Travails of a transatlantic transplant: I Come in Peace

I have been saying for the past few years that once I achieved Canadian citizenship, I would no longer need to post in this blog. (Also, I hoped someone would come up with a better word than 'blog'.) The point of starting it had been efficiently to update friends and family on my transition to this new world, and the motivation for maintaining it included both the fun of writing about what I noticed in this long-drawn-out transition period, and the mental health benefits to myself of carping about what I noticed in this long-drawn-out transition period.

But here I am, a bona-fide card-carrying Canadian citizen, and still writing.

Perhaps the mental health benefits accruing to me now are those necessary to counter the ongoing impact of the pandemic. Omicronitis, we can call it. Here in what Theo Moudakis, my favourite of the Toronto Star editorial cartoonists, labelled OmicrOntario, we are again locked down this month: gyms, indoor dining, theatre, cinema, all closed. Limits on gatherings and customer capacity. Schools and university courses (most of them) are online. It's like 2021 all over again, with added vaccinations. By a combination of luck (husband's and mine) and intrepidity (daughter's) all five of us are now triple-vaxxed. We are grateful, but still wary, trying to live defensively. Socializing occurs online or outdoors--in below-freezing weather: locked down by winter and by pandemic.

Crossing the border from the US to Canada in early December, just ahead of the omicron 'tsunami', I used my new Canadian passport. It was, I have to say, an unanticipated thrill. I drove over the Peace Bridge from Buffalo, NY to Fort Erie, Ontario, after a long day's drive from Manhattan. My PCR covid test results had reached me in the nick of time--negative, although I had been living fast and loose in those post-vaccinated, pre-omicron, halcyon days--eating with friends! Going to museums!--and I had the screenshot ready to show on my phone. It was early evening on a Thursday, and there was no queue. I rolled down my window and greeted the Canadian immigration agent with enthusiasm, which seemed to surprise him. I brandished my passport. "This is my first time entering Canada as a citizen," I told him. "Would you give me a stamp?"

"We don't usually do that with Canadian or US passports," he said, and asked me the usual questions. Where had I been, why had I gone, where did I live.

"But it's my first time," I reminded him, boldly.

"Do you have a PCR test to show me?"

I did. He examined the screenshot and perused my passport. Then he looked at his own computer. "Did you complete the ArriveCan information?"

Uh-oh. I had not. Although we had managed the procedure only a couple of months earlier, in August, to return to Toronto from Los Angeles, I had entirely forgotten to fill out this electronic paperwork now necessary to enter Canada (possibly because the 'we' who had done all the work in August had been my husband and my younger son). "Whoops. No," I told him, now meek. "I'm sorry."

"Oh well," he said generously. "It's fine. I'll let it slide this time. Why don't you give me your phone number?" I wasn't going to argue even if it seemed a little odd.

So I did. When he gave me back my passport, it had been stamped. A fair trade.

To misquote Fay Wray, though, he hasn't called, he hasn't written...