I decided to stay in Hanover for most of this past interim, a wise decision for anyone who is uniquely fond of eating at Taco Bell and who doesn't mind sneaking into the nearest dorm in order to take a comfortable shower. Predictably, after a short while I was bored out of my senses. I needed to go where the action was and late-night trips to Foodstop just weren't going to cut it. I had my sights zeroed in on a greater target: The Great White North. I was headed to Montreal.
Luckily, my friend Liz just happened to be in the Upper Valley area for a couple of days, and, as fate would have it, a trip to Montreal was soon on her agenda as well. Imagine that kind of fortune. Five of us packed a change of clothing and packed ourselves into her dad's Toyota Camry. We hit the road with visions of Canadian nightlife dancing in our heads. Specifically, I am referring to the lower legal drinking age.
After a stop in Burlington for dinner and a brief, uneventful encounter with the border patrol, our party reached Canada. It was already pretty late when Liz and I decided upon going to the casino Montreal. Why pass up a chance to see one of Quebec's great landmarks? The casino, we figured, would provide a surefire way to spend (i.e. waste) loads of Canadian money in a short period of time. Also, what good would a trip away from the confines of Hanover be if all we did was sleep at a hotel? Not much I'd say.
At the Casino we ordered a couple of drinks. Two watered-down Tom Collins' ran thirteen dollars. Canadians sure do know how to levy exorbitant taxes; it's a cultural thing. I got ten dollars' worth of quarters and we hit the slot machines. Liz played the ones that were aesthetically pleasing, while I looked for the ones with cool names like "White Lightning." Neither of us spent more than a couple of quarters during any one sitting. In fact, we hardly sat at all.
We had sacrificed roughly eight or nine dollars to the gambling gods when I won it back, plus a little extra. At that point, we decided only to gamble with house money, and if worst came to worst, we'd leave having not lost anything. Well, worst came to worst, except that we went 25 cents over our limit. That was fine; it was only really about 18 cents, American.
We thought that it would be alright to play three more quarters, because then we could say that we gambled in Montreal and only lost a dollar. Not seeing the actual logic behind this, I went along with it. Liz and I each played a quarter immediately and lost. We had one quarter left. Predict the outcome.
She chose the machine. It was neither aesthetically pleasing nor did it have a cool name. ("California Dreamin.") I motioned to pull the lever, but Lady Luck quickly hit the button on the display, which produced the same result. She's a button kind of girl, she explained. The machine responded to her touch; its reels spun until three random, seemingly unrelated symbols appeared. Dejectedly, we stared at the display. The number of credits won suddenly ascended to 160; we were forty dollars the richer for it. If we weren't so tired, we probably would have been more excited. That final little wager covered our share of the room and board.
I came to a realization (which is good, because it is about time for this tale to have a moral): one of the more interesting things about life is that people rarely end up too far ahead or behind the point at which they start their various endeavors. In my opinion, too many decisions we have to make are akin to playing a slot machine; you can either hit a button or pull the lever, but the outcome will be just as unpredictable.
What we think are sound decisions often turn out to be bad ones, in retrospect. Conversely, circumstances sometimes turn out favorably when hope seems faint, much like ours did north of the border. This idea certainly isn't arcane. Remember that life contains no bonus round. To win is to simply break even, and everyone almost always does. I prefer not to attribute it to luck; it's the natural order of things.
If I discovered anything else from my inaugural trip to Canada, it would have to be that Montreal is about as difficult to navigate as the New World must have seemed to Columbus. Maybe it would have helped had at least one of us spoken French. Also, remember to change your money back to American currency before you cross the border, because you wouldn't believe how few businesses around here accept Canadian.
