allowed. For example:

 

A young nurse and an old nurse are conferring about a young male patient. “Imagine,” says the old nurse, “he has the word SWAN tattooed on his private parts!” “No,” says the young nurse, blushing, “it’s actually SASKATCHEWAN.”

 

The second joke goes like this:

 

Two Englishman are travelling by rail across the country at the turn of the last century, starting in Montreal and heading west. They know nothing about Canada, and, as it turns out, it is much larger than they expected. After several weeks of travel, days of which are spent gazing out the window at seemingly empty wasteland, they come to a town. “Open the window”, says one of the Englishmen, “and ask that chap on the platform where we are”. His companion obliges, and calls out to the man standing outside. “Pardon me, my good man, can you tell me where we are?” “SASKATOON SASKATCHEWAN” replies the man. The Englishman shuts the window, turns to the other, and says: “Pity. He doesn’t seem to speak English”.

 

That’s it. My dad never found a third joke. You could almost say he died looking for it. You could also say the first two aren’t even that funny, but I’ll thank you not to speak ill of the dead.

 

When Ronan was much younger, I remember telling him the names of the most prominent Canadian cities. When I got to Regina, he fell off the couch laughing. “No way!” He said, ‘that’s not a real place!” “Of course it is,” I told him. “It’s named after the queen.” “And if it was named after the king,” he said, “would it be called Renis?”

 

So maybe that’s the third joke.

 

Hey! Thank you to everyone who wrote to congratulate Ronan on finishing his undergrad: Trudy, Helen, Michelle, Dianne, Bert, Roseanne, Vicki, Cathy, Barbara and Ellen. Thank you to everyone who also wrote to commiserate about that horrible cyclist who threatened me: Samantha, Carol, Susan, Gord, Rosemarie, Pamela, Donna, Erika, Gayle, Darlene, whose dogs met a skunk. Peggy, whose fridge is on the fritz, Nuala, who misses her doctor daughter something fierce, Lori, and sweet Maggie, whose son does deliveries and can never find a public washroom on the road because they are all closed. The things we have to endure!

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Go Saskatchewan! Go New Brunswick! But, you know, go cautiously and safely.

 

 

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