Small town life

*The following is part of an ongoing post about how we became Montrealers, and is on my maternal grandparents in Portugal. See previous entries beginning in December 2012.
------------------------------

School for children was not mandatory and their attendance was but loosely enforced. Children in the region must now go to school for at least nine years before they can choose to work. When my grandparents were young, preschools were privately established in homes and, for those who could afford it, they taught children the alphabet and kept them relatively occupied while parents worked. Other families had the option of leaving their children to wander the streets or depending on a neighbour look after them. School was free for all children as of seven years old, and at that age, everyone went.

            The schoolhouse was not the most popular place among the children of Aljustrel, as the primary use of the yardstick was to chastise, the second, to intimidate, and third, to provide measurement values of lengths and widths. With red hands, the children were only obliged to commit to school for four years. After that, to continue would bear each family an invoice. This option was not popular, especially in the interior provinces, and few went on to study their way into college. Lucia did the four years, outlasting her older sister who completed two years before being taken to work by their mother.

            The mines in the region were for copper and manganese, the green stone. This was the general line of work of the town’s men. It was the predominant industry, as there was little else at the time apart from the fields. But working above ground was generally a woman’s job and below it, a man’s.

            “Is that how the town began?” I ask.

            After a long pause for thought, my grandmother responds. “ I think it was the mine. There were 3 mines, one in the other town Santo Domingues. People from Belgium owned the mine. They were not Portuguese. This was for many years. Then they were closed, but it had to be maintained all that time. They just reopened one last year. They had slowed down and closed for more than 10 years and now they’ve opened again. But now it’s a Canadian company.”

            She looks to my grandfather for confirmation on this and repeats the question in Portuguese. She has an Alentejano accent but it is less apparent after 40 years spent amongst Canadians, away from the natural progression of vernacular, pronunciation and vocabulary localized ways of speaking can undergo in one-and-a-half generations. I don’t have the privilege of being able to speak Portuguese but having heard it my entire life and understanding it almost as well as I do French, I was able to pick up on the various dialects and accents when touring the country twelve years ago.

            He confirms with a nod, and goes on to explain that the reason the Romans and Arabs were originally attracted to the place was for its subterranean richness. There were lots of useful things beneath those grassy hills. The Romans they speak of, it suffices to qualify, are not empire Romans but rather Romanians, and the Moros (Moors) are from the times of the Kings, most notably King Alfonso in the 12^th Century, who fought to reclaim the southern provinces of Portugal from its Muslim occupants and to establish the region as a kingdom in its own right and not merely a fiefdom of Leon.

            “Your mom has a book, the story of Portugal, that explains many things.”

At this point, I embark on a lighter topic.

            “How well did you know Avô before your relationship started?”

            Lucia smiles. “We weren’t friends as kids, but we lived not too far from each other.”

            Three streets separated them, the path a zigzag. She nonetheless knew who he was. One of her childhood friends was his next-door neighbour. Their backyards were separated by low, stone half-walls and often they would play as a larger group of children. “Many times we’d play together, boys with girls, but I never thought about him. When I was 14 he started to pass through my street and he started to walk with me.”

            Miguel, accompanied by two other boys, would sing for Lucia and her friends from the street. In the summers of their teenage years, they held dances and large gatherings in the central market on Saturdays. The townspeople would clean everything and prepare for these events that would last into the evening and attract seasoned bands from other towns. When the rollerskating rink was built, it soon took over as the new location.

            “Back then,” my grandfather points out, “lots of people lived in Aljustrel. Now it’s a bigger town, but fewer people live there. The mine had 1,500 people working there. Saturday night and Sunday, everyone was in the street, walking in the middle of the street.” On their occasional summer visits to their hometown, my grandparents encounter a subdued calm on weekends in stark contrast to the period in which they grew up. Not surprisingly, he also attributes this change to the advent of television, which I assume reached that population some time later than North America, with similar consequences. 

A good place to start.

Accounting for much of the southern half of Portugal is Alentejo, a province once vastly occupied by the Moors in the medieval period. Its rolling, grassy hills undulate with orchards and wheat fields and sometimes towns. There are no forests. No matter how deserted the road may seem, look in any direction toward the horizon and you are guaranteed to see evidence of civilization from any vantage. Houses on hilltops dot the landscape and if you’re lucky, a town snuggled into a miniature valley springs into view. Aljustrel is one such town, a collection of white plaster houses with red clay tile hats, all tightly packed together as if bounded by an invisible moat or wall. A few manmade ponds surround it and a hillside blasted wide-open, residual scar tissue from a now defunct mine.

            This appearance from a distance is consistent with the nature of the community I witnessed in 2001: unselfish, unified, wounded, proud, the town of my mother and grandparents’ birth. Pedestrians make way for motorists that honk liberally at every signal-less intersection. A car horn carries a friendlier significance in Portugal – “you can’t see me around the corner but I’m here, hello!” Narrow concrete streets lead the wanderer in diffuse directions, sloping ever steeply on the hillside of which the Ermida de Santa Maria do Castelo commands the summit, a 15^th century chapel, the town’s sacred treasure. The province, Portugal’s largest in area, has ridden the country’s modernization and surging economy in the last quarter of the twentieth century. But to get to here, it had to undergo unforgettable struggle at the hands of fascist asymmetry in the capital.

            My role here is not to align facts on a chronological continuum, nor is it to even provide verified accuracy. For that, I’m certain you can consult one of many accounts of Portugal’s political and social history. I bring to you the country of my grandparents as they remember and understand it; a sense of place at the point at which lived experience is intrinsically tied to the drawstring of memory.

           

At the time that my grandmother, Lucia—or who my brothers and I call endearingly Avó—was born in 1937, Alentejo was under feudal ownership and largely divided between only three or four people. Her father, whom we called Avô Ferreira, was a field worker (our paths only crossed once when I was a toddler). He worked mainly with the means of the day, machines, tractors, weeding and fertilizing the fields. Previously, he had been a chauffeur’s assistant, charged with sitting for long distances, keeping freight drivers awake and helping load and unload. But as far as Lucia can recall, he had always worked for the agricultural management company owned by her godmother’s parents. “That’s why we didn’t suffer too much,” she clarifies, “because we were close to that family and they helped us a lot.”

            Lucia’s mother, Avó Izaura, had six children, five daughters and one son, all quite far apart in age. Roughly 18 years separate the oldest and youngest, Lucia being the second born. Izaura had two adult daughters by the time she was nursing her youngest children, such that my mother’s aunt Mena is a mere 18 months older than she is.

“In that time we didn’t have television,” my grandfather interjects, at first, seeming to depart from the topic.

“What he means is, before, people had too many kids because they didn’t have TV,” corrects Lucia, at which we share a laugh. 

            Nobody owned their own land, but ordinary citizens like my grandmother’s family worked for the monopolists. There was plenty of manual labour for the girls in the fields, picking olives and nuts and cutting wheat. The northern tip of the province was somehow different. Many families had their proper division of land—I’m shown a recent touristic map as reference—but the rest consisted of what was probably no more than four enormous properties. Things have obviously changed since immigration to the first world began. Many people accumulated wealth and have returned to purchase a part of their homeland.

            The house in which Lucia spent her childhood was passed down from her paternal grandmother, who had two houses, one for her son and one for her daughter, her only two children. Lucia’s grandfather had died a young man and her grandmother had worked had to raise those children. She had had a piece of land where she grew grapes and olives and among other things, but it was later sold and the two houses had remained in her possession.

            Lucia speaks of her grandmother as a necessarily resilient woman whose job was to carry the mail. Aljustrel was then capital of the region, and all the smaller satellite towns belonged to Aljustrel’s council. She delivered mail from the center to another village, Montes Veilhos, each day, travelling by donkey. Lucia was delighted whenever her grandmother took ill or wasn’t feeling up to the task, for that meant she and her two cousins about ten or twelve years of age would take up the commute, to them an adventurous departure from the mundane. She recalls falling off the donkey upon his abrupt refusal to cross a stream. Often there were stone bridges at such crossings but when it had rained too much the water would rise, rendering the bridge inaccessible, forcing them to wade through the water. Once when the girls approached the donkey, he jumped and pushed the three of them into the river, Lucia’s head striking a rock and leaving a bruise to endure weeks.

            As she was one of the older children, it naturally fell on my grandmother’s list of responsibilities to care for her younger siblings. When her younger sister Elisabete was six-months-old, my great-grandmother became sick with liver stones and had to go under the knife in Lisbon. “We had a very difficult time, that time,” Lucia tells me, describing that at fifteen and seventeen, she and her sister stayed and watch the younger ones.  Twice a day they had to bring the baby across town to be breastfed by a cousin who was coincidentally a new mom. Nobody at the time brought their children with them to the hospital, and Lisbon, from Aljustrel, was a nine or ten hour bus ride, predating the country’s system of highways. Today, Lisbon is less than two hours from Aljustrel by car.

            Lucia remembers another hardship brought about by a progression of misfortunate events. When she was pregnant five months with her first child, her mother-in-law died at age 45. Lucia remembers her as a good person and a generous helper, who housed her upon her marriage into the family at age eighteen. My grandfather Miguel, or simply Avô as we call him, was serving his mandatory years in the military far from home. His brothers, Dionisio and Ze, were little kids, and his only sister Nellita only five years of age when their mother passed away.

“Four months later, Laura was born. That’s why we named her Laura; because she looked exactly like her Avó, exactly, exactly like her. Even now when I look at her, she reminds me of my mother-in-law.” My grandmother goes on to explain that Miguel has always taken after his mother in speech and mannerism, unlike his more soft-spoken brothers. “Your Avó Laura, she never shut up for anybody. When she had something to say, she said it, but she was a very right person. When she reasoned, nobody stopped her.”

“That sounds like my mother, all right,” I cut in.

My great grandmother Laura was benevolent to a fault. She would sacrifice what little she had for others, often neglecting her own personal security or wellbeing. During the Spanish Civil War, many Spaniards sought refuge in Portugal. She didn’t know these families, but she never let anyone stay on the streets, even if it meant they had to accept sleeping on the floor when all the beds were taken. One family, Lucia recalls, was a particular nuisance. It was expected that they stay in the house until it was safe to travel again, but eventually, the father found a job and decided to make a temporary living in Aljustrel, for a while refusing to move out and rent a home for his family. They had become too comfortable and would continuously argue when confronted by their hosts. The family finally vacated. My grandfather recently ran into one of the daughters in the Algarve, not surprised that they had remained in Portugal permanently ever since.

 In another gallop of reflexive generosity, my great grandmother took in her own uncle and his four boys, and provided shelter for many years. He made agricultural tools by trade and would sell them in the surrounding towns with a travelling fair. No one else wanted him around because he was a heavy drinker and difficult to handle. There was no space in the house, but my great grandfather made him a little house in the backyard. (On my last visit in 2001, I noted that the little house had been converted into a miniature barn occupied mostly by chickens.) He lived there, worked there and would often get drunk. Late one night, when it rained so heavily that the steep incline of the street turned into a rushing stream, he could be heard lying in the water yelling. My grandmother and great-grandmother, in her sick and depleted state, went trudging down the street in as many layers as they could throw on (my great grandfather not on hand because he worked the overnight shift in the mine), to carry the man back through the house, into the backyard, up a long flight of stairs and into his own house. Such are the tribulations of the kind hearts of this world. My mother was born four months to the day after she died.

            The women of the family were also able to contribute some paid work. “We called it ‘monda’, ‘mondar’…we had to clean the weeds from the wheat, and pick chickpeas.” This was done at night, for the day’s aridity in the summertime would cause the chickpeas to fall too easily. Chickpeas inside their casing are like beans. They need an adequate level of humidity to hold them together in order to be properly picked. Women living in rural settings were never short of an occupation. When there was no fieldwork, Lucia would learn how to sew. She explains that in Portugal of the 1950s, clothes were either made or bought from individual tailors or seamstresses. Stores sold only material, thread, and sometimes socks for convenience, but fascinatingly, these suppliers’ other role in society was to educate young girls on the basics of couture. So the women in the family made all the clothing they wore, even underwear and socks. It was different in Lisbon, as “they already started to have what we called ‘pronto a vestir’, but there was not too much of that.”

            It was more expensive, but the culture of the decade demanded perfect fit. “We had to know how to make something, take measurements and make things for our body. At that time, we recycled so much. I heard David Suzuki talking about that. It’s exactly the same thing he used to do with his grandmother and all the family. Now jeans are chic, but at that time, jeans were just for work. But when they had a hole, we kept an old pair of jeans to cut pieces off and patch it up.” That image not far removed from the current hipster drapery adorning our city centers and suburbs, it is just another spoke on the ever-rotating wheel.

Presence, and what it means.

Before getting into the narrative/exposé part of this project, I want to first share a guiding notion that will remain prevalent throughout. Shamelessly, I’ve lifted this directly from the pages of my MA thesis on three Canadian TV commercials. There’s nothing as gratifying as recycling your own labour when it has already been declared dead and forgotten.

If you don’t know what any of this is about, read the previous post.

Presence emphasizes the choice to make positive and lasting investments of time in the lives of one’s family members. In Proud Fathers, Lou’s stern, affirmative presence in Jimmy’s formative years, as well as his covert presence at the rink, is worth noting.

               In A Bike Story, presence is demonstrated through silence. The narrator’s modesty illustrated by his reluctance to ask his father for a bike is in turn rewarded by his father’s decision to buy it for him. Silent presence appears in the attitudes of both the boy and his father: the boy’s quiet humility, patience and devotion to his father and the man’s silent awareness of his son’s thoughts, wishes and credibility. Embedded in the dialogue and scenario in Dieppe, presence can once more be found. Mark’s conversation with his grandfather is mediated by the distance between them. On a personal level, Mark communicates with his grandfather to include a veteran first-hand voice from his own family into an experience he has created in the spirit of past events. Dieppe is an important place for Mark’s grandfather. It resides in his memory and in the memories of others who lived through its darkest days. Part of his life remains there despite that many of his compatriots lost their lives. Mark travels to be close to that memory. Steps are retraced, the town is explored, and sand and stones on the beach are physically touched, picked up. They are the sediment of the foundation upon which this memory was created, long before Mark’s birth. This memory was then supplanted into his mind through stories narrated by his grandfather. Therefore, by placing a long distance phone call, Mark is able to be remotely present for his grandfather, and reciprocally and involuntarily, his grandfather is spiritually present in Dieppe for Mark.

               Through the notion of presence and the different ways of being present (for one another), the characters’ personal ethics within the narratives can be illustrated and typified. Furthermore, these depictions of ideal forms of presence are the first step in the process of collective identification.  

While collective identification may not be my focus here, personal identification molded by meaningful relationships to others, be they positive or frictional, best suits this particular idea of presence. Presence is love in its many forms. It is life-sustaining and preserving. It is, in a very fundamental way, a linear facilitation of the basic need of self-making. An extreme example comes to mind.

One summer there was suddenly a family of squirrels living in the awning above the front door at our house. This is because, when building it, my father mistakenly left a three inch opening just above the storm drain. Sitting out on the front porch we could hear them running around inside the large triangular space above our heads. I wondered how any animal could see in there, as they seemed to be located beyond the archway that would cut off what little light the entrance could possibly provide. We would hit the ceiling with our hockey sticks, laughing at the ensuing audible fuss. Sometimes when I was quiet I would find the mother squirrel sitting sentinel with her nose jutting out from the opening. I would carefully leave almonds and peanuts on the branch saddles of the large magnolia jumping distance from the hole, only to sit back and watch as she cautiously collected all of them, freezing still at equal intervals, her senses on high alert.

            My father boarded it up eventually, but not without a struggle that demonstrates the kind of panic a mammal parent has toward its young. For days, the squirrel gnawed at the half-inch slice of particleboard, littering a bed of sawdust on the ground beneath, in order to create an opening just large enough to squeeze through. I imagine the babies lived through the ordeal since no smell of decay or spike in housefly numbers occurred. After that, it was business as usual. I’m not a naturalist but I imagine that after a while, those little ones, however many, were by the summer’s end old enough to climb down and start living autonomously.

            One November evening, when the temperature dipped well below zero overnight, I arrived home for dinner, the street dark. After I walked inside, my brother pointed out that I had just walked past two young squirrels parked on our front porch. We could see them clearly from the window. They were nestled quite tightly together, bracing for a cold night. Why had they had not scattered when I was keying the lock? Had I stepped five inches to the right I might have flattened a tail. I got down on the floor and put my face right up against the glass. The pane was all that separated us. I knocked. One of them looked frightened, concerned for the other, who was virtually immobilized with what looked like a terminal disease, but conscious nonetheless. These two were siblings and I was willing to bet nice dinners for a year that they were the summer pups that had lived seven feet above their current uncertainty.

            Fascinated, I grabbed a small blanket and a shoebox, closing off the window gap with the lidless box and throwing the blanket on top of the squirrels. The caretaker worked furiously – really, what luck to have a makeshift shelter fall out of the sky – to entangle its sibling into warmth and security. A frozen breeze still made its way through gaps in the shell, rippling the blanket. The able-bodied sibling braced for a tragic night, staring at me sidelong with its one visible eye, the other squirrel fading away, twitching less with each passing moment, eyes greyed over, waiting for an impending appointment.

In my neighbourhood, squirrels did not trust humans like those in an Algonquin camp site who stage territorial feuds, scream from the tops of trees and beg for scraps of bread and fruit. Pointe-Claire squirrels remained pinned to the sanctity of thinner treebark if people were anywhere within earshot. To dispense with their dependence on the ground they created highways along branches and electrical wires spanning almost the entire block, hardly needing little more than a two-metre leap of faith at the most. The scene in the front door window, however, reminded me that personal tragedy transcends levels and lines of nature and habit to disassemble barriers, and that those in dire circumstances can be driven to reach for olive branches from the devil’s mouth. As a real life metaphor, it also revealed the most basic operation of the notion of presence down to the last transmissions of a flickering flame. We are present in spirit, in growth, in deed and in death. We are visible to one another; we undergo radical passage in communion, in concert. Even major movements achieved through solitary action rely strongly at the fringe, in the margins, on interaction, fleeting human companionship, favours taken and offered, regardless of the terms of social contract.

I woke up late the next morning to the sounds of my grandmother rearranging pots and pans. When I asked her about the previous night’s squatters, she reported to have thrown the dead squirrel, wrapped in its small blanket, into the garbage, shoebox and all, its companion absent; a dark chapter in an already spirited family saga, of which we would never see the next installment.

"Doodle" (for lack of a better title)

Once in a long while, I sit down and think about things. The problem is it usually happens when I don't have the time to be thinking about things. Here's a thought that may end up leading to other thoughts down the road:
---------

Rudy Wiebe, one of most under-read of the greatest Canadian writers, introduces us to the Inuit conception of spatial structure in Playing Dead. Any area whose dimensions are undefined or unknown is understood de facto as long and narrow. Likewise, anything that is stationary and visibly bounded becomes “areal”; relatively equal are all of its perceived geometric dimensions. When something is in motion, it becomes “linear”, presumably because of the trail it leaves behind, the tracing of a path through what is both familiar in its enormity, and in its details, new and wondrous with every individual step.

            He’s transforming local spatial concepts into linguistic metaphors about the Canadian North, or any north for that matter. What’s important to remember is that death comes to those who remain motionless in the Arctic. If we move, and therefore become linear in dimension, he writes, “on the so-called barrens of the Arctic it is impossible for a living person to stay lost; or by the same token, it is impossible to hide.” This idea, as I understand it, is readily applicable to the pluralistic civic nation and its problems, problems that arise as a result of being made to share a plot of land with one another. Political tensions that gave birth to the rights revolution, the recent reasonable accommodation debates, suspicions predicated on, in many cases, the subtle differences between ethnic groups and the dominant faction can all be remedied if we choose to see them as spatial.

            Different peoples organize, create, use and deploy space in their unique ways, which often end up interfering with others’ plans. My idea, condensed, was to connect this conception with how space is articulated by the relationships between characters in narrative commercial ads on television. By looking at these relationships and the gestures that represent them as rhetorical, I hoped to characterize them as influential of an ongoing program for Canadians: the program of the mundane and its pivotal role in defining who we are as a collective body. I wanted to prove that these commercials - like Tim Horton’s Proud Fathers and Canadian Tire’s A Bike Story and Bell Canada’s Dieppe - show us the kind of nation we aspire to be, despite seeming contrived and melo-cinematic. They convince us that the poetry-in-motion of everyday life diminishes and renders insignificant our political demands and the conflicts they ignite. We are all stuck on the same grid, and so we must smile, nod, wink, and practice community through reciprocity and compromise.

            The kind of thinking this type of assertion requires (What did you say? Commercials are actually culturally beneficial? An ideal society is one in which cultural identity is upstaged by consubstantial order?) is usually met without fail by raised eyebrows in today’s post-secondary, especially north of the 45^th parallel. That is, among other factors, why it never saw its own expression in dissertation form (other factors were money, cash and funds). The freedom one relinquishes in such a constrained and misdirected process can be quite suffocating, a premonition that caused me to politely jump ship partway through a potentially destructive doctorate. So with the umbilical cord cut, and the world beginning just outside the old wooden door of my Montreal home during the first snowfall in autumn, I will tell this story at my own variable pace, drawing on my not-so-carefully selected bedtime literature collection for guidance and friendship, and seeking momentary inspiration in each gulp of espresso.

            The last four paragraphs cover a lot in a short span without much indication as to what kind of story is worth telling. As a preamble, I return to the Inuit conception of spatial structure, extending it to a global scale to test its conceptual parameters. There are two types of motion in the circulation of people around the world. On the one hand, we have local motion. Mrs Retiree leaves her home in the morning to go do volunteer work, after which she has afternoon tea with friends at her favourite coffee shop, after which she stops in at the grocery store to buy some fresh vegetables, and upon arriving home, brings in the mail. Local motion is linear, but is also repetitive and cyclical, is highly structured and scheduled, and occurs with fluidity, depending on one’s abilities and energy levels. Above all, it is a reflex to stay alive and kicking. Basic socialization and association takes place in the realm of the mundane. It is very much a matter of our survival as individuals with interests and as agents in a structured system. On the other hand, we have at our disposal the type of movement that is linear, unidirectional, covers significant distance and is intended as a permanent reconfiguration of one’s reality. Radical passage is the reduction of the human nomadic reflex into a moment in which we recognize the incompatibility between our personal mode of survival and the surrounding (and luckily regional) organizing principles that engage us. It is sometimes also a response to the recognition that despite the competence of one’s current assurance of the ongoing provision of basic needs, one has a better chance or is certain to “live better” elsewhere.

            In both instances, the concept of space operates, either as a tool of familiarity, proximity and routine, or as a measurement of distance, discovery and renewal. While living in a city, we may be “areal” or sedentary at a global level, but on a local scale, the linear paths we create crisscross endlessly, forming a complex web of interconnections, recognitions and assurances - in other words: waves and winks, meetings, dinner parties, and car accidents. By the same token, distance plays a pivotal role as a measurable degree to which we remain separated from all the places in the world we (sometimes subconsciously) long for. Radical passage as new beginning requires a necessarily violent rupture; spaces once familiar crystallize into memory. Languages, cultural codes, ways of relating to one another (or not) no longer serve us how they used to, forcing us to adapt and discover how easily we can exceed our once thought limits. Meanwhile, we grapple with our reflections, never quite facing this complex relationship we have with our skin, with our origins, often making our return during years of good harvest to reassemble our identities.

            All of this to say that while communication technologies (in the broad sense) and the global economy have cooperatively eliminated the caribou hunt (or rendered it almost exclusively ceremonial), they have created alternate exigencies our nomadic instincts can be resuscitated momentarily to solve. In modern societies, a once reflexive type of movement can now be understood as a rational, calculated leap of faith. In what follows, I chronicle two such leaps almost two decades apart: those that eventually led to my existence. The stories of the migrations of my paternal grandparents from war-scarred Italy in 1955 and my maternal grandparents along with my mother and uncle from one-party Portugal of 1972 are not unique. They are at once every ethnic Montrealer’s narratives. What, then, is the use of telling them if they are simply joining the established chorus of voices? A responding analogy would ask: Why record an album of popular Christmas carols? Two reasons jump out here. The first and most obvious is that beauty and authenticity reside in the singular interpretation. However, I have far from sat down to interpret the life and times of anyone. Rather, I’m filled with the Christmas spirit, to extend the metaphor, with an irreversible compulsion to give, to receive, to communicate, to examine a historical trajectory and finally, to feel the same unity carolers share.

            So the second reason is simply to inscribe. The hours of interviews conducted with family members are themselves timeless and infallible inscriptions. Therefore I write in the hope of providing a display case for their preferred arrangement, but unlocked so as to invite future changes, elaborations. I write for my unborn children in full knowledge that they will grow up far from knowing the “foreign” cultures that gave them their unique names. Take myself and my brothers for example. As a first generation born Canadian on my mother’s side, the fiction of the mosaic (perhaps appropriately) ravaged what potentiality I had of learning her language, or that of my father. I am another Anglophone Canadian with a Torontonian drawl given to me by that slice of Ontario within Quebec we call the West Island. I see what traditions my parents grew up with now in a constant state of reinvention. In this day and age, the way we run our lives needs to serve our momentary needs and desires, and it is so shallowly set, it can all change in an instant. I see fewer and fewer people, myself among them, who adhere to deeply entrenched principles in their decision making. Improvisation is the new mantra.

            So this act of inscription will ideally help me to discover what’s left, if anything, of an authentic way-of-being brought here from somewhere else, whether it amounts to familiar reactions to social stimuli, the simplicity or complexity of emotions, of psyche, or perhaps how we are often hardwired to deliver humour like others in our lineage. Regardless, I’m almost convinced for the record that there is nothing left. After all, spatially speaking, the neighbourhood raised me, and I am a son of this country through and through. One element that threads the generations is our need to be surrounded by family. Though not unique in any way, our heavy reliance on and willingness to support and be ever present to our siblings, parents, grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts, is the only responsible factor to our privilege and prosperity in so short a time. With confidence I can say that this relationship of warmth has not been in any way drained by the washed out watercolours of multiculturalism many so overzealously tout.

            Of this movement I write.