My Canadian Upbringing in America
The summers were lovely. The winters could be brutal. It’s life in the north. Living on Lake Ontario meant you didn’t get the snow dumps of Buffalo. Ontario is a deep lake, and the prevailing winds carried any lake effect snow off to the east, though the occasional ice storm would take us off the grid for days at a time.
It’s not a wealthy community during the week. The weekends of late spring through early fall meant the rich would be in town to service and sail their “yachts.” They were primarily small sailboats. They’d fish for sturgeon sometimes. Other times they just lived on the boat for the long holidays. They didn’t mix with the “townies.”
As an adolescent, I spent considerable time down at the river and, later, at the lake. The rumor on the American side was that Canadian girls were loose. On the Canadian side, the rumor was reversed. The truth is none of them was that way.
There would be the odd fistfight. And name-callings, rooted in our teenage bravado. The differences between our two countries were always a topic of conversation. Compared to our Canadian cousins, our Western NY accents and speech patterns often meant not knowing what the other guy was talking about.
Our TV stations were all in Buffalo. Because we lived below an escarpment, our reception was spotty on good days. The TV coming out of Toronto was crystal. Bennie Hill and Monty Python greatly influenced me. The likes of them honed my sense of humor. To this day, I prefer British television to American.
In the latter years of the sixties, a friend and I would get up early on the weekend and skiff draft-dodgers to the other shore. It put cigarette money in our pocket, and we didn’t understand what we were doing, not really.
Sometimes the body of a “jumper” would find its way to the docks. The Niagara River separated the two countries, and the suicides could go long distances or get snagged on the rocks upriver and be shredded. It was always ugly when they happened to be caught in the quiet eddies near the docks. It didn’t happen often. I want my ashes spread there.
Later in life, I lived in the Adirondacks and traveled to Montreal to catch a baseball game or a show and eat the cuisine you don’t get unless it is a cosmopolitan city. Sometimes the citizens I came across arrogantly refused to communicate civilly with you if you didn’t speak French. Most times, they recognized you as American right away. A sixth Canadian sense. Those conversations went well enough.
I’ve adventured north to some great fishing places in the indigenous lands. Driving to them was pure pleasure. The land is raw and beautiful. The wildlife is diverse — so many varieties of birds and fish.
In short, I *heart* Canada.
These past few weeks, I have worried for my cousins. The strain their prime minister and his minions have put upon them is a shock. These kind, quiet, hard-working, polite people have had their freedom and finances upended. They’ve borrowed the words of our government and politicians to compare the protestors to our January 6 insurrectionists. I asked myself, “Is the government that afraid of the masses?”
This whole COVID thing has people squaring off into fractured camps. Masks and vaccinations have turned us into long-winded pontificators of our position, pro or con. I haven’t witnessed this much infighting in America since the Vietnam war.
We owe Canada. Their brave men have fought and died in the same theatres as ours. Their cultures are as important. Their democracy is as well. I think we’re failing them.
Our politicians are egging them on, I fear. Be afraid; our government tells their Canadian counterparts. Then the heavy hands start to land. Our two governments are tilting at windmills. We’re being forced to decide which “corner of the day” we want to be in.
My Granny, a West Virginia Mountain woman who didn’t have running water in her house until she was seventy-two, and whose farm I would stay at for six weeks every summer, had this saying:
“Other peoples’ opinion of you is none of your business.”
That’s my corner: Decide what is best for you and yours and don’t care what people (or governments) say.
People like Trudeau and Biden can’t have that. They want their opinion of you to be your priority. They flex beliefs and laws to make it so.
Let’s sack the lot of them and start over, shall we?
