This past Saturday, in the wee hours of a freezing winter’s night, a Moncton landmark, Le Château à Pape Restaurant was destroyed by fire. The building was one of the oldest in the city.

Last Tuesday, my wife and I had dinner at Le Château à Pape with the city manager, Jacques Dube, and his wife, Nancy. We don’t regularly rub elbows with the city’s senior staff members, but my wife bought some tickets at work in support for charity and won the top prize. They were charming, down-to-earth people and the food was great. We had a genuinely nice time. In the days leading up to our night out, we got increasingly anxious about what the heck we would talk about. I mean, this was the city manager and his wife, both of whom we had never met, and we were about to sit in a fancy restaurant with them for 3+ hours. While I resisted the urge to start the conversation with “So… how about them roads?”, at one point I did make a comment which, in retrospect, seems a little eerie. Mr. Dube had removed a lamp from the centre of the table and placed in on the floor. It was tall and was blocking the view for each of us looking directly across at each other. As he went to lay it on the floor, he realized that it wasn’t an electrical appliance, it was a lit candle. I made a joke something like, “Ha! That was close! This building has been here for more than a hundred years and one dinner with the city manager and the place burns to the ground.” Hardy-har-har!

Little did we know that three evenings later…