The New Homeland

A lot happened during August of 1966 and the easiest way to sum it up is with a picture. And this one explains it all:



Yup - that's the stamp in my old U.S. passport documenting my arrival in Montreal as a Canadian immigrant... I'm not sure what prompted mom to go to the Canadian embassy - I think they were actually advertising for immigrants back then... But regardless, everything happened really fast. We passed the medical checks on August 10th, the visa was issued on the 23rd and we were in Montreal on the 29th - courtesy of the Canadian government.
Now - they certainly didn't need to pay people to go to Montreal - our final destination was Winnipeg (a slightly less desirable location). But I'm getting ahead of myself :-)

Why Canada? Good question... Probably because it appealed to my mother's sense of adventure... She had grown up reading novels about the American west (romanticized by authors who had never been there). Those books had a major effect on her and she spent the rest of her life extolling the virtues of the "pioneer spirit". She saw Canada as a wide open space - a land of unlimited opportunity...
Now - whether any of this made sense or not is a different question. But that was not a question my mother ever asked :-)
BTW: Why the Canadians would pay for Americans to immigrate to Canada from Germany beats the heck outta me - my mom could talk almost anybody into anything :-)

My aunt Vesti was deeply concerned... When she found out we were leaving she took me aside and explained that my mother was irresponsible and could not be trusted with money and my sister was no better. So if we were going to survive I was going to have to be the responsible one - I was going to have to be the voice of reason, and I was going to have to keep track of the money... So Vesti gave me a ledger and taught me how to do double entry bookkeeping...

If you recall, in my blog entry entry entitled "The Inevitable Truth" I talked about the realization that I could no longer depend on my parents. My closing line was "And that was the moment my childhood ended..." Yeah - at the age of 12 I became the 'adult' of the family... And people wonder how I got to be so interestingly and delightfully neurotic :-)

As it turned out keeping track of the money didn't do any good... Vesti had incorrectly assumed that my mom and sis overspent because they didn't know that they were overspending...
That was not the case at all... They overspent because they didn't care that they were overspending... That's a totally different issue and no amount of bookkeeping can fix that... But I digress :-)

So we packed our bags and filled a chest with the things we didn't need right away. Vesti promised she'd send the chest once we got settled - but that's yet another story...
And the night before we left we heard a car pull up out front... I looked out the window and there was my dad's 1963 Plymouth Fury convertible... (Yes - he'd brought it to Europe...)

Now - we hadn't heard from dad for months and then he showed up out of the blue the night before we were leaving for Canada. Mom was certain that he knew something - that he was going to try and stop us... We hid the suitcases and told Vesti that we did not want to see him or talk to him...
So Vesti and my dad chatted downstairs for about a half hour. At one point I found my mom lying motionless on the floor. I was sure she'd had a heart attack but she was only trying to eavesdrop... And then dad left...
It was hard to sleep that night and the next day mom was jumpier than I'd ever seen her. She kept thinking she saw dad - she was expecting him to grab us at any moment... She didn't breathe a sigh of relief until the Lufthansa 707 left the ground... A quick stop at Heathrow and we were on our way to the Great White North.

When we arrived in Montreal we got into the line for immigration. One of the customs agents noticed our U.S. passports and politely informed us that we were in the wrong line... And we assured him we were indeed immigrants. Yeah - he was surprised too. It was amusing :-)

That evening I had my first cheeseburger in over 16 months... It was good to be 'back' :-)