375th birthday is good a time as any to party

After 375 years and too many contributions to count, thank you for always being you

Dear Montreal:

Happy birthday! … Honestly, you don’t look a day over 374.

In fact you’re looking a lot better this week than recently, since the sun’s finally come out after 40 days and nights of rain.

Your skyline is sprouting several new towers after decades when construction cranes were as rare here as whooping cranes.

Your complexion is still pockmarked with cracks, creases and potholes, while your streets sag and your bridges shudder. But you’re getting a big facelift now — and God knows it better work, because your re-construction work is aging us all fast.

Mark Twain once said you couldn’t throw a stone in Montreal without breaking a church window, but now our churches are all condos — and you can’t throw a stone without hitting an orange cone.

No matter where we’re headed, all roads lead to Rue Barrée.

I’ve known you my whole life, Montreal. I was born in your belly at the Royal Victoria Hospital. I grew up in Park Ex, where I had my first snowball fight, my first street fight and my first street hockey game — in traffic so busy it would get my parents arrested today.

I’m a Montrealer before I’m a Quebecer or Canadian. Actually, as an anglo I’m a Muntrealer not a Mawntrealer like outsiders often say. Or a Montréalais, as francophones say.

I went to your English Protestant schools and learned to belt out “Onward Christian Soldiers” in a class full of hymn-singing Jews. Sometimes, I still find myself humming God Save The Queen.

In college I moved downtown, where I fell for you big time, Montreal — your downtown bars, your crazy street life, your politics and your passion. I’ve felt the same way ever since — and missed you whenever I moved away.

You’re not a gorgeous city like Vancouver or San Francisco, or a striving boomtown like Toronto. You’re a battered, bruised, livedin town with centuries of history, turmoil, chaos and soul.

You’re an unruly, jaywalking, fun-loving, festival-crazed town — the only place anywhere with a “construction holiday.”

You’re an explosive town that bursts out of winter like a prisoner released from isolation. Last Wednesday night, half the city poured down to the river to see the new Jacques Cartier Bridge-lighting show. They squeezed together on every street, spoke a babble of languages and partied till all hours, without incident.

The only major police presence was 2,000 protesting cops in camouflage gear marching nearby — waving their flashlights and illuminating police logos to prevent spectators from watching the light show. Yet somehow it all worked out, as usual.

You’re a special town, Montreal. Your two major world languages make you unique — perhaps the best model anywhere for how people should live together in a growing age of cultural division.

Your geography helps you, too: the river and the mountain hemmed in your early growth, squeezing all your life into a small, intense downtown area with enough sizzle to match anywhere on the continent but New York.

As an aging hooker on the Main once told me: “Downtown is what makes this city go boomboom-boom!” Even lately, when it’s the sound of jackhammers.

As I look ahead into the future to your 400th birthday, what do I wish for you, apart from another party? I hope: That you’re still a booming French-speaking metropolis, with a thriving anglo and allo community that’s added even more exotic festivals.

That your infrastructure has been modernized, with roads that gleam because of newly invented self-filling potholes, while Ste-Catherine St.’s heated sidewalks have spread through all downtown in winter.

That your superhospitals have become super, not sickly, and your universities are filled with brilliant foreign professors and others who fled here from England and the U.S. — during what’s remembered as the Brexit-Trump Catastrophe Era.

That your city hall has gotten efficient, inventive and honest — with enough confidence to elect a hybrid Hindu-Scot-CaribbeanHasidic-francophone-de-souche mayor.

That you’ve become a city that works fabulously for pedestrians, cyclists, wheelchairs, buses and self-driving cabs and cars that fill your streets.

Some of my friends aren’t happy that we’re spending money on your birthday, or your bridge, Montreal — why mark 375? But I’ll give you a break: every now and then, why not celebrate someone you care for? We celebrate Canada Day every year.

Your new bridge lights are pretty flashy, the first thing with some pizzazz we’ve built since our 1976 herd of billion-dollar white elephants. So thanks to Canada for footing most of the bill.

I’ll go out and see your 375th spectacles: your giant puppets, outdoor concerts, film screenings, light shows, historical happenings and other stuff (though I’ll skip the granite tree stumps on stump-filled Mount Royal). I hope we get our money’s worth — but then, let’s settle down for another sensible 25 years.

Here’s looking at you, kid. We’ll talk again when you’re 400.