Born on the Fourth of July

On Canada Day, I think of the United States.
It’s inevitable.
And it’s also very personal.

Our two countries are so very different, yet we both sprang from the womb of Brittania who once indisputably ruled the waves:

Two colonies who grew up and got all independent, as children are wont to do — one, a brash bold charming young Alpha male, charging out into the world with flags flying and supreme self-confidence; the other, more feminine and accomodating, half-envious and half-despairing of resisting the testosterone tornado from the south…

Why can’t we all just get along?

On the First of July, each year, I march in the Canada Day parade with our local field trial club, accompanied by my best-behaved dog. He’s the one who affects not to notice the big brass band that’s marching after us, or the Chinese dragon dancing ahead.

This dog is American-born, in fact— but what does he know? He’s just happy to be here, out for a lovely walk in the summertime, meeting new friends…

Walking in that parade, waving my little Maple Leaf at the laughing roadside crowds, I am aware only of music and the breeze and a sea of red-and-white flags, a blur of faces… just change the flags to Stars and Stripes, and this could be Independence Day in any New England town.

~

I was born on the Fourth of July.

But that’s not what it says on my birth certificate.

In the small border-town hospital where I was born, the windows of the maternity ward looked south. On the night of the Fourth of July, in the final hour of her labour, my mother distracted herself by watching the fireworks over the river. She told me so.

~

I was born on the Fourth of July.

But my father refused to permit it.

If he could have kept me in the womb for another hour, no doubt he would have done so. But even in the moment that I was delivered, a cacophany of boat and car horns was heralding the fireworks finale on the American side.

The doctor asked the nurse to note the time of birth. My father sprang up from her bedside and wrenched at the hands of the wall clock, cranking them around to just past midnight. The doctor took one look at Father’s face and quietly changed the date to July the Fifth.

(Things like that can happen in small towns, where each man knows the other’s story.)

Father’s deep-seated disgust for all things American was so extreme: he would not allow his child to share a birthday with our neighbour-nation!

For years, this perplexed me…

Why can’t we all just get along?

~

You see, Father was, in truth, the least xenophobic of men.

He spoke seven languages from the Latin to the Scandinavian, with a workmanlike smattering of a few Asian tongues.

Growing up, we kids were double-bunked like cordwood to make room for foreign students — Vietnamese, Australian, Thai, Nigerian — who became part of our family, and stayed so for decades after they they moved on to other parts of Canada, or back home.

My first boyfriend was Maliseet; the second was the descendant of Black Loyalists; the third was Spanish.

My father never blinked an eye.

~

A clue here and there, dropped in family conversations over the years… and I’ve come to the conclusion that Father’s apparently logical reasons for his apparently illogical dislike of the United States, has nothing to do with politics, economics, history, geography or value systems.

It has nothing to do with the “melting pot” versus “cultural mosaic” philosophy that is perhaps the single largest difference between our two countries.

It has nothing to do with blind patriotism.

It’s personal.

~

My paternal grandfather was an American. He married a Canadian, settled in Canada, and raised his family with dual citizenship — or he started to raise them. He was lost at sea just short of his fortieth birthday, just after my father was born.

Father’s older brothers and sisters helped their widowed mother to raise him — no doubt a hardscrabble existence, through the Depression years. She took in laundry. My uncles and aunts left school in their early teens. They ate a lot of fish.

My grandmother’s family gave what they could to help, and fostered my father in his first few winters, when there wasn’t enough firewood to keep the house warm for a baby. There are stories from that difficult time I know that I’ll never hear…

What I do know is that my grandfather’s family had no hand in raising those children.

To this day, we have no idea who they are— some family down in Boston shares my last name, that’s all.

They might not even know that they have a Canadian branch to the family tree.

Imagine, then, my father’s heartbreak when the siblings who raised him all — every one of them — picked up and moved “across the line”and renounced the Canadian part of their dual citizenship, to become more fervently American than native-born Americans. Suddenly, everything in Canada was second-rate, backwards, vaguely pathetic — including their youngest brother.

And they said so — loudly and often. This I remember all too well from my childhood, crouching over the floor grate in Grandma’s back bedroom, all ear for the tense adult voices in the night kitchen below.

And what do men of my father’s generation do with pain?
They turn it into anger.

~

My father’s anger propelled him out of poverty and fuelled a distinguished academic career that opened doors for him all over the world. It brought him material success and the lasting respect of his peers. It gave his children a very comfortable upbringing: more so, in fact, than that of our American cousins.

But whatever he earned or achieved, it was never enough to let his siblings see him as anything more than the little brother who failed to take his opportunity to become an American; who “settled” for being a mere Canadian shadow of the dream.

On his side, something to prove.
On their side… what?

It’s just a crying shame.

And I don’t quite know what to make of it all, except to take it as a cautionary tale. Pain and a sense of abandonment can only spawn fear and anger; and negative emotion, let free, has lasting consequences — my entire life began with a written-down lie.