That stylized half a maple leaf on the tail of Air Canada's planes, and Tim Horton's coffee and donuts.
I once spent some time in Egypt on a professional assignment, and the place was so totally foreign and incomprehensible to me (alien is not too strong a word)--I knew no Arabic, couldn't speak, write, or read, a word of it--that I had a low level of distress and anxiety the whole time I was there. I have post-graduate degrees, an IQ measured at well into 3 digits, but in Egypt I was functionally illiterate, which is a humbling and salutary experience. I couldn't read street signs or newspapers, couldn't understand tv and radio broadcasts, I couldn't even speak to people in the street. I was able to do the job I'd been sent to do only because the Egyptians I was working with were multilingual, but I felt personally lost and alone and ignorant the whole time.
I flew Lufthansa from Cairo to Frankfurt to get home. When I was waiting in the airport at Frankfurt for the flight that'd take me back to Canada, I saw the Air Canada 747 pull up to the departure gate for loading, and I saw that big red and white half a maple leaf pattern on the tail, and I choked up. "I'm really going home now," I thought, an idea that for a month had had a curious quality of unreality about it. I landed in Calgary many hours later, and while waiting there for the last connection to Regina and home, I encountered a Tim Horton's in the Calgary airport. I hadn't had any good trashy food for so long... I sucked up two of Tim's biggest coffees and three big fat chocolate-covered donuts, and then by gawd I knew I was home.
There just ain't no place like home.
