Stranger in a Strange Land

I was born to a world of short men with tall tales - with beer barrel chests which would heave with convivial laughter. I was born to a world of rosy-cheeked women, generous in both their affections and the volumes of their cleft bosomed bodies. I was born to a world full of shaggy haired boys and braided girls; children with names like Hilde and Gerhart, and Franzl and Lisl and Bertl and Shani. I was born in a land that wore civilization and history like a sweeping cloak, that strictly followed and enforced rules of etiquette, reflected class distinction in a glance and waltzed its culture from the open windows of its sorriest tenements to the steps of the Schönbrunn palace.



I was brought to the frontier when I was too young to understand my loss. I was brought by a ship called the Seven Seas – a factory ship that caught up Europeans, dumped them flopping and gasping for air in its holds before depositing them, ready to be processed, and frozen, on the shores of Canada.



Before we left we had a portrait taken. It was black and white, then retouched with colour in the photographer’s studio. It made us look rich although we weren’t. We had a cabin in steerage which is where they load people who are more cargo than passengers and help provide the ballast that keeps the ship from keeling over. I was told we could order anything we wanted at dinner. I asked for six eggs at breakfast but the steward, an officious sort who was used to vermin like me, would only bring me two. My mother bought me a little racecar but the rubber wheels kept falling off. I didn’t know what planned obsolescence or being ripped-off meant at the time. My mother and my older sister were an ocean’s worth of seasick. My little sister was fastened to the bed with a child harness which was in vogue back then because people realized that children sometimes had to be restrained for their own good. We didn’t sit at the captain’s table for dinner.



I wandered the decks and got stuck in the engine room because I couldn’t reach the door handle once I was inside; the stairs leading down meant I had an extra foot to reach to reach up which was beyond my seven year old reach. I sat on the stairs until a crewman came along.

I remember my mother being upset because someone had given her Dutch money as change; it looked almost identical to Canadian money but was worth much less. I remember flying fish but maybe my mind made those up to make the crossing seem more eventful. I was seven and people were fishing off the docks in Montreal and everything was much too big.



It was April on the train but October in the post-apocalyptic scenery of the Canadian Shield - Spring in the symphony of my life but snow-less Winter in the impending Phoenix-like death of the northern Canadian landscape. I didn’t know the legend of the Phoenix then so I expected no rebirth from the bleakness but a life spent in a world of skeletons and granite.



And when at last my father met us at the railway station and we had finished all the drifting on the winds of poverty from the Ellis Island of one family acquaintance to the Anne Frank attic of another- welcome but intruding- the raw savagery of the new homeland worried on my soul and tore the fine membrane of gentility that was not yet and would never survive to become my armour.



Coarse, crude, unrefined, mistaking strength of sinew for strength of character. Closed minded, open armed, a veneer of naivety covering jingoist xenophobia, obscenely generous with eyes like wolves. Swaggering their illusory frontier bravery, their rough, “unpolished” worldview, like an idiot savant with an attitude.



And that was the children.



And that was what I felt as a child back then. I felt the thorns of their rejection. I hated that I wanted to be like them – be liked by them. And those children are adults now, though many are just children with wrinkles, incontinence, less hair and bigger toys. And some of the girls I knew then are living in the suburbs and complaining about Packies and natives and people on welfare and crime and such because the more you have, the more you have to lose. And they still think that the stuff they sacrificed their joy for was really worth it. And they still have stunted souls and stunted dreams in the breast pocket of their birthday suit. And they still think they’re on the frontier and they wonder why their children don’t respect them. North America seems to have replaced wisdom with platitudes and acquisitiveness which are not evocative of respect, so is it any wonder? We used to have elders but we’ve replaced them with old people. And the only wisdom they ever find flows from the pulpit in their church or the electric pulpit in their living room and the only depth they ever approach is the yawning well of their lives’ emptiness.



And sometimes I grieve for them. And sometimes I despise them. And sometimes I rise to all my pompous height and look down at and upon them, like now. And sometimes, if the light is right, if it’s Tuesday, if the canned laughter on the prevailing cultural icon invades my musings, or I rage at the coloured skin of someone who has interrupted my mindless rush to wherever – without signaling – I come up short.



When in Canada- do as Canadians do.