I went to junior high school with a young lady named Ann D., who was much picked upon by everyone for being plain, gawky and geeky. If I recall, she was a straight A student, and the fact that my fellow students decided that she was fair game was not a bad point in my book–I knew that the majority of my classmates, energetic boys and girls one and all, were well on their way to becoming vicious provincial assholes and assholettes. Well, one day, Ann suddenly disappeared. The rumor was that she was sent to a private school.

I ran into this same young woman several years after I’d graduated. She’d blossomed into a fairly attractive person, who knew all about folk singing, and appeared, to my somewhat experienced eye, to be about six months pregnant. I spent a day hanging out with her in and around Westminster, and late on that long-gone summer day, she told me she was heading back to Mcgill the next morning. “Mcgill?” “Yeah, the university. You know–up in Canada?”

It was then that I began to think that Canada must be a pretty good place to be.