Sprung Spring, The Kampung Bomb And Matters Of The Faith

Just off the phone with Mum. Temperature soared to 8C in Montreal today where folks in shorts and Ts wandered through puddles with goofy smiles on their faces.
“Wore my office jacket to work and sent the winter jacket to the dry cleaners,” she says.
Some people wait for the robins to return before declaring winter over. In our family the ritual dry-cleaning-prior-to-packing-away-of-the-winter-wear is the surest sign that spring has sprung.
Of course it’s an illusion. Spring doesn’t sprung until the Sunday nearest St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, the day of the annual parade along the length of St. Catherine’s Street, which always coincides with the last, vicious right hook from the allegedly departed winter.
I’ve never seen a St. Paddy’s Day parade that didn’t require full winter battle wear: it was one of the few days during the course of the winter that I actually wore a touque. The main shopping boulevard is one of the city’s finest wind tunnels. The gusts ricochet off the stone facades of Simpson’s, Hudson’s Bay and other classic Montreal grey-stone edifices (where one watches movies or plays arcade games these days) built on the back of 200 hundred years of the fur trade, plunging a relatively balmy minus five to a bone rattling –28C.
Later the Old Dublin would morph into a sweathouse as once-a-year Irishmen of every hue peeled out of half a dozen layers of wool and synthetics for a day of fully sanctioned drunkenness, bad jokes and endless recitations of Dirty ‘Ol Town.
Mum’s an optimist. I expect she’ll be digging out those woolies at least once more before it’s safe to stick a spike in the winter of 2003-04 and call it ‘done’.
Mum tells me we’ve just celebrated another anniversary of some significance. 36 years ago Feb. 28, Dad arrived in Toronto, a bold first step onto terra incognita for the Dillon clan. Mum, Clare and I followed about three weeks later, before boarding a train for the nine hour ride to Thompson, Manitoba and our first Canadian apartment.
And here I am, huddling behind the closed doors of my Jakarta home wearing a balaclava against the noxious fumes of the dengue foggers who’ve just bombed my backyard. Ten folks in this little kampung alone have come down with it during the current epidemic. Over 340 people have died, mostly here in West Java, and thousands are hospitalized. It’s so bad we treat every little cough and ache as though it were a sign to head for the hospital. Others in the kampung are having the insides of their homes sprayed but I’m not sure the cats will last long gnawing on insecticide-soaked toys. As it is, I’m worried about the fish, though they’ve proven themselves resilient to poison, brackish water and neglect in the past.
Different worlds, eh?
Speaking of which, a day has been chosen for The Grinch to shed this moral coil, emerging after the incantation of sacred words and the blessing of the religious, as a fully formed follower of Mohammed. And, what more appropriate time to do it than on the aforementioned Irish holiday. Two weeks tomorrow, freshly back from a week-long stay in Papua (first day of the national elections will be spent in Wamena!) I’m off to Istiqal Mosque, the largest mosque in Asia, for the day-long conversion process. J’s brother will witness and Juliana will attend as well.

Have to practice getting my mouth around a couple of Arabic formulas, the most important of which is the declaration of faith repeated five times a day in a hundred million mosques worldwide: “There is no God but God and Mohammed was his Prophet.”
Not sure how many uncircumcised-Moslem-Irish-Scot-Canadians there are out there but I vow here and now that if I add another hyphen to my socio-genetic profile, I’ll explore the possibility of federal funding to help me deal with my complicated, conflicted emotions. And then found a support group for others like me.
The whole thing should be quite interesting. I’ve read heaps (so as to avoid being a spectator in my own life) and will try my best not to trouble the revered Imam with too many spurious questions: no point in overturning the mango cart now when I’ve got the rest of a lifetime to poke and probe.
Have to pick Jihan’s brain afterwards over a celebratory St. Paddy’s Day pint o Guinness…