They call it the “kinder, gentler country.” At least that’s what my Quebecois husband Pierre calls it.
Kinder and gentler than what exactly, I’m not sure, but I’m betting a Canadian’s tag of his homeland has something to do with his southern neighbour – a country that happens to be my old stomping ground.
Whatever Canada’s affiliation with compassion and affability, this country is where I find myself these days. And I’m not just here. I’m really here. It’s the first time in a quarter-century since leaving my childhood home that I’ve landed somewhere and am meant to be staying for good, forever and ever, to the end of time. Amen.
Which, if I’m honest, fairly freaks me out.
My entry to Canada in mid-July started well. Magnificently well, actually, after our family’s year-long stay in France’s Côte d’Azur. There were no particular immigration formalities. No hearty, back-slapping ‘congratulations’ on my new choice of home. No fireworks bursting over my head. But this entry to Canada will remain engraved in my memory.
The first person I met in Canada – other than the faceless guy who stamped my passport – was this man.
Things in my new, adopted country were looking positively fabulous. My former screensaver loitered with a buddy, some guy with a guitar strapped to his back, amid an oblivious airport crowd. I cornered the megastar at the end of a luggage belt in the bowels of Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.
I’m so sorry to bother you, I said, discarding any idea of intimidation or propriety. It was now or never, I realized. Suitcases began to tumble out onto the circulating belt. Sting turned his head toward me. He looked at me. At me! And his eyes really were that blue.
I have to meet you, I told him. You’re my musical hero. You and Bach.
The line, I thought, might catch his interest – if it wasn’t also true. Passengers moved around us to collect their bags. A bellhop hovered.
Bach? Sting said. He’s a bit older than I am.
Yeah, he wasn’t available for a photo, I said, so that’s why I’m counting on you….
I tried to look hopeful. My musical hero was gracious, just as I’d heard he was. He wrapped an arm around my shoulder and we posed for Pierre, who loitered behind my camera.
At Pierre’s hip stood our daughter Laurelle. She watched the scene through big, brown, four-year-old eyes that had been alert for 20-some consecutive hours, her jaw slightly dropped. Why was Mommy behaving this way around some strange man?
Sting nodded toward Laurelle. She has no idea who I am, he said. Isn’t that great?
My mum doesn’t either, I told him. I signaled over my left shoulder toward my mother, who waited by our hand baggage. I told him that she’d asked me whether Sting was a person or a group.
But wait a minute, you say. Sting may have been kind like a Canadian, but he hardly is one. Why mention the episode?
First, because I can’t help myself. It’s just too good not to share. Second, if I’m searching for a reason, because throughout our conversation – can I call it a conversation? – not a single Canadian pestered the weary megastar at the baggage belt in Pearson Airport. It’s a fairly startling observation given that just two nights later, he performed under a threatening sky and pulsating laser beams to something like 110,000 or 120,000 cheering fans at the Québec City Summer Festival.
No, the good Canucks left my hero in peace. Canadians are polite. They are, indeed, kinder and gentler than this American neighbour anyway.
Which is something I normally I try to be. So I’m hoping – under normal circumstances anyway – to fit in in the Great White North.
To tell the truth, I’ve never been terribly worried about relocating to Canada. It’s a welcoming country. According to US Immigration Services, Canada boasts the highest per capita rate of new citizenships in the world. Too, Canadians speak English and French, making even my second language studies profitable in the land. And importantly given its latitude, Canadian shops sell goose down-lined everything.
What’s more, the culture in Toronto (where I now live) seems – how can I put it? – a happy mix of what I know best. Toronto is the convenience of Chicago (near where I grew up) and the multi-ethnic and Queen-bowing culture of London (where I spent most of my adulthood) – all wrapped into one, neat package. Toronto will suit me just fine.
But hold on, you stop me again. Not so quickly. Toronto’s not American. It’s not British. And didn’t you just come from France, the beloved subject of all those previous blogs?
Ahem, yes. And to tell the truth, settling into the big smoke of Toronto from lazy, seaside Antibes hasn’t been as seamless as we expected.
“I can’t believe how frenetic it is,” Pierre said to me that first week as we walked along Yonge Street, one of Toronto’s major arteries. Bulky, North American-style cars and trucks roared past us. (And why wouldn’t they, given that Yonge Street once ranked in the Guinness Book as the longest street in the world?) Shops and signs populated every street-level cavity of apartment towers along this stretch of the road. People scurried past us on wide sidewalks, their faces and languages streaming into Toronto’s melting pot from around the planet.
Even Pierre, who previously lived nearly three decades in the city, faced some re-adjustment. Laurelle and I, newcomers to Canada, faced a steeper climb.
“Mommy,” my four-year-old daughter asked me on several occasions, “why are there so many shops here? Like the restaurant and Starbucks and shops that sell things?” Compared to Antibes, the variety was mind-boggling to her innocent head. “And why are the eggs white?”
Even the simple task of parking a car exposed my foreignness in this land. In the Côte d’Azur, discovering new parking techniques was one of my favourite hobbies. I was a trainspotter with a different obsession. I figured out what constituted illegal parking and what could be deemed permissibly illegal. Finding available parking within clogged city centres was something of an art form. Cars humped sidewalks, nosed into parallel slots, even perched in the raised, central circles of roundabouts. But a French car never, ever parked on a zebra crossing.
A couple weeks ago I drove my boxy, North American 4x4 to a Staples store on lengthy Yonge Street. I turned into the store’s small parking lot tucked behind the shop. It was chockablock with vehicles parked around the perimeter walls. One car hovered in the lot’s central corridor, waiting. Shortly a car moved. I hesitated, waiting for the first waiting driver to snag the spot. Instead she drove toward my 4x4’s window.
“Are you waiting to park?” she asked me.
“Yeah….but go ahead,” I said. “You were here first.”
“No, no, I feel badly,” she said. “Go ahead.”
“You’re joking,” I nearly said, but didn’t. I could hardly believe my luck – or the complete submissiveness of the Canadian population. Did she think that my errand was more pressing? That I was in some mad rush to buy pencils and rubber bands? Never, ever – let me assure you – would such a scene unfurl in any parking lot in the whole of France.
I inched my truck into the available space in Staples’ parking lot. Only then did I see the “No Parking” sign plastered on the perimeter wall. And the notice about unauthorized vehicles being towed.
Towed, schmowed, I thought. The parking space was so big – so glorious and so blooming obvious – that I didn’t even need to pop on my hazard lights to borrow it. (And no, I didn’t get a ticket. Or towed.) Gentle AND kind, I tell you, are these good Canadians.
Okay, ambushing Sting and now this. I guess I do need to work on that kinder, gentler thing.
Most of my early Canadian education has dealt with the legalities of being here. As I’m meant to be staying here for, well, a good amount of time anyway, there have been details to attend to. Things to carry me from being a lower-case-v visitor to an Upper Case-L, Upper Case-I Landed Immigrant. A full-fledged Permanent Resident.
And so my learning process truly began, like everything begins, with the government.
Salle d’attente, I was reminded, is the French phrase for “waiting room.” I saw those words everywhere on Canadian’s bilingual signs in government bureaus. I spent a good chunk of time studying their meaning.
At least the time let me mix with fellow newcomers. I could’ve enjoyed a lingering, hot pancake and Maple syrup breakfast with the changing community in the salle d’attente at Service Canada as I awaited my Social Insurance Number. And I could’ve washed it all down with a spicy goat curry.
I got to enjoy the company of Canada’s bureaucrats, too. During sequential visits to Service Ontario, the provincial equivalent of Service Canada, I became all chummy with the clerks in the driver’s license division. They’d come to know me.
Weeks later in the same governmental bureau, I waited for my provincial health card. I swear the focus group gathered in that salle d’attente could’ve solved all loggerheads of NAFTA by the time I was in front of a clerk.
But no one was hostile. No one was unkind. This is Canada. These folks were just a smidge bit inefficient or – more likely, given Canada’s open arms to immigrants – overwhelmed.
(It is for this reason, dear readers, that I’ve been a bit absent. I apologise. I’m sorry one friend and faithful follower had to send me an email entitled “now you gave us this tempting thought”, only to underscore the fact that after promising a French-Canadian sequel, I’d left you high and dry. The short story is I’ve been whalloped by my new governmental buddies. And to be honest, there have been a fair few contributing factors, such as the “bronchitis-like” thing Laurelle imported from France, the search for doctors and extracurriculars and school uniforms, the opening of bank accounts, the house construction, and the moving boxes – the number of which was too high to be within the realm of social acceptability.)
But never mind. I do carry hopes of a kinder and gentler, less fussed and less bureaucratic Canada sometime in my near future. This inspiration became evident during the king of all governmental processes for imports like me: the quest for Permanent Residency.
Years and miles of computer paper after Pierre and I began my PR process – having sourced medical reports and photographs and fingerprints, old emails confirming our courtship, and police records from the US, Britain and South Africa – I finally amassed all necessary documentation in August to “land” in Canada as a Permanent Resident. All I had to do was leave Canada, re-enter, and ask the attending immigration officer to make the final stamps. Easy-peasy.
Or so it should’ve been.
Several days ago Pierre (a Canadian), Laurelle (a dual Canadian-American) and I decided to properly “land” me, the family Yank. We’d make the occasion into a family outing. I dressed carefully, for multi-cultural Canadian success: American top, French trousers, Moroccan beads, Croatian sandals. Our threesome hopped into the German 4x4, listened to a British CD while driving to Niagara Falls, and took a jaunt on the internationally celebrated Maid of the Mist. We ate Japanese sushi in the sunshine while listening to some guy croon old Van Morrison tunes. Then to complete the journey, Pierre, Laurelle and I would make a brief crossing into the US, and return to Canada across the Peace Bridge, 20 miles further along the US-Canadian border, to go through my paperwork.
The US welcome was anything but warm or efficient. The border guard saw the unstamped Canadian Permanent Residency visa in my US passport and asked whether I’d properly landed in Canada yet. No, we told him, that was the purpose of today’s excursion. We would cross back over into Canada at Fort Erie on the Peace Bridge. (This crossing, our lawyers had advised, was the most hassle-free approach.)
What should’ve been a mere wave through American borders, followed by the requisite “Have A Nice Day,” instead holed our family up in a well-packed, ripe-smelling, and culturally-diversified hall on the second story of the US immigration building. A small photo of President Obama smiled down on a passive crowd. Our family had no number. We knew no wait time. We had no idea why we were jammed into the room. And we had no passports.
A good hour of biding time in oblivion with a feisty four-year old gave me a good idea why non-Americans love to hate US immigration. When we finally received our passports again, they were accompanied by a slip of paper saying we’d never passed through US immigration.
Which, as we headed toward our truck to drive into the US, made no sense whatsoever. For a second time we explained our “landing” plan to a nearby US immigration guard. He tore up the slip of paper – that precious piece of paper for which we’d waited blindly – and sent us on our way. No problem, he said. Just hop over the border.
Fortunately our luck soon changed. Thirty minutes later we approached the aptly named Peace Bridge from the US side into Canada. We parked the 4x4 and I took my papers into a bright, new immigration building staffed by ten Canadian officials. Only two other customers occupied the building with me; we three enjoyed the attention of all ten officers. It would just take a moment, one immigration officer advised. And with a flourish of stamps and two hearty ‘congratulations,’ I was on my way. A Canadian Permanent Resident. I was duly welcome to a kind, gentle – and at least on that day, efficient – Canada.
Pierre, Laurelle and I found the perfect way to celebrate. We drove back to Niagara Falls (on the Canadian side, of course). The community around the falls – how can I say it? – reminded me of Las Vegas without a drop of glamour. We parked and bought some strong doses of good ol’ Dairy Queen ice cream.
Stationed along Niagara Falls’ kitschy main drag, we devoured the American sundaes on Canadian soil – under the gentle gaze of a waxen Egyptian pharaoh.
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