Tomato, Potahto

Mary Schendlinger’s Parker pen story (“World’s Most Wanted,” Geist 108) reminded me of a CBC interview between (if my memory serves me right) Peter Gzowski and a woman who had come to Canada from the Caribbean to teach somewhere in the north. She was met at the airport by a man who drove her to her hotel and who, en route, instructed her to go to the local Hudson’s Bay store and buy a parka. She thought it odd that he would instruct her to buy a pen, but she later dutifully went to the Bay and bought herself a nice Parker pen. The next morning she travelled farther north in a small plane. As she hurried across the tarmac at her destination she became aware of an odd sensation, which she only identified after she had sat for several minutes in the front seat of a pickup truck, between two men in parkas, and felt their warmth penetrate her freezing body.