<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not your garden variety Canadian. I don\u2019t own a Hudson\u2019s Bay blanket. I no longer attend hockey games. I\u2019ve stopped being overly nice and polite. And I gave up my citizenship when I became an American many years ago. But I can\u2019t shake my country of origin. Nor do I want to.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t shake either.<\/p>\n
O Canada! My home and native plant: this isn\u2019t 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<\/p>\n
During a recent trip home to Calgary, I didn\u2019t 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\u2019d 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
And so I look for clues, wanting to throw open the doors of childhood. W. G. Sebald says, \u201cNo one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.\u201d And in Speak Memory, <\/em>Vladimir Nabokov wrote that \u201cChildhood is next best to probing one\u2019s eternity.\u201d The problem is choosing which memory to pursue.<\/p>\n The first clue I pick up is from a dream. I\u2019m standing on the street outside the Crescent Confectionary on 3rd<\/sup> 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.)<\/p>\n A toothless Mr. Larson looked me over and said he\u2019d 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\u2019s hair (Mr. Larson didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019ve dreamt frequently of this place. She says she dreams of it, too, at least six times a year. I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2014the early \u201850s. 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.<\/p>\n Chester actually ended up paying my salary, though he didn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019t have the cash up front.<\/p>\n A crescent signifies an early stage in the moon\u2019s 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\u2019t know what my future had in store for me, but I also didn\u2019t appear to have a future. Chester didn\u2019t think girls needed to be educated. College certainly wasn\u2019t a consideration for me then. I could have worked at the Confectionery well into adulthood and beyond\u2014or held a similar dead-end job.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t, though at the time, I couldn\u2019t have foreseen a future that did<\/em> include college and many other triumphs. Unfortunately, I had to move to America to fulfill those dreams. In the early \u201860s, 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve changed since the early \u201850s, 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.<\/p>\n Canada has come of age in many ways. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s been planted within me.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Celebrating My Namelessness<\/strong>
\nThe day is as ordinary as this drink of the day at the bar where I am sitting at the moment. Instead of enjoying my drink, if one can ever enjoy something very ordinary, I am constantly stirring it, trying to remember my name. But I don\u2019t. The only thing I surely know about myself is that I am an immigrant in this country where I am currently living. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3704,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-non-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2163"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3700,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163\/revisions\/3700"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}