My father served in WWII with the RCAF. When he married my mom they lived with her parents for some years saving to put a down payment on a house. My brother came before me. I remember their first house. They rented part of it out to a single working man. There was no health care and or pensions or welfare. When I was bit by a rabid dog everyone was worried. My treatment and care was expensive by the standards of the day. Same as the cost for me stepping on a rusty nail that went through my foot.
We ate Sunday dinner with my mom’s parents. We attended the Baptist Church too. That’s where I met black people. My father’s brother married Annie who was Cree. That’s how I played with Métis kids growing up.
We moved to Winnipeg when I was young. That’s when I met my two friends, Kirk and Garth. The Cold War and the Kennedy Missile Crisis were frightening. We had one of the first TV’s, my mom won it in a draw, and watched hockey with neighbours. Playing hockey was Canadian. In the summer we played baseball.
We all loved Mr. Diefenbaker because he loved all of Canada not just the east. We always camped in tents and went fishing in the summer. Dad took us on long drives on his 2 week summer holidays, once to the Pacific Coast and another time to the Atlantic Coast. My mother’s aunt visited us from Toronto. She’d been the assistant to Canada’s Ambassador during the War and travelled all over the world sending us souvenirs. I especially loved the Arabian head dress which I wore as a Shepherd in the church Christmas play.
Other than the thought of being blown to smithereens by nuclear weapons, growing up in the 50’s and early 60’s was pretty neat. My Jewish friend showed me the sign at the country club which said “No dogs. No Jews”. I didn’t have any yellow friends till I was older. My father liked smorgasbord and eventually met a Fillipino couple who’d Mom and Dad would go to smorgasbord with. We did know a Japanese fellow and later I’d know an ex Nazi German who told us with tears in his eyes that he’d had to fight the Russians because the government said they’d kill his wife and child. His wife was crying at the time and that’s all they ever talked about the war.
I remember singing the Canadian anthem and didn’t like much when they changed the flag. I liked blue and when they took away the blue it seemed wrong. Also the maple leaf was only in the east and the red colour was harsh. I remember Canada dividing east and west that year and feeling like a second class citizen. The railway and Gordon Lightfoots song, Canadian Trilogy had brought us all together like 1967. I loved seeing the geodesic dome at the World Fair in Canada.
We’d seen alien spaceships in the wilderness , watching saucers through binoculars. Then we’d hear that the government said it was weather phenomena. Dad laughed at that. He and his chemist friend from the university said, “No weather phenomena can make a ship go at that speed and change direction at 90degreess. “
We loved Star Trek and look forward to coming home after school and watching it. Mom made us grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch and Dad liked meat and potatoes for dinner. We all loved orio cookies .She gardened and kept the bird feeder and wrote columns on community news for the newspaper. She talked on the wall phone a lot to collect information for her articles. We competed in the horticultural shows with the flowers she taught us to grow. We visited Granddad’s ranch in the north some summer’s too. My uncle was a real cowboy. I rode horse with him. In the fall we hunted. Mostly ducks. Mom wouldn’t let Dad take me deer hunting. I remember him hanging deer in the basement where he had his shop skinning the deer and Mom and him butchering the deer on the kitchen table.
As kids we laughed at Bill Cosby records. Music became important with the arrival of the Beatles. Girls were the most beautiful in Canada. I loved the Scandinavian girls in bikinis at the Lake Winnipeg beaches. That’s when Beach Boy songs became popular.
We celebrated Christmas with a Christmas tree and gifts and tobogganing and hot chocolate. We loved maple syrup on our pancakes. I don’t remember Easter much except that the ladies wore exotic hats in church and we all sang happy hymns. Mom had taught me to pray on our knees by the side of the bed when I was a little child. We always had a dog who Dad would sneak scraps of food under the table.
In the fall we’d drive out to the country and visit the towns where the communities had fowl suppers. My brother Ron and I would stuff ourselves on turkey and dad would talk hog prices with the men. CJOB radio station always reported on the grain and hog prices each day. We shopped at Eaton’s and the Hudson’s Bay. Eventually I’d join the YMCA. At school I’d play volleyball. Later I’d join the Manitoba Theatre School. The Vietnam War was frightening. We thought it would spread. Jon Cowtan taught me guitar when I was doing Kitchen work with him at a summer camp. My first song was draft dodger’s rag. It was funny. I wrote love poetry mostly and wanted to be a writer. As a child Mom had taken my brother and me to the library every week and we’d borrowed three books we’d read each week. I loved reading and learning.
I’d fall in love, have sex and get my first broken heart. We’d go snow shoeing in winter and canoeing in summer. We hired the Guess Who for my high school dance for $500 when I was on the Student Council.
I’d eventually get kicked out of school, finish somehow, get into a band, do drugs, have more sex, crash, come home. My parents loved me. My older brother took care of me. I studied and read philosophy, history and theology , writing poetry all the time. I was a dancer and an actor, got married, then I left for Europe. I came back to Canada and liked that Canada was clean. I loved the wilderness. Everything human made in Canada seemed small and new in this vast country. Europe was old. Buildings were old and people were everywhere with very little country left. I loved the architecture there though. Our biggest building in Winnipeg was the Richardson Building. My aunt Sally liked to take us for dinner at the restaurant at the top of the CN Tower when we stayed with her in Toronto. I loved the sprawl and mess of Europe and Northern Africa when I bicycled across Eruope in my early 20’s and visited Morocco. The history and quaintness and different distinct cultures were so intriguing.
I was so glad to come back to Canada where there was opportunity. Everything in Europe was fixed. People didn’t have the choices we had. I loved freedom. I loved that I could go to university on scholarship and be rewarded by hard work. It seemed in Europe it was all about who your parents were and the class system was so powerful everywhere.
In Canada we had freedom. I loved the meritocracy of Canada.That was before the welfare system. I met Pierre Trudeau and liked him as a kid. I didn’t know he was a Nazi communist back then. He just seemed ‘cool’. The suits and red carnation got me. I was meeting a lot of White Russians who’d escaped from Communism and had so many of their family killed. I’d be a liberal for 20 years, meeting Chrétien and Turner too. I thought of Canada as enlightened. I’d loved Pearson and his worldliness and felt after I returned from Europe that the west was kind of provincial.
My heart was broken again and I left the arts and writing for medicine and service. Learning sciences was a different vision and I became fascinated by Canada’s scientific advances, the CANDU reactor, the Avro Jet, the Heart Surgery. I just lived in Canadian cities and whenever I could took off for the weekends to go hiking and camping. I’d eventually make my own igloos in the north and sleep in them. That’s when I was a fly in doctor in the north after I’d graduated and left surgery for country medicine because that’s where the greatest need was. We’d vacation in Mexico back then, exploring the Minoan and Aztec ruins and lying on the beach.
I’ve never thought I was anything but a Canadian. Then Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister and made Canada politically everything I abhorred. I never wanted to live in a totalitarian country. I had fought censorship and now was faced with the loss of freedom of speech. Even comics are charged for telling jokes. Everything not liberal is racist or hate speech. I’ve continued to travel around the world and people smirked and told me jokes about our Canadian Prime Minister. I’d been so proud to be Canadian when I’d travelled before but now we are a joke internationally. Not that relevant either, despite the grandiosity of Ottawa. The world had become much more sophisticated while Canada had become much smaller ,outdated and provincial.
Now we’re in the midst of Covid 19 and I’m very thankful to be in British Columbia where UBC, Dr. Bonnie Henry, Mr. Dix and Mr. Horgan make me proud to be Canadian. But mostly I’m British Columbian today. There’s been so much divide and conquer I can’t feel much of the old Deifenbaker, Canada, One Country. Trudeau calls himself .a transnational and loves the UN One World Order. There’s nothing there Canadian. He has no pride of country like I did. In fact, he’s anti Canada, as far as I can tell. The whole Idea of an enlightened country which loved the north , embraced freedom and wilderness as distinctively Canadian has been lost. Increasingly I meet immigrants who have never been out of the parking lot cities. Vancouver may as well be San Francisco or Mexico City. Winnipeg downtown may as well be Tel Aviv. Cities are not countries. Cities are human habitats and they look all the same like Walmarts and Canadian Tires. Big shopping malls with living quarters. Istanbul only has one block of park and except for different monuments seems similiar to Delli. Now so many Canadians live in a Canadian City and they don’t holiday in Canada or know Canada as a country, but every year go back to some city in China, India, Somalia, or the Middle East. They don’t call themselves Canadian either, but Indo Canadian or Chinese Canadian or Persian Canadian or French Canadian . At least I meet their children out in the woods or in the north. The natives call me a squatter and want to turn Canada into what became of South Africa which kills whites weekly claiming that’s progress. I hope not.
What made Canada distinctive was the wilderness and the outdoors. We didn’t hide inside and people didn’t live out their lives in their mother’s basement or in high rise appartments like Hong Kong. Canadians camped and hiked and knew the land. Fewer and fewer people I know have been to the north or explored the Maritimes , been to Niagara Falls or visited the St. Lawrence or the Prairies. I’ve been to every province but the new Nunavut and Newfoundland.
Canada somehow became Montreal/ Toronto when I was living overseas or working in the States. Overnight the rest of Canada disappeared like England disappeared one day when London became a megalopolis.
Now Canada is a city, Montreal and Toronto no different from London, New York, or LA. Canada for me was the Great Lakes and the Rockies. It was sailing and hiking and playing hockey and snowmobiling in northern Manitoba, motorcycling Duffy Lake road, skiing Whistler, cross country skiing in the Yukon, swimming in Lake of the Woods, eating lobster in Nova Scotia, fishing pickerel in Loyalist Cove. It was riding horses in Saskatchewan. It was country. It was the Calgary Stampede and the Maple Syrup festival in Quebec and tales of Coer de Bois in St. Boniface. It was distinctive and unique as only the outdoors can be. It was God’s country and I was so grateful and thankful to be Canadian and grow up Canadian.
It’s Canada Day. I’ve a wealth of wonderful memories and bittersweet thoughts of my country today The people have changed and the politics have gone down the tube. The corruption seems worse but then we were once famous as booze runners and then as pot sellers. We’ve always been gun runners. I”m outside today enjoying being beside a mountain stream. Canada is still God’s country to me even though I believe the government has gone to the devil. I can’t wait till it finds it’s way back home because I’ve got nowhere else to go.
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