From Here

August 16 2015

My grandmother was born here

before the turn of the last century.

She was still a child, when they left

not long after;

a mere asterix, in her biography,

when this town was small

and even more remote.

I didn't know her well.

We lived a long way off,

and she was not a big hugger, baker, comforter,

the grandmotherly sort

you tend to think of.

It's shocking to imagine

that touching hands with her

is like reaching across the 20th century,

all that tumult and change

when the world was re-made

so many times over.

And that, through circumstance and choice

I ended up living here as well.

Which means I can claim the history

of 3 generations,

our ancestral name

planted like a flag

in its hard perpetual granite.

When I am really rootless, and unattached,

living without the enmeshed entangled connectedness

of real family.

So how long, before you're from here?

What makes belonging, identity

a sense of place?

Is it real estate?

Is it friends, marriage, blood?

Is it acceptance

from the wary old-timers

who count generations like currency,

and to whom come-from-aways

are born poor

and will die in debt?

Home, which you can only make

the best of.

When I moved here -- to Thunder Bay -- I don't think I even realized that my paternal grandmother spent her early childhood here. (The actual birth was in North Dakota, where her own mother's (father's?) extended family had originally homesteaded, and where her pregnant mother returned to give birth; but that's a mere technicality. And I took some poetic license with the "ancestral name", which -- because it follows the maternal line -- was Lyone, not Green.) They eventually moved on to the big city of Winnipeg -- in those days, the ambitious "Chicago of the north" -- and all connections with Ft. William were severed. (Ft. William, along with Port Arthur, are the twin cities that amalgamated in the 1970s to make present day Thunder Bay. Alright, another technicality: I'm a Port Arthur guy, and her family actually lived in Ft. William. Since the psychological division still exists between the traditional rivals, I feel compelled to specify my allegiance!)

So I have this paradoxical relationship to this place: deep roots; and also rootless. It makes me think of small towns and insular islands, especially when their population inevitably ages: how you have to go back at least 3 generations to even be considered a native. Live in the place all you adult life, and you're still a newcomer and come-from-away.

So this poem becomes an opportunity to explore ideas of place and attachment, of belonging and home. (And I think there is a simple answer to the tortured question of the poem: home is where you have kids. They root you. Of course, since I'm childless, the question for me remains open.)

I also think the 3rd stanza carries a lot of weight, even though it's a bit of a digression. Because to have a first person connection to the late 19th century while standing here in the early 21st is really quite remarkable. I can't think of a more portentous or revolutionary century than the 20th (in which I was born pretty much in the middle), of a century that has changed history more. Especially considering that in the centuries before the Enlightenment, and then the Industrial Revolution, things almost never changed (just as most people, in an entire lifetime, never went more than 20 miles from home)! I look at images of the skyline of Toronto, illuminated at night, and think how utterly gobsmacked and incomprehensible this futuristic mirage would be for someone instantly transported from 1890. Which, in the perspective of history, is really just a blink of the eye.