Our first taste of summer, and to be honest it’s a little sour
This weekend in Canada we celebrate Victoria Day. Or rather we would, in ordinary circumstances, when holidays meant something, because at the moment celebrating Victoria Day feels a bit like cherishing a snowball in the middle of a blizzard. The prospect of the three-day weekend has lost much of its appeal now that most of us are confined to our homes throughout the week — we no longer have work places to seek refuge from. Holiday Monday sounds exciting only when the idea of “Monday” has some definitive shape, and lately, even regular weekends seem difficult to distinguish from the rest of the working week.
Long weekend? Christ, we are already living through the longest bloody weekend of our lives.
Victoria Day has a unique place in our holiday calendar. It heralds the long- awaited arrival of spring, whose equinox is proximate to the holiday and, even more tantalizingly, foreshadows the approach of summer which, as the weather warms and the end of the school season nears, always feels close. These promises are reflected in the usual Victoria Day rituals: blowout May 2- 4 barbecues and sun-baked tailgate soirees, excursions to cottage country and the year’s first forays to the trailer or the cabin. Victoria Day is often our first taste of the kind of life we expect to lead once winter recedes and summer is upon us. But this year we are beginning to accept a grim inevitability. Summer itself has been cancelled.
Of course, we resisted this possibility in the early days of the pandemic as businesses shuttered and concerts and sporting events were “postponed.” But how temporary does any of this seem now, after two months of isolation? True, some businesses are in the process of gradually reopening, and in the places where COVID-19 is for the time being under control, certain fixtures of the old normal will return sooner than imagined.
But even while city and provincial parks are being made once again inhabitable, and even as the parameters of life under lockdown evolve to accommodate changes in rates of infection, it’s obvious that much of what we associate with summer in Canada will be absent this year.
Toronto has been hit especially hard with cancellations. Pride was among the earliest casualties: the month- long event held every June announced weeks ago that it would take a necessary hiatus this year. Caribana, one of Toronto’s most popular summer festivals, won’t be running either, off for the first time in more than half a century. The Toronto Blue Jays may actually move ahead with the baseball season — although if they do, it will most likely be without a live audience to watch the boys of summer. It was particularly devastating to hear, earlier this week, that the Canadian National Exhibition was officially cancelled, too. Though almost impossible to imagine crowds of its size gathering as soon as August, it’s equally hard to picture Toronto without the CNE. British Columbia has also cancelled summer festivals, sporting events and concerts, and Calgary has cancelled its Stampede. These are our most reliable fixtures of summer. Their loss hits remarkably hard.
Meanwhile, much else about summer that one looks forward to increasingly seems like fantasy: tours and all- inclusives, resort packages and trips to Rome. The travel industry has been drastically affected by the coronavirus and its attendant closures, with major airlines cutting service and close to bankruptcy all around the world; demand for air travel is at an unprecedented low, and the long- term effects remain largely unpredictable.
For the time being — maybe for the next several months — we won’t be travelling out of the country. We won’t be enjoying the usual vacations, and we won’t be taking in baseball games, summer music festivals, parties outdoors or doing more or less anything that involves leaving our homes to encounter strangers in the wild. What does a summer trapped indoors look like? Without these familiar signifiers, how much are we missing out? It seems unavoidable at this point that summer as we know it simply won’t be happening this year: The arrival of Victoria Day absent its customary hallmarks has made that resounding clear.
What we’re faced with now is an even more alarming question: Summer is cancelled, what about fall?