Canada Day

Yes, today is July 4^th  and I'm in Chicago. But I have three countries, so I’m remembering Wednesday, Canada Day. Seems like someone around here should.

Late Wednesday night I was sitting inside a fort where once British Canadians fought Americans, listening to a band and watching fireworks among a crowd of red-Tshirted, flag-waving, happy Canadians. Someone passed around a guestbook with this question: “Why do you like Canada?” Made me stop to think.

The Lord Mayor (they have lords in Canada, red-Tshirted like everyone else) had welcomed us and introduced another dignitary whom I could tell was Italian even from where I was sitting. He told us his story about his family coming to Canada with nothing and making a life for themselves. He was bursting with pride for his new country. His last statement was pure Canadian, “No slight intended to any other nations, but this country is the best in the world!” The family that had adopted me for the evening and was passing around the guestbook is German and was remembering necessary expressions that just don't sound as good in any other language: schwienerie. This country is full of stories like that. But it’s not just immigrants. Other Canadians feel like they have been picked up and moved around to a new place, too.

We were in conversation with a recent college grad, a teacher, who told us that she already feels left behind by the technological savvy of her own students, her junior highers. She’s not even out of her twenties and she feels like she’s falling behind. She can already join in the “good old days” stories about having to walk home from school uphill both ways that parents tell. She no longer lives where she grew up.

Just before we’d talked to the college grad, we’d talked to a principal, retired for years now, who told his own stories. In his childhood, his family had no electricity, because Dad wasn’t going to pay for something he couldn’t see, and their freezer was an icebox that got stocked by the delivery man once a week. Even Robert remembers when his phone was a party line, and his family waited for two long rings and one short to pick up, unless they wanted to overhear their neighbors’ conversations. He remembers that when he took homemade bread to school, that marked him as “poor.” Things have changed.

There used to be a time when the stories of the old were wisdom for the young and the take-away was consistent and obvious. Their stories now seem foreign, exotic, sometimes even irrelevant to the young. What do we have to learn from ice boxes and party lines? So it’s not just immigrants who leave their past behind and pioneer new spaces.

In the notebook we passed around about why we loved Canada, people included things like maples and bacon, and freedom, and diversity and being able to walk down a street in Toronto and hear twenty different languages spoken all around them. Made me recall the comment of a friend just returned from Kentucky where a black-white marriage was criticized, because, “Where will the children fit in?” Would they fit in here, where I am now?  I am surrounded here by people who have to learn to fit into a new world, whether they are immigrants, twenty-year olds, or seventy-year olds. They all find themselves moving to Oz in some fashion, a good thing, since people who feel the ground move under their feet start looking out windows and noticing things. Uprootedness gives God room to nudge. I like Canada because of its pilgrims, its people on the move. It is a country of stories, a womb of stories.