By Joe O’Connor
Jul. 2, 2010
Barbara Lee, or Barbie to those who know her best, was leaning on her walker. Waiting. Barbie’s hearing is not so good anymore and her balance is not what it used to be and her back is bent and her body frail but her upper lip, that is still good and stiff.
All around where Barbie stood, waiting, in the garden of the Governor-General’s mansion in Ottawa late on Wednesday afternoon (and this before yesterday’s Parliament Hill Canada Day show featuring a charmingly edgy Christopher Plummer and a surprisingly chatty Stephen Harper) were men in fine suits and women in fancy cocktail dresses with colourful hats.
Barbie did not have a hat. Barbie is one tough old dame. She spent four years in London during the Second World War serving with the Canadian Air Division, and the occasional bursts of rain from a cool, cloud-streaked sky in the nation’s capital did not bother her one bit. Nothing much does anymore. She is 95 years old.
But missing the garden party at the fancy house, with all the fancy people around, would have bugged Barbie. Not because she wanted to be around them, but because she was waiting to see her — her Queen — Queen Elizabeth II.
And so there she stood, leaning on her walker, until an elderly woman in a baby blue hat and a baby blue coat, and with a retinue of royal handlers, approached. They leaned toward one another, an 84-year-old monarch and her 95-year-old subject, exchanging smiles, sharing a few simple words.
“I told her I was at her coronation,” Barbie said. “And she said to me: ‘Oh really.’ What else could she say? She has so many people to talk to.”
“Her coronation was fabulous. It rained that day in London. But the decorations and the procession were fabulous. She is a strong woman and being so young back then and taking on that job, she has been a wonderful Queen.”
She has been on the job for 58 years now, a reign surpassed only by her great-great-great grandmother, Queen Victoria.
Today, Queen Elizabeth II is the head, in our heads and tails. A familiar face that gets lost between the couch cushions of this nation and found again on our streets; a lucky penny to be wished upon before tossing her down the well.
We don’t think about her much because, in many ways, she is always here. And then, she really was here, in the flesh, a monarch alighted in the nation’s capital and emerging from a royal limousine — with a gold crown for a licence plate — at precisely 12:35 p.m. on Wednesday at the Canadian Museum of Nature.
Five hundred people were on hand, cheering at the sight of an old lady in a baby blue frock. A corgi barked. Bagpipes played. A guy in a costume held a sign: “God save the Bears!”
Many others held bouquets. Some had driven through the night, arriving with wilted flowers, hoping the Queen would still accept them.
“I am more than a fan,” said Amy Levengood, an Italian-American-Canadian-admirer from Pennsylvania. “I am a bit of a fanatic.”
Later, 10,000 people packed Elgin Street eager for a glimpse of Her Majesty at the National Arts Centre where she unveiled a statue to jazz great Oscar Peterson. The crowd was so thick that, for most, the monarch was swallowed from view.
People craned their necks. Many stood on their toes. A gospel choir sang. Everybody wanted to see . . . something, anything. Far from being annoyed, the mood was electric.
The Queen was in town. Maybe that is just the way it is in Ottawa on a blustery day in June: a sleepy bureaucrats’ burg where anything out of the ordinary counts as something extraordinary.
Or maybe, after all these years, and after all the polls saying we no longer care like we once did, the Queen has still got it. Her Royal Highness is still the biggest star we know.
On Canada Day she was back again, this time on Parliament Hill, arriving by horse drawn carriage, wearing Canada Day red, a white hat and with a diamond Maple Leaf broach pinned above her heart.
She sat just off to the left of the stage at the centre of the celebration, listening as Plummer, the great Canadian actor — in his finest Shakespearean timbre — winked at the excesses of a “naughty” youth spent in Montreal’s taverns. Listening quietly, clutching her black handbag, occasionally scanning her notes as French rappers, opera singers, a classical pianist and even the Barenaked Ladies crooned before a crowd of more than 70,000.
Really, there was only one performance that they had come to see, and it wasn’t our surprisingly chatty Prime Minister. And then she spoke, for just over four minutes in a voice that is older than it once was but impossible not to recognize.
The Queen referenced the Winter Olympics, mentioned the golden-hued men’s hockey team to much applause, praised our men and women serving overseas, praised us as a caring nation and a welcoming sanctuary for those in need.
"In many ways Canada is proudly asserting itself on the international scene and looking to the future with confidence,” she said. “I wish you all the very happiest Canada Day. God bless you all and God bless Canada.”
Seeing the Queen up close it is easy to imagine Her Majesty handing out hard candies to the neighbourhood kids at Buckingham Palace.
Her age, her splendid hats — her simple grace — the reserved English charm and the voice, it is all there. And it makes her, in a sense, an Everyman’s grandmother, a not-so-distant regal relative Canadians recognize with a stately bearing that is both obvious and not always apparent.
Beside her, we are the commoners. We are the flock gawking on Elgin and gathering on Parliament Hill waving those tiny Maple Leaf flags and lining the crowd control fences in the hopes she might stop to shake our hands.
But through looking at her, and looking real close, it is easy to see we are just the same. We are all Canadians, after all, and, odd as it sounds to contemporary ears, she is The Queen of Canada.
The only one we have, no matter what Governor-General Michaelle Jean thinks. Our one and only Head of State is a living embodiment of our system of government and an enduring link to a collective national past that is much older than any of us, including the 84-year-old Queen and a 95-year-old subject, like Barbie Lee.
Opinion polls might indicate that we have forgotten about her, that she is a dusty relic from our colonial past. What they don’t say, and what they don’t show, is her impact upon the ordinary hoser.
How she can make them smile. How she makes them light up and cheer. How they will lean on their walker, for her, on a rain-streaked afternoon, just waiting for the chance to say hello.