Surly Suds Squabble

It’s 2007! I consider myself resilient by nature, but 2006 really tested my resilience. I was moving and going through a long and stressful layoff process and dealing with my dog’s dementia and insomnia all simultaneously for an extended period of time. Shortly after those things settled down I started househunting, so the moving thing started all over again. I lost a very good friend to crack cocaine, and I discovered there was nothing I could do about it except walk away in the end. There were a couple of sad deaths in 2006: Frank, and my son’s granny. Another lowlight of the year was killing my birds. That still feels surreal.

On the plus side, I got to keep my job, I emerged from my hermit stage, I met some new friends and I bought my first house.

Time’s such a freaky thing. It slips by in such a distorted way, you barely notice the days or weeks or months or years passing. All of a sudden one day you look in the mirror and you don’t quite recognize yourself. You realize ten years have crept by. You go to write a cheque and hesitate before writing the year – not because you don’t know what year it is, but because you don’t remember what decade it is. I feel like I could still reach back and almost touch 1997.

I’m celebrating the new year by decluttering. All those boxes of memories I’ve dragged around from place to place, things I get a glimpse of only when I move: it’s time to sort through them and discard what I can. But it’s hard to let go of things once they’ve survived this long. It’s like they’ve earned the right to exist by virtue of the fact they’ve survived this long. Did I drag them around all these years just to eventually throw them away?

Here, for example, is an Ottawa Citizen newspaper dated October 3rd, 1978. The big front-page story? Surly Suds Squabble. Men were pissed off that women would be allowed to drink in taverns.

“There’s going to be trouble and more people might get hurt,” warned Ian McVitty, manager of the Ritz Hotel, “The customers aren’t taking kindly to women wanting to drink here – things may get out of control next time.”

“We can’t go into their washrooms, so why should they be allowed in our taverns?” moaned 20-year-old George Meranger, “None of them act their age and you can’t talk about anything without being called a creep or an animal.”

What a creep.

The classifieds are interesting. A 5-bedroom brick townhome in West Centretown cost $42,500. In the Glebe, a large executive home, suitable for an embassy: $170,000. A luxury heritage home overlooking the Canal: $130,000. A 3-bedroom house in Hull: $19,000.

What else was new? Well, peace talks were about to start in the middle east. City Hall was reconsidering building the Rideau Bus Mall because merchants said it would do nothing to turn around the economic decline of Rideau Street. The Rideau Centre was in the planning stages. Rene Levesque was in the US trying to make friends with American business. Forty pothead whales beached themselves in Musgrave Harbor, Newfoundland. And here’s an interesting headline: “French feelings ‘natural’.” I bet that was reassuring for the French.

So what do you think? Should I throw the newspaper out?