This is my favorite time of the year. Friday is Canada Day, and the following Monday is the Fourth of July. I’m a dual citizen. Join me for a few moments as I mark both.

Because –with a Montreal mother and a Massachusetts father –my feet always have been planted in both countries. 

I write this column for an American audience, and I write a separate one, in The Globe and Mail, for a Canadian audience. I root for the Pittsburgh Penguins and for the Montreal Canadiens. I have positions at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States and McGill University in Canada. Sitting Bull once said the meat of the buffalo tastes the same on both sides of the border. This will raise objections from both Quebec and Vermont, but I believe that Grade A Dark Robust maple syrup tastes the same on both sides of the border.

So in celebration and appreciation, let’s hop across a border that was closed by the COVID threat. Here are things to salute on both sides:

Canada: Montreal rotisserie chicken, in its purest and most delicious form at Chalet BBQ, founded during World War II and served in ancient wooden booths with loads of French-fried potatoes and a mysterious dipping sauce that probably was formed by the big bang or, if you are of a religious turn of mind, in the first six days of creation.

United States: Southern fried chicken, perhaps in its purest and most delicious form at Mary Mac’s Tea Room in Atlanta. The only original tearoom surviving from the 16 that sprung up under the enterprising initiative of war widows and worried soldiers’ mothers during World War II, it is both old-fashioned (don’t skip the Georgia peach cobbler) and modern (it offered curbside pickup during the COVID explosion). My great friend Affan Chowdhry took his Canadian family there during their first days in Georgia, introduced his children to black-eyed peas and pronounced the experience “fantastic.”

Canada: Eddie Johnston, who played a short stint with the Toronto Maple Leafs. He was the Johnston brother who wasn’t a member of Montreal’s notorious West End Gang. While his four siblings –trusted lieutenants of the Irish mob leaders Frank (Dunny) Ryan and Allan (The Weasel) Ross –wreaked havoc from coast to coast in Canada by robbing banks, leading squad cars on high-speed car chases, killing barmaids, engaging in shootouts with police and stuffing corpses into automobile trunks, Eddie luxuriated in the contained violence of Canada’s winter game. When one of the gangster brothers died, Bobby Orr accompanied Johnston to the funeral. “I chose a different line of work,” he once told me. 

United States: Eddie Johnston, the Bruins goalie present at my first hockey game. A maskless, fearless goaltender, he was a stalwart on the Boston teams that won Stanley Cups in 1970 and 1972. Once he was smacked in the head by an errant shot by Orr –and, at age 81, was beaned on the golf course at The Club at Nevillewood, outside Pittsburgh, by a drive from former Penguins right-winger Jay Caulfield. “I’ve been hit harder,” Johnston said. 

Canada: Leonard Cohen and the notion that there is a crack in everything, which is how the light gets in. 

United States: Robert Frost and the cult of the road not taken.

Canada: Its stirring “O Canada” anthem, first sung in French in the 19th century. It became the country’s national anthem 41 years ago this week, saluting “our land glorious and free” or, if you prefer, celebrating that “ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux!” 

United States: Stirring collegiate alma maters like “Hail Colby, Hail,” which inexplicably appropriated the tune from “O Canada.” 

Canada: The Ojibwa author Richard Wagamese, whose 2012 novel “Indian Horse” is an affectionate and yet searing coming-of-age tale of a young man (and gifted hockey player) who lived in one of Canada’s state-funded Christian schools that for a century, beginning in 1880, used physical, psychological, emotional and sexual abuse to force First Canadians to assimilate.

United States: Another Ojibwa, my college classmate Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band and, last month, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her luminous novel “The Night Watchman,” based on her grandfather’s struggle to prevent Congress from withdrawing federal recognition of her family’s tribe. 

Canada: Montreal bagels.

United States: New York bagels.

Canada: My mother, the former Norma Marks, born in Montreal 90 years ago this month. She was a proud Canadian who, following a wedding in the hotel where the NHL was created, grafted a Boston accent onto her Dominion of Canada lilt. It was in her honor –excuse me, honour –that I sought Canadian citizenship.

United States: My father, Richard Shribman, born in Salem, Massachusetts, 96 years ago this month and who would have celebrated his 70th wedding anniversary only days ago. A proud veteran of World War II and a brave victim of polio, he taught his children the gifts of patience in family life and selflessness in parenting. The results are four intact marriages in the next generation, eight sparkling grandchildren and five wondrous great-grandchildren. 

Both countries are in painful and long-overdue racial reconciliations. In Canada, there is outrage prompted by the shocking discovery this May of the bodies of 215 children buried in a mass grave near a residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Here in the United States, the senseless death of George Floyd has focused the country on how far it still must go to redeem the promise set forth 245 Julys ago when the Declaration of Independence asserted that all were created equal.  

Canada: “Saying sorry for the tragedies of the past is not enough,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in an emergency debate in Parliament shortly after the children’s remains were discovered. “It is not enough for the children who died, for their families, or for survivors and communities. Only with our actions can we choose a better path.”

United States: The January insurrection at the Capitol, President Joe Biden said just before leaving Europe last month, reinforced “what I got taught by my political science professors and by the senior members of the Senate that I admired when I got there –that every generation has to reestablish the basis of its fight for democracy. I mean, for real, literally have to do it.”

David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Follow him on Twitter at ShribmanPG.