MarryACanadian.com


A movie I have not seen but for the trailer got me thinking about the whole “marrying a foreigner” thing which I honestly don’t give any thought to at all unless I am tangling with Immigration rules and hoops, or I use some American saying or slang that Canadians don’t know (because it really is never safe to assume that people up here are “just like us” – us Americans that is). In the film, Blue State, it is 2004 and Bush has been re-elected prompting one fervent young Democrat to make good on his threat to move north and become a Canadian. At one point in the trailer we see him perusing a website called Marry a Canadian.com because, I am assuming, he has discovered (as most people do) that it is not so easy to pick up and move to another country. Pack a bag and visit is okay, providing the FAA is not making an example of the particular airline you are traveling with that day (and you aren’t leaving from New York City as the only timely way out – or in – after a certain point in the early morning is really by car). Emigration however entails a lot of paperwork and can take months, or years, depending on your situation. Although this movie portrays marriage as the quickest route to residency and citizenship, I can assure you that it isn’t. There are rules, mountains of paperwork and documentation and a whole lotta waiting involved. And they will check to make sure you are, um, consummating on a regular basis.

Rob wondered idly after we saw the clip if anyone wonders how he met me. Anyone who doesn’t know our story that is, and who could read me and not know more than they ever wanted to about us?  We are quite open with having met on the Internet (interesting how many of us speak of cyberspace as though it were a real place), and probably not as apologetic as some would think we should be when we elaborate that our meeting site was a widowed support board.

Back in the early days of our friendship, a new friend at the YWBB and I were chatting on the phone and she enquired as to Rob’s accent. She was not assuming it was a Bob and Doug Mackenzie “hey, hoser” type of thing but French because her perspective led her to believe that most Canadians are of the French persuasion. Canadians do have an accent that is not the over-exaggerated one of the Mackenzies but is similar in a very non-cartoonish way. Most of the people I know use “eh” as their end sentence filler and have the distinct “ou” pronunciation. Canadians have their own slang, thank you very much, that is not American derived. Given the ubiquitous number of Canadian cities masquerading as American ones on U.S. television, I was surprised to note that there are subtle but still noticeable differences like traffic circles and a softer, more rounded shape to traffic lights and light poles. The Canadian post boxes are everywhere in residential neighborhoods and the concept of a freeway American style doesn’t seem to exist anywhere I have traveled and that includes the length of Saskatchewan, from Calgary to Grande Prairie in Alberta and a chunk of B.C.

One of the things I get quizzed on quite a bit is the health care system here because, unlike the States, anyone who cares to buy in can have access to health care. So right away one should notice that it is not free. There is a premium that varies according to income and is sometimes paid for by your employer, and you are correct if you are muttering that it doesn’t include the cost of prescription drugs. Medications are out of pocket for the most part though again an employer might have a prescription plan as part of one’s compensation. Speaking however as an asthmatic with allergies, I can tell you that the out-of-pocket cost for some of the medication I need is on par with just the co-pays my health insurance plan stuck me with back in Iowa. It’s odd not to have access to just run of the mill care on the weekends. Clinics just aren’t open. Many people use only clinics and haven’t any primary care physician because like everything else up here in terms of labor, there just aren’t enough doctors. Which is also why whole wings of hospitals are closed and it’s hard to get into a hospital for non-emergency things, there aren’t enough nurses either. But our little town of just a bit over 16,000 people has its own hospital when I know that rural folk in Iowa were having to drive hours to get to a hospital and in the case of an emergency, you would be treated somewhere.

Having just done taxes, I have noted differences there too. There is no such thing as filing jointly. Every adult is required to file yearly regardless of whether they worked or earned a single dime (and they do have dimes here but not dollar bills. The dollar is a coin called a “loonie”). I had to get a SIN in order to file taxes. It is similar to the U.S. Social Security number. They have two types. One is for citizens and legal residents and another for temporary workers. Wow. Differentiation. What a concept.

Canadians don’t have any idea what real consumerism looks like as I have written before. Stores close at 6PM on Saturdays and 5PM on Sundays (after only opening at noon). The shelves are often bare and strangely, to an American, sometimes stay that way. For example, during the heat wave last July, stores ran out of air conditioners. The end. There were no more shipments until probably now when they stores begin to gear up for summer again. Seriously. This happens. When stuff is gone, well it will be back next season.  Oh and Canada is devoid of Target.  Not a single one anywhere. ‘Nuff said.

I have never thought of myself in terms of place. I was born in Iowa and lived there my whole life before coming here. I had thoughts of living somewhere else before I met Rob, but I hadn’t fleshed anything out. A place is a place really and it is your human connections that make it home. Even so, I have never really missed a place once I have moved on to another one. Oddly, or maybe not, I feel more at home and connected here – to this place, Canada – than I have at any point in my life. There is a genuineness to the people I meet and a sense of perspective of time and the ground we occupy that I don’t remember from back in the States.  Not that I have developed any anti-American sentiments that I didn’t already have, but I am comfortable in my Canadian skin. Enough so that I can heartily recommend marrying a Canadian to anyone who gets the chance.

Life in the Plastic Bubble: Food allergies and Eating Out


Basically when you have food allergies, you don’t eat out. That kind of normal experience that nearly everyone takes for granted is not an option for you. Whereas food in the grocery comes with labels that are about 90% helpful in helping you avoid thing things that will make you sick, restaurants are not similarly labeled.

Friday night we tried to eat out at a new place in The Fort, a Vietnamese noodle house. Asian foods, if I am alert for peanuts, are strangely easier for me to eat. Rob was a bit dubious. He has learned (more quickly than I ironically) that dining out nearly always ends in disaster. The only safe bets include Subway, Subjoint and anyplace that serves eggs and toast any time of day. The short list of my allergies includes: peanuts, tomatoes, anything citrus, oil, butter, onions, red meat, pig, and chicken. It might not seem a long list but try to find a seasoning or sauce that doesn’t contain tomato or onion. You wouldn’t believe the number of foods that those two things alone knock off the “good foods” list. Vegetarian options are not plentiful when they exist at all and most dishes are prepared with some kind of oil and the more oil used the sicker I will be. 

When we arrived at the Noodle House, I had surprisingly high hopes. We walked in, however, and were greeted with a CASH ONLY PLEASE sign and promptly turned and left. Cash? Quaint. I was undeterred though Rob voiced suspicions of omens. We headed toward a strip mall on 99 Ave and while I hit the ATM there, Rob and Katy ran into the Shopper’s to pick up a registered letter the postlady had left him a note for earlier that day. Money and junk mail in hand we first hit the main post and then returned to the Noodle House. To make a long story a bit shorter, I will quote you Rob’s rendition of our noodle house adventures:

The Fort Noodle House was a total bust.  We returned, with our cash, and were eventually seated.  We looked at the menus; only one kids’ menu item (French fries, chicken wings, pop….wait, did that say chicken WINGS?  For KIDS?)  We looked over the rest of the selections.   There were a few vegetarian selections and we discussed a few possibilities.  But I was starting to get a bad vibe about the place.  It was filling up and it was visibly understaffed.  We decided to nip a potentially bad dining experiment experience in the bud and got up and left.

 and skip to the Chinese buffet that came after.

Normally I can eat Chinese. It’s hard to get into too much trouble with rice and veggies, but Rob had nearly filled a plate for Katy before I realized that this buffet was more Alberta than Chinese. Meat in nearly every dish and onions in the rest. And I was ready to cry. Seriously. Dining out is absolutely not on my list of fun things to do. If I am not trying to make a meal out of side dishes, I am trying to assure my fellow diners that I am really okay with not eating while they stuff themselves in my face. I am not sure which is worse sometimes. Feeling like a leper or knowing that aside from Rob, no one really has much patience with my food “issues”. People with food allergies are generally treated like closet anorexics – we just don’t like to eat or something because no one but the small children of anal retentive overparenters really has food allergies. Even the health profession tends to downplay the idea. I have been told I have an ulcer (nope), IBS (nope) or perhaps I mistook a stomach virus for something more. 

Let me tell you what happens when I eat tomatoes or citrus. I get a bumpy rash on both sides of my tongue leaving it feeling as though I have burned it, and sometimes my lips will tingle or go numb. Then I get horrible stomach pains which then travel through my digestive tract wreaking havoc. 

Yes, I know. That was TMI. But I don’t banish food from my life lightly, and I am as weary of my allergies to food being looked down on or dismissed as I am of smokers who crowd doorways and take insult when my asthma flares. I would rather be a “normal” person, but for whatever reason I am on my way to life in a plastic bubble.

Rob, though, is better than a plastic bubble. Perhaps in a way he is my bubble. When I told him I wasn’t going to be able to eat anything, he sprang into action. Grabbing a menu, he quickly found me suitable entrées and while ordering quizzed the hostess as to the types of ingredients used. Peanut Oil? MSG? Within ten minutes we were all seated and eating.

So the evening ended on a high note. Katy loves to get out and it was nice to not have to prepare an evening meal. I don’t think we will eat there again. It was, in Rob’s words a downtown skid row establishment.

The Rules – A Hump Day, Hmmmm


I was visiting Julie Pippert at The Artful Flower last Friday and caught the hump day topic before the fact for a change and thought I might give it a go. I don’t do MEME type stuff generally because I am an all-about-me kind of blogger, but I loved the topic. Rules. And this is what Julie has to say about it in the form of a prompt:

Notes: Next week’s Hump Day Hmmm. Mamma Loves suggested “The Rules.” Call them rules, call them mores, or maybe even call them ethics. In general, we all understand there are certain rules and most of us try to follow them. Something to do with being good. But…are we all playing by the same rules? Do we all have to answer to the same rules? Are the rules applied equitably, and enforced equitably? Are we even all playing the same game? Are you a rule follower? You tell me.

Growing up Catholic, and a girl (the two most incompatible things ever by the way), life was an onslaught of “thou shalt not’s” and double standards. There was one set of rules for boys and another for girls, and the girls’ rules always sucked in a big way by comparison. Life if you were male was like five on five full-court, but if female it was six player. Three on three. Half-court only. You were restricted to either shooting or blocking the shot, and if that wasn’t binding in a Chinese shoe kind of way, there was that little two-dribble and pass thing. Boys could be altar-servers. Girls were lucky if they were allowed to step foot on the altar to help clean it. Boys were priests and ran the parish while girls were the nuns who took orders and did the heavy lifting. Boys were husbands and heads of household. Girls were fashioned from their ribs to be Stepford Wives their (junior) partners aka wife. When I was 8 I wanted to play shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, but I was told I couldn’t because I was a girl. When I was 9, I wanted to be a priest and was offered the nunnery. When I was 10, I wanted to write and was told I wasn’t any good. I equated that with being a girl and laid low for a good deal of my life thereafter.

Rules were woven into the essence of my being from before conscious memory, but I never willingly followed. I conscientiously objected. Quietly. Passively. Aggressively. I quit the basketball team in grade 10. It wasn’t really basketball anyway if you couldn’t run the court. I stopped going to confession that year too. If God could hear my prayers, couldn’t he hear my sins straight from my mouth as well?

In school, high school and university, I learned that rules were more guidelines than anything else, and the more talented you were the less they applied to you. This was reinforced by my years as a teacher. If I got the job done, it didn’t matter if I was a team player or a maverick. Results were everything. Who you knew mattered – a lot. The objector in me began to wonder who had come up with this neat little scam called “the rules” because they sure didn’t apply equally or sometimes even at all.

I am not a rules girl. I don’t get the Sex in the City approach to love. I am not Gordon Gecko enough to crave out a slice of the American Dream for myself and my family. I was too busy surviving while my first husband died slowly in plain view to coif our suburban yard or join the right play groups or volunteer at the church. There was always something more important to do than identify the feet I should have been annointing with perfumed oils and drying with the long tresses of my hair. Life would have been easier if I had colored inside the prescribed lines and known which way the wind was blowing and who was releasing all that hot air in the first place.

When I became a widow I was blithely unaware of the fact that there were more “rules” waiting for me although surely the one time in your life you need a little wiggle room wouldn’t be the time to slam the door behind you, right? I didn’t know a single widow under the age of 55 but when I went looking for my “own kind” I thought I would find comraderie and found instead a curious culture with a shitload of rules. It was like being back in Sr. Marilyn’s homeroom at Resurrection Grade School in 1976. That inner passive aggressive middle-schooler is never hard for me to locate and channel, and I did what I always do when confronted with a rigged game.

I understand the reason for law and societal norms. They are necessary because so many of us would rather be told what to do than to think for ourselves. The civilization that results is patchy at times but works, more or less. When I think of rules however, the aforementioned laws and norms is not what comes to mind. Rules are the norms within norms. The cliches and gangs that spring up in the gaps like weeds in a cracked cement driveway.