I was recently required to go to St. John's for work. I didn't want to go because now that Newfoundland is a "have" province and we here in Ontario live in a "have-not" province, I was jealous of it the way I was jealous of my friend Rachel in Grade 7 when she developed breasts and I had yet to (sorry, have yet to). It's not that I really understand the whole have/have not thing; when people bring up equalization payments, I begin nodding. But I know it's bad for us and good for them and I'm a petty person. I went in with the attitude that Newfoundland was our enemy and its citizenry a dumb, drunken army. I tried, with every Torontonian fibre in my body, to dislike the place. I tried.

The first Newfoundlander I met was sitting next to me on the plane. A nurse in her early 50s, it wasn't five minutes before she was telling me jokes - dirty jokes. On her way to see her ailing mother in a small town outside of St. John's, my seatmate was not letting life's horns prod her spirit. "What do you call a lesbian?" she asked. "What?" I said, and she told me a punchline that sadly can't be shared in a family newspaper. I found myself refreshed by her unabashedly politically incorrect play-on-words.  In Toronto, everything we say is being analyzed by the Appropriateness Police. Perhaps what made this woman's jokes acceptable was that you knew there wasn't a bad bone in her body - that if she were to encounter a funny-word-for-lesbian in need of assistance, she would be the first in line to help. She was one of those people who made you happy to be alive, like Gandhi or Cher.

I tried to shake off the fact that I'd liked my first Newfoundlander; it was probably just the high altitude, I thought. Once landed, I took a stroll down Water Street, the oldest street in North America. I found myself perplexed as to why people were looking at me and smiling. Did I have lobster in my teeth? Toilet paper on my shoe? I checked myself in a storefront window to find nothing amiss with my appearance (aside from my face, but it always looks that way). I continued walking. Still, the smiles. And then the most shocking thing of all: Hellos. People were smiling at me and saying hello! It was a strange thing to get used to. In Toronto, if you make eye contact and smile at someone on the street, they grimace and look away as if they were in the middle of a rectal exam and you were the doctor. It was nice to not feel alone in public, especially as a single woman who lives with a cat.

What really struck me was the Newfoundland sense of identity. They are proud of where they come from and take an interest in their roots and history. When one visits Newfoundland, it is customary to get Screeched In. When I found out that this had nothing to do with the TV series Saved By the Bell, I decided to partake. Being Screeched In means you have undergone a traditional ceremony (no lambs are slaughtered), after which you become an honorary Newfoundlander. The ritual consists of kissing a cod (just a peck, no tongue) and ingesting a shot of Screech (Newfoundland's own rum, which smells like rubbing alcohol and tastes even better!). The man who administered mine had a long ponytail and an even longer beard.  He was dressed in a black slicker and rainhat. I kissed the fish, drank the juice and presto! I was one of them. I tried to think of what the equivalent would be in Toronto.  How would we Screech them In? Maybe we would give them a half-pint of Steam Whistle, get them a job with the city and encourage them to complain about their benefits?

The Screech must have gotten to me. That night I had a dream about Danny Williams. He'd shaved his head, was wearing gold chains and insisted I refer to him as Daddy Warbucks. He told me to tell Dalton McGuinty he was sorry he'd had to turn him down for the role of Annie in his province-wide play but that if David Miller was interested, he could play Sandy, the dog. He was holding canvas bags with dollar signs on them and when he spoke, oil came out of his mouth. I awoke in a cold sweat.

The next morning, I went to Signal Hill to collect my thoughts. Signal Hill overlooks St. John's and the Atlantic Ocean - it's beautiful.  With the colourful houses, it's as if a five-year-old Diego Rivera had been given a box of crayons to paint the city from afar. I met a man with a dog, a Newfoundland dog to be specific; it was almost as big as me (I am an adult human), with a thick black coat and a gentle disposition.  I liked the man and I liked the dog and I finally came to accept the fact that I liked where I was. Newfoundland is not only a have province, it is a have-it-all province. If these people are dumb, I want to be dumb. I feel for us, here in Ontario with our collapsed auto industry and our hands out to the feds, but hey: Maybe all those years of being have-nots helped Newfoundlanders become proud, resilient and fun. Maybe we could use this time to find the have in have-not.