Sunday, November 22, 2009

I could have brought back a whole cow

Years ago, while was in university, I spent a lot of time meandering back and forth across the 49th parallel.

Going to Buffalo was always a good plan at 1:00 a.m. when all the bars closed in Ontario. And going to Detroit was where we went to flirt with danger. Taking the tunnel from Windsor or driving over the Ambassador Bridge was like the ultimate road trip. We didn't want any part of the danger mind you, but we wanted to be voyeurs on the front lines as much as possible. Greek Town in the middle of Detroit was always a good place to start.

Then there was the year I spent in Syracuse. That was a real turning point in my cross-border career. As a good Canadian who spent my formative shopping years near the US border, I became very adept at moving my purchases from one side to the other. I can't go into the details because I am not sure if the statute of limitations has expired yet. However, you can trust me when I say that my friends and I had a plan A, B, C and D for every border crossing we encountered.

But the thing I remember most is how my good friend in Niagara Falls (on the Canadian side) lived her life going back and forth across the Canadian US border the way some people go back and forth to the corner store. She had family in Buffalo and the gas was much cheaper there, as were the groceries, clothing, school supplies and pretty much everything else. This was particularly true when the Canadian dollar dropped to its all-time low of about 70 cents on the US greenback in the mid 80s.

The funniest part of this memory was her little old European grandfather who was probably only as big as I was, but had the toughness of a Jew who had escaped Europe through his own creativity, "just in time" in the mid 1930s. He went across the Canadian US border probably as frequently as she did, but as a Jew raised in early-Hitler Europe, he was not one to tempt fate or the border authorities.

However, every time he came back to Canada without being questioned -- which was pretty much every time -- he would always say the same thing: "I could have brought back a whole cow". That line always cracked me up.

And early this morning as I arrived in Israel from Greece with only a few little tokens of my trip -- rather than the things I really wanted to buy -- I couldn't help but think the exact same thing. I received only the most cursory security check as I was leaving Greece at 1:00 a.m. this morning and having breezed through security, I couldn't help but think of all the things I almost bought, but didn't because I naively thought that in post the 9-11 world that it was actually going to be problematic to get across a border with extra liquor and things made out of wire. Ha.

Talk about frustration. Talk about all those cool things I left behind in the stores of Athens. Talk about the fact that I could have brought back a whole cow.

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