My Home and Native Plant
I’m not your garden variety Canadian. I don’t own a Hudson’s Bay blanket. I no longer attend hockey games. I’ve stopped being overly nice and polite. And I gave up my citizenship when I became an American many years ago. But I can’t shake my country of origin. Nor do I want to.
My family members still live in Canada, including my son, and I return regularly to visit everyone. Yet even if my family vanished tomorrow, I would be drawn back to my homeland, like a moth to light. The land and the culture took root in me as a child, and I can’t shake either.
O Canada! My home and native plant: this isn’t a Freudian slip. Canada (or any birth country) is like a plant that takes root in our psyches when we are born or even if we become naturalized citizens of another country. Its ethos, its history, become part of us too, and, if watered and nurtured, it will continue growing throughout our lives. So even if the physical structures I once lived in no longer stand or are attacked by decay, fortunately, I still have my memories of them
During a recent trip home to Calgary, I didn’t recognize many of the buildings and felt as if I were intruding in this space that had once been so familiar. The Macleod Trail, where I’d worked for Wonderly Construction as a typist in my late teens, has expanded to the point where it is unrecognizable. When I was a girl, I would walk from downtown Calgary to the Stampede grounds because I didn’t have enough money for bus fare. The buildings I passed were old friends. I could count on them being there when I made my return trip. This is no longer true.
And so I look for clues, wanting to throw open the doors of childhood. W. G. Sebald says, “No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.” And in Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov wrote that “Childhood is next best to probing one’s eternity.” The problem is choosing which memory to pursue.
The first clue I pick up is from a dream. I’m standing on the street outside the Crescent Confectionary on 3rd Street N.E. in Calgary. The place is lit from within. A couple sits at a table next to the window, eating. I feel like the little match girl, on the outside, looking into this place where I once worked. When I was thirteen, I went with Chester, my stepdad, to the Confectionary, and he asked Mr. Larson, the owner, to give me a part-time job. (Chester bought all of our food there on credit, paying the bill when he was flush.)
A toothless Mr. Larson looked me over and said he’d try me out. Drool gathered in the creases of his wizened face and dripped off his chin. Both Mr. Larson and his daughter Bert (short for Alberta) wore deeply soiled aprons. Grime filled every seam in their hands. Tobacco stains turned their index fingers brown, and Bert’s hair (Mr. Larson didn’t have much left) seemed to have been washed in oil. They worked with a cigarette dangling from the corner of their mouths, ashes falling into grocery bags and produce.
But in the dream, the Confectionary is now a restaurant, having undergone a major revision under new owners. From the shadows, an unfamiliar woman appears. I tell her I’ve dreamt frequently of this place. She says she dreams of it, too, at least six times a year. I’m surprised to hear that someone else has been impacted by the store. When I worked there, it was just a confectionary. In addition to a soda fountain (we made milk shakes, sundaes, banana splits, and floats), groceries, toys, clothes, magazines, and cosmetics crammed the two rooms.
I partially came of age in that store. It was my first official job other than babysitting. Mr. Larson paid me 35 cents an hour, an amount that seemed huge at the time—the early ‘50s. I had to interact with a variety of people, serving them at the counter. I also lugged wooden crates of soft drinks upstairs from the basement, as well as boxes of canned goods, shelving them and dusting the rest.
Chester actually ended up paying my salary, though he didn’t realize it. Whenever he made a purchase, either Mr. Larson or Bert wrote down each thing in cramped handwriting on the stained sheets of a ruled notebook. The paper curled at the edges and the ink ran. There was no cash register tape to itemize each purchase. It was all based on trust, but I knew from watching Bert and Mr. Larson that they weren’t trustworthy. I had seen them put a little extra weight on the scale when they were weighing sliced sandwich meat (bologna, spiced ham, salami). Nothing prevented them from padding the monthly bill they gave my stepdad, and he never questioned the charges, grateful that they had let him buy things when he didn’t have the cash up front.
A crescent signifies an early stage in the moon’s monthly evolution. When I worked at the Crescent Confectionery, I also was at an early stage in my life. Just as the crescent moon is limited in what it can illuminate, so, too, was I restricted at that time. I not only didn’t know what my future had in store for me, but I also didn’t appear to have a future. Chester didn’t think girls needed to be educated. College certainly wasn’t a consideration for me then. I could have worked at the Confectionery well into adulthood and beyond—or held a similar dead-end job.
I didn’t, though at the time, I couldn’t have foreseen a future that did include college and many other triumphs. Unfortunately, I had to move to America to fulfill those dreams. In the early ‘60s, Canadian colleges would not have allowed me to take a general education development test that would have replaced a high school diploma and allowed me to enter the world of higher ed.
In the dream, I told the woman that I had lived just a couple of blocks away from the store, the bungalow that housed me when I attended Stanley Jones School. Just uttering those words made me cry in the dream, there still being much emotion attached to that house where I had spent some of my formative years, as well as to the Confectionery, where I first ventured into the working world.
I’ve changed since the early ‘50s, and so has the store. A restaurant now, at least in the dream, it can nourish those who enter its doors, sending them back into the world refreshed and renewed. But so has Calgary and Canada itself changed since I left the country. I think those physical changes are ultimately on the surface and that the dream I had of the Crescent Confectionary has a deeper significance as a symbol for the country itself.
Canada has come of age in many ways. It’s no longer just a purveyor of goods that a multiplicity of people from around the world and its residents can enjoy. It also has established itself as a place where people want to live. People of many different races and ethnic groups reside there, creating a sophisticated, multi-faceted nation.
Like the woman in my dream who has visions at least six times a year of the Confectionary, an emblem of Canada itself, I, too, carry my home and native land. It’s been planted within me.
