A story for Dean, for Canada Day: My family emigrated from the UK to Canada in 1974. I was a baby. We went back and forth between them for years. We’d spend every summer in the UK, sometimes for months at a time. We always lived with one foot in each.
In certain eyes, that made us “bad Canadians.” We weren’t even Canadians, officially. We weren’t citizens. I sometimes felt like we didn’t belong anywhere. My friends made fun of how my parents said “garage.” Our UK relatives looked at our tans and thought we were aliens.
When my dad said “home,” he meant Wales. My mum meant the north of England. But time soon began doing its good work. As we, their children, grew up—first my brother and me, and later my sister, born here—when we said “home,” we meant Canada.
So did my parents. They came here with nothing—we would cut chocolate bars into five, like Tiny Tim’s family sharing a bean—but they worked hard and both became college professors. They taught thousands of Canadians over the years and learned from them, too.
When I was 19, my family finally applied for citizenship. We had to take a test. Like, a general knowledge test, administered by a citizenship judge. Weirdly, we felt suddenly compelled to study about Canada, where we’d lived for nearly two decades.
I don’t know if we were supposed to study. I would guess the idea behind the test was that “true” Canadians would know some things about their own country—would have picked up its history, culture, and traditions by osmosis. That’s how Canada works.
It’s fun, years later, watching my Romanian girlfriend gather her own Canadian string. Canada does indoctrination differently than other places. It’s slower, subtler. Songs on the radio. The view out the window. The understanding that cutting in line will get your bell rung.
Anyway, we studied for the test, because we didn’t want to blow it. We wanted to prove we had become good Canadians. We dressed up and went to our interview. Arrived at the appointed hour in the judge’s chambers. I can still feel the trickle of sweat that went down my back.
The judge looked at my dad and said, “John?” He was one of my dad’s former students. That’s how long we had lived here. My dad had come to Canada and taught someone who now helped decide who should get to call themselves Canadian.
The judge didn’t ask many questions. He just smiled and said, “Welcome home.” That’s Canada to me. It’s one long cycle of people coming together to give to other people, who give back, and we call that a country. Happy Canada Day, everybody. We are lucky to have each other.
