Happy Days In Canada

I have just returned from Cape Breton Island and my granddaughter's wedding.  With my penchant for generalizing I was quick to determine what seemed basic differences between the people I met there and what I find in the United States.  I was reminded of Norway, actually, not because of the frequent views of ocean, steep rises of land, forests, but rather an extraordinary sense of enjoyment that the locals displayed.  Of course, the area was rural, isolated, there was none of the pressure of urbanity; still and all it seemed like the young men and women I encountered at all the festivities were not preoccupied non stop with their incomes, their chances of getting ahead, the general tension that occupies the space between people here in the States.  It was as though we were all at a very congenial laid back relatively quiet jazz bar without the drinking.  Maybe it had to do with the fact that the groom belonged to a blue grass group, and there were numbers of musicians at the various social events surrounding the wedding, most of them coming from that musical tradition.  The men particularly seemed to me so attractively masculine without demonstrating an overload of testosterone.  They were well built in a chunky way, so refreshing after the excessively slim variety of male one sees here balanced against the definitely over expanded bellies of the middle aged.  And pleasant! And gentle! I don't know when I have talked to so many gracious, polite, just downright nice males.  The women were good looking and laid back as well, but that did not strike me so strongly since I encounter women like that the world over.  It is beautiful land, constantly sliced with views of lakes and inlets of the ocean, water everywhere.  The natives all talked about the long winters, and snow and rain and sleet and ice with gallows humor, so I suppose that the sunny balmy wedding days were sufficiently rare that everyone was in a really good mood.  I can imagine a different tone in the dead of winter.  Whatever, as we all say nowadays.  I was entirely refreshed emotionally and spiritually from my visit there, just as I was a few years ago from a stay among Norwegians.  Maybe it's partly the welfare state; people are not so desperate in these places.