O Canada!

It's been 35 years and two weeks since my family emigrated to Canada. I was nine years old and my parents and I, after a few exciting years in the Middle East, were living in Cornwall, England, but apparently that was about to change. One morning my father said to me, "What about Canada? We might be moving there." I can remember as clear as day, looking out the window and thinking to myself, "I'll have to wear snow shoes to get to school, and my friends' fathers will be lumberjacks." That was my very distinct impression of the possibility of our move.

How wrong could I be? The reality was a new apartment building in Mississauga (a suburb of Toronto, and brown water from the taps). Nothing could have prepared us for the cold. We had lived in the Middle East for years, and then spent a damp few months in Cornwall before enjoying a record-breaking English heat wave. It was November when we arrived in Canada, and our newly-bought London winter coats were not up to the job. I had never experienced that nostril-freezing bite as I stepped outside the door.

I was unhappy and it took a while to get over that. As we supposedly spoke the same language, it was assumed I would fit into the school system smoothly. Unfortunately I didn't understand most of what my teacher said, and my upright, rounded English handwriting was unacceptable. I was forced to learn sloping cursive. A few years ago I looked back at my tortured workbooks, my writing straining to conform. It was too awful to remember and I threw them all out. When I left highschool, seven years after arriving in Canada, my handwriting reverted to its original upright, rounded shapes like a whiplash.

I hated school. But I began to love Canada and now I'm so proud to call it home. I enjoy dual citizenship, which is a rare blessing in world where many have a single citizenship in a place I'd rather not even visit. Canada is - relative to what's out there - as free, safe and tolerant a country you could live in. It suffers from a multitude of identity crises, a terror of not being considered "world class", and peculiar, slightly wimpy political divisions, and but I can't talk intelligently about that. What I can say is what I love about it: it has billions of trees; its lakes are deep and clean; it's a pot-smoking, gay-marrying liberal haven; it's constantly striving for cultural significance. I am so lucky to live where and when I do.