by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

If you stick around here long enough, you develop a lot of local reflex associations with things outsiders wouldn’t understand.

For example, give a real Montrealer a phone number starting with 76 and he’ll picture Verdun’s aqueduct and flats with solid wood floors and girls who dye their hair black. And to those who know this burg, phone numbers beginning with 48 sing West End as loudly as the unscrubbed karaoke offenders at Maz. To hardcore Mtl-ers, numbers starting with 69 elicit visions of lawns and bungalows in little Ontario, also known as the West Island. Numeros starting with 27 evoke the multi-accented ride up Park Avenue.

Now people are popping up with rootless cell phone numbers that start with combinations like 867 and 655 and 804. It’s disorienting. It’s a tough knock for us with old notions.

Same goes for English and French. Many of us carry a ton of not-always-well-founded assumptions about what the other side does.

French people here like Pink Floyd, while English prefer Led Zeppelin. Don’t ask me how I know this. It’s surely true however, as solid as the fact that the French shopped at Dupuis Frères and the anglos bought at Eaton’s.

They drink Pepsi. We drink Coke. They celebrate Jean-Baptiste, we whoop it up on Victoria Day.

Their fashion embarrassments involved medallions and leisure suits, ours were about greasy hair, Kodiaks and lumberjackets.

English people have the Eastern Townships, French got the Laurentians. Anglos practised trade and commerce, francos did law and other professions. We celebrate Christmas, French fête Christmas Eve. We puff Players, they smoke Export A.

English ate Weston bread, French munched POM. English listen to radio, French watch TV. They drink wine, we drink beer. Anglos have the Royal Bank. French have the Caisse Populaire. We shopped at Steinberg’s and Dominion, they went to Metro and Provigo. We had Belmont Park, they preferred La Ronde.

This cultural mythology is self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating and self-defrosting. But sometimes, we’re all forced together and nobody notices. Quebec anglos might want to drink Molson Canadian, but all Quebecers are stuck drinking the supposedly less-politically controversial Laurentide.

In 1939, Montreal’s English hockey team, the Maroons, voluntarily folded to allow the Flying Frenchmen Canadiens to thrive. It probably seemed unthinkable to see the bitter rivalry end that way, just as anglos watching Habs games in French might’ve once seemed uncomfy. It’s commonplace now, thanks to the Toronto-centric CBC Habs boycott.

Schools and hospitals are still kept apart by language, but it’s expensive to fund the divide. The double cost has recently prompted the province to balk at funding two entirely separate hospitals. Now they want to save bucks and make you—shudder—get your colonoscopy at the French hospital, and make patients there get other specialized services at the English superhospitals. Insiders say that resistance to sharing comes from glory-hungry hospital bigwigs, but it looks like the province is firm to push the patient-sharing though.

I don’t imagine that sharing resources would be so bad. I’ve been treated at French hospitals and the staffs were so anxious to speak English that they reminded me of the kids in Vietnam who beg you to practice English with them for a few minutes. English hospitals like the Douglas already have more French names on their voicemails than an Aznavour biography.

Mind you, I’m not that open minded to linguistic détente. I’ve still never tasted poutine and plan to keep it that way.

• • •

The arrival of more Daylight Savings Time is excellent news for this town but alas, we have to wait until 2007 for it to start. The delay was based on a mistake. The Michigan lawmakers who launched the extended DST put it off to 2007 partly to allow time for each Canadian province to pass a law to switch their clocks. However, the Americans were unaware that each province no longer has to pass a legislation to make the switch—it has been reduced to an administration thing. It could have been done in a day.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca