Crossing the Canadian border, I left behind the familiar ounces, inches and gallons of the English system and plunged into the confusion of the metric scheme.

Buying gasoline by the quart, measuring distance in half miles and handling multicolored money that resembled goose stamps more than currency, I stopped for gas (make that petrol) in Val Marie, a hamlet that squats beneath a skyline of grain elevators at the edge of Canada’s Grassland’s National Park.

Locals boast that their town produces professional hockey players and homicides out of proportion to its population.

The local behind the counter of the community-owned grocery store was neither killer nor puck chaser but looked rough enough to be either.

In an attempt at international small talk, I nodded at the clock on the wall and asked, “Is that metric time?”

The women sputtered and huffed. “Well,” she said, “toime’s toime, ain’t it?”

I told her I reckoned it was and left Val Marie blushing with pride in my country. The Canadian government told its citizens it would convert the country to metric measures. On the appointed day, the change was made.

In spite of their hockey playing and homicides, the Canadian people struck me as rather rabbity. The U.S. government announced a move to metric. Citizen protest killed the conversion. Today the U.S. of A.,  plus Liberia and Myanmar, are the only countries to have resisted “metrification.”

God bless America and her irascible, independent, sovereign citizens.

I grew up on a diet of politics, but the current nine-month fight over health care reform has exhausted me. Give me a good knockdown over metric vs. English systems any day.

Before I could spell “politics,” I learned that FDR was the nation’s savior, Democrats were the good guys, Republicans were the bad guys and a pair of senators named Taft and Hartley were the devils who gutted the Wagner Act (Labor’s bill of rights).

I did not understand the evil that was right-to-work laws, terms like “feather bedding” or “scabs.”

But there were bread and butter issues even a preschooler could grasp. One was the yellow margarine battle. It was a housewives’ issue. Butter was expensive. Oleo margarine was cheap but came in one color – fish belly white.

Dairy state congressmen used federal pure food and drug laws to ban colored margarine. Yellow margarine partisans lobbied for a lifting of the ban. I secretly hoped that they would fail. We bought white margarine that came in a plastic bag with a dye-filled navel. Buyers would pop the navel and squeeze the white stuff from hand to hand until it turned golden. It was fun.

I was 5 years old, and margarine squishing was my job. My father had taught me the importance of protecting a job.

A year or two later, a battle in the state Legislature ended the ban on discount and prize coupons. The coupons, good for dishes, flatware and other prizes, came in laundry soap boxes, flour sacks and other bulk commodity containers. My mother hoarded them in cigar boxes stacked on closet shelves.

Her hoard, of course, was worthless. All the coupon offers contained this line: “Void where prohibited.” That spelled Montana until Gov. John Bonner signed the bill lifting the ban.

In the 1960s, towns across the United States began adding fluoride to their drinking water. Studies showed that fluoridation did wonders in preserving children’s teeth. However, fluoridating the water did not cheer everyone.  Anti-fluoridation activists claimed the chemical caused cancer, was the beginning of socialized medicine and a commie plot.

Billings residents shouted at one another across City Council chambers, wrote nasty letters to the editor and filled the air with squawk show debates. I happened to have cut my teeth in a town where natural fluoridation protected children. The fluoride in the water also painted ugly brown spots on our teeth.

I figured the damage was already done and that I had no dog in that fight.

Nothing riled Tragic City citizens more in the early 1960s than the one-way  designation of certain streets downtown. Mostly, the opposition claimed one-way streets were a big city idea and not a fitting change for River City.

The anti-arrow folks won the fight. One-way streets were made two-way again. Within a half dozen years one-way streets returned and few people complained.

What will we look back on as the major dustup of the 21st century’s second decade? I will have to be roundabouts. A little thought (only a little) makes plain that roundabouts are safer, faster and better looking than the ancient crossings controlled with signal lights that they replace.

Cars go slower, all moving in the same direction and none stopping for a 90-second red light. No head-on collisions, no T-bone collisions and no stopping for traffic lights.

It doesn’t matter. Roundabouts are weird and counterintuitive. If it comes to a vote, I’ll vote “NO!” At least the first time.