I-Day supper: the Canadian boys unhatted, "hard facts," homesickness

texture · 8 Nov YDAU (Interdependence Day)

• When: Interdependence Day, 11/8 YDAU (Mario's I-Day film screening)
• What: At the I-Day communal supper, while the American kids heckle Mario's puppet-film with sugar-high ironic glee, "only John Wayne and a handful of other Canadian students sit unhatted, chewing stolidly, faces blurred and distant. This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them." The Canadian boys "remember only hard facts," feel "with special poignancy on 11/8" the implication of being in "the land of their enemy-ally," and the less gifted among them wonder whether they'll ever get home again. Wayne keeps wiping his nose with a cloth hankie (the cold that later figures in event 18's meltdown). A rare glimpse of Wayne's Québecois interiority — grave, homesick, ironyless.