Playing Dominoes

By Michelle Berry (page 1 of 5)

It's funny how I want my memory to work a certain way. I want it to be like those history classes I took in high school, chronological and ordered. But memory doesn't work that way. It's not a connected line. It's a series of images flashing on my consciousness, images that are connected only by a brief thread of thought. It's a chain reaction. Tip over one Domino and the rest will fall down.

My mother calls me on the phone from Victoria, B.C., and mentions that she found the little toy squirrel I bought when we moved from the U.S. to Canada. She says she'll mail it to me. She says I saved my money as we drove across the country in 1975. I waited until I found the perfect thing to buy. She says that maybe I bought it because when we were in the Badlands I loved the prairie dogs. "What do prairie dogs have to do with squirrels?" I ask. She says that maybe I thought the squirrel was a prairie dog.

Then my mind jumps and I remember the first time I went to Stanley Park in Vancouver as a kid. I was probably eight. I remember the squirrels. Fuzzy, fat things -- my brother and I would feed them peanuts we bought from a vendor on the street. In Toronto, ten years later, I remember being bitten by a squirrel as it jumped up to grab the bread from my outstretched fingers. There were no squirrels in Victoria when I was growing up. They hadn't figured out how to hop on the ferries yet, I suppose. But now my mom has them everywhere in her garden, digging up her tulip bulbs, chattering away like squeaky dog-toys.

This is how memory works. It shifts. A crazy, unknowable, knowable thing. Memory as our own personal fiction.

Six years old and running wild in the fields in Virginia. Seven years old and sitting two weeks in a moving van as we drive across the United States.

Seven years old and standing on the ferry to Victoria, my hair blowing into my eyes, watching the vast ocean, the many islands, my brother standing beside me, the solid presence of Canada all around.

I step on the boat an American. I walk off the boat a landed immigrant. I became a Canadian citizen many years later.

This is the history of my mind. These are the images stored in my brain.

Americans have been coming to Canada for a long time and for all sorts of reasons. During the Civil War in the 1860's Americans dodged the draft and many settled in New Brunswick in a place referred to as Skedaddle Ridge. During World War I it was the opposite -- America provided a safe refuge for those Canadians who didn't want to enlist to fight overseas. In the late 1950's U.S. academics started moving to Canada when Canada was expanding and founding new universities. About 125,000 Americans came to Canada between 1964 and 1977 as draft dodgers of the Vietnam War. Half of them stayed.

Back and forth. The borders touch. It's one big mass of land. There's no getting around it.