NEWFIE

When I was working in HongKong, my immediate superior was a Canadian.  A man of few words, perhaps ten years older than me. Not unpleasant,not at all,  but dour.  He rarely smiled and getting him to say anything was like extracting teeth.

I questioned some other Canadian colleagues about him, and they dismissed it with, "Oh, he's a Newfie."

That didn't mean anything to me.

Many months later, we were having a few drinks after a client conference and he finally unbent enough to tell me about his childhood.

He grew up, he said, in a wooden house on a cliff looking out to sea at the Northern end of Newfoundland.  Across the water from Greenland. 

The house was unheated, though it had a big cast iron wood stove that had to be constantly fed.

In winter, he said, the pack ice would form, stretching for miles from the shore.  And the polar wind would come down from Greenland, screaming over the miles of pack ice, getting colder and colder, and when it reached the coast, it slammed into this lone wooden house on the cliff.

The house would shake.  All the timbers in the wooden frame would groan.  The door, if not locked, would be violently blown open.  Every window rattled.  And if the wind brought snow...

Glenn was a copywriter, so he could describe a scene vividly.  

And now, though I have never knowingly met another one, I make allowances for Newfies.