Top Ten Tuesday: The True Meaning of “Sunny Day” to this Chick

I’ve been tagged! By none other than The Dona (hey – if you can have The Donald and The Dude, why not The Dona?)

So today it dons on me that in a mere three weeks – that’s right people, 21 days – I will be reading from Fashionably Late to a Miami audience.

Fashionably Late. Miami. Moi.

It’s almost too much to handle. This is like one of those fantasies you indulge in when you’re stuck on chapter twenty-three of your virtually-no-hope-to-be-pubbed magnum opus and you start mentally rehearsing the acceptance speech of your RITA award instead of getting your subplots to cooperate.

I feel like going back in time and telling pre-pubbed me not to feel so guilty about the daydreams, that daydreams coupled with many hours at the keyboard (some painful, others that fly by) wondering “what the heck am I doing here, and WHY???” is the stuff magic is made of.

Being able to think back to the daydreams and look at how far you’ve come IS magic.

So, if any of you faithful blog readers happen to be in the Miami area on Sunday June 3rd between 3 and 4:30pm, then you need to be dropping by the same bookstore Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez raves about in her latest, Make Him Look Good, Books & Books Coral Gables.

I am oozing awe. I’ll stop talking about it now before I jinx myself.

Now, about this Tuesday’s topic… yes, I live in the Cayman Islands where nine and a half out of every ten days are likely to be sunny (on the flip side, that half day is for hurricanes), but I moved here because I’m a true-blue sun bunny. So no complaints… but… with all this wonderful weather, you start taking sunny days and all summer connotations for granted. So I’m going to take myself back five years to a time and place where summer was an event more awaited and celebrated than Christmas… Montreal.

Montrealers WORSHIP summer. It’s like we hide all winter long (and in Montreal, boy is winter lo-o-ong…) and burst out of our cocoons with the first green bud to show up on the first maple tree to bloom. Like wearing t-shirts in plus 5 weather (that 5 Celsius, y’all… somebody translate please!). Summer is more than a season for us, it’s an industry, a state of mind, an end to the Winter Blues, its…

1) Tim Horton’s Iced Coffees. Tim Horton is Canada’s answer to Dunkin’ Donuts but only like, a bazillion times better.

2) A meal at one of Montreal’s thousands of outdoor terraces. Any meal, in any neighborhood. I know lots of cities do this now, but this tradition comes to us straight from Paris baby, where artistes would sip their cafés au lait on scraps of sidewalk masquerading as a “terrace” and lament about the miserable state of the world. Nowadays this is a bona fide marketing strategy.

3) Cutting work early so you can get to aforementioned outdoor meal as quickly as possible.

4) Hitting the bars/clubs in short skirts, flimsy tops, open-toed sandals, and best of all… no coats!

5) Sundresses. Denim sundresses, short yellow sundresses, white eyelet sundresses, sundresses from K-Mart or sundresses from Kookai. Whatever. It all works.

6) McDonald’s 49 cent soft ice-cream cones and the special counter open only in the summertime, where you can by them right off Ste. Catherine’s street. I bet they’re a dollar now.

7) Weddings. Everywhere I look, in the paper, blocking traffic, blaring car horns, the magazines, you name it.

8) Festivals. The Just for Laughs fest (yours truly’s favorite), the jazz fest, the film fest, the fireworks fest…

9) La Ronde. This is Montreal’s lone amusement part, as venerable and traditional as Shepard’s Pie. There was some talk of Six Flags buying it way back when and I’m not sure if this has happened in my long absence… When I still lived in the city, I never missed one summer without hitting La Ronde. Even worked there when I was 18!

10) Becoming Canadian. My family traveled to Montreal on an “emigration scouting trip” back in 1986. That summer was one of the best of my entire (admittedly short) life, holding up to such other summers as ones spent in Greece, Spain, Lebanon, and Jordan. I remember standing in front of a fountain in Marineland (Canada’s version of Sea World), tossing a penny in, and making a wish: that we would move to Canada forever and ever.