Close encounter with the royal perogative

It was the summer I lived in Vancouver and worked on the catering team for that famous CBC production “Danger Bay”. I suppose that alone could qualify for close encounters with them what feel they should be treated like royalty. I mean if you want to know what a person is really like, feed them lunch for a week. But that is another story.

It came to pass that on a Friday afternoon Her Majesty, Empress of India, Defender of the Faith etc., aka Ma’am, would be in my neighbourhood. She was to visit the University of British Columbia for a tour of various buildings, enduring hours of smiling graciously while grown men and women presented art and architecture to her like bureaucratic toddlers presenting their equivalent of shell macaroni pencil holders to the great white mother.

I thought if I got there early enough I’d see her hat float by.  I was wrong. I found myself at the very back fringe of a crowd pushing and shoving to see the royal personage hustled down a breezeway from one building into another. Quickly the word spread: her schedule was in a shambles, no one would see Ma’am at the University today.

I turned away from the crowd and wandered back along the road. A large black car was parked in my path. The crown on the license plate and absolute lack of numbers caught my eye. Several bouquets of flowers lay across the back window.

And then there ‘She’ was. Doing the back door scoot, not more then 2 meters away from me was the woman who could cure scrofula with a single touch of her divinely anointed hand. She waited for her attendants to catch up and open her car door.

A voice from somewhere in the distance behind me cried out, “Oh look, there she is!” My prairie ears recognized the paralyzing rumble of a stampede and where it was headed. Her Majesty turned, stiffened and stretched her neck slightly to look past me. Her face shifted quickly from relaxed  indifference to a wide-eyed deer-in-the-headlights expression and I almost expected her nose to twitch as if sniffing the air. Certainly at that moment she did not resemble any portraits I had seen on our currency, stamps or even in the paintings adorning schools, church halls and public buildings across this nation.

I quickly looked behind me at the crowds bearing down on their royal quarry. When I turned back my face ran right into the large flat palm of an RCMP officer assuming the traditional “Halt” posture. She removed said hand from it’s resting place against my eyebrows only when it became obvious I could not move backwards due to a bike that had jammed itself in a rather intimate nature up my backside.

After getting an insincere promise from the bicycle that it would call me, I began to move sideways to escape the madding crowd. My royal encounter ended with a glimpse of a very small woman, not much bigger than me and just as frightened, peering out of the back window of her limo.

On the way back to my apartment I stopped off for a coffee. Sitting in the sun outside the café I sipped the common brew, dipped a common donut and said a very common prayer of thanks.