When I was born they screamed ISN'T HE THE CUTEST THING! They pinched my tiny cheeks, both nether and upper. As I got older, things got uglier. The schoolyard crowd yelled horrible epithets. Give him a Dutch rub! Lower his self-esteem! Box his ears and be quick about it before they take our jobs. Make them all read Rod McKuen likes I had to. Give him a Chinese haircut! Grab him with the Boston Crab! They made ungrounded claims about our group: I believe there is a slight chance your mother's footwear may be of military origin, one child opined. Tears sprang to my eyes as I ate my onion. Why were they so cruel? Tears tears tears. At Zeller's the This Till Closed sign came up just as our turn finally arrives. On TV ads we had to add $2.50 for shipping and handling. Our car seemed worse after the mechanic finished. The mechanic, cleaning his hands with an oily rag, obviously doesn't like our kind. Polls came out: 47% 45% 49% For? Against? Nothing in those dark days was clear. There was referendum after referendum, changing interest rates, shortages of egg salad and hockey tape. I still have nightmares about being pulled from bed at dawn: lessons, groggy, croissant crumbs falling from the corners of my mouth, strangers telling me to smash an orange tennis ball. Jumping into a cold pool. Naked grotesque bodies in the change rooms. I just tried to survive, as a child does, never knowing what fresh horrors each day might bring. After supper my parents whispered at the kitchen table. Papa was a proud taxi driver with a long mustache. His taxi gleamed like a quasar as he swerved, screeched, cut people off, ran over toes! Just let me out here, people said. Papa and mama whispered at the shaky formica table, worried about our future in such a hostile land. One freezing night my family walked the starlit hills to the frontier with nothing but Odeon movie passes and Canadian Tire money sewn into our purple ski jackets. A mile from the border they caught us. Men in new black uniforms intercepted us, gave us RRSP forms to fill out for monthly deductions, made us pick 12 CDs for a penny. We didn't know which way to turn. There were only Michael Bolton CDs, 80s movie soundtracks, Prince, early Leonard Cohen. No one helped us. They took us with the others to the stadium. I had been warned not to go to the stadium. Parking was a fortune. A CFL game was in progress but I didn't know the players' names. The beer was weak and tasted of the wax cup. Murray The Pez told off-color jokes. Jackie 'Spaghetti Legs' Parker came from the bar and went in at QB. Some of us cracked under this devious torture. We signed anything. In the city we were relocated to houses by the airport. We were only permitted in the part of town that had ranch style housing – cedar fencing snaked around our ghetto. We had to wear ballcaps and sneakers to identify us more easily. Mobs of frenzied accountants and dentists took over our old brick and iron flats by the river, knocked out walls. They had "permits" from city hall, converted our old homes into lofts and condos. At your school you made us diagram strange sentences, made us give humiliating "oral presentations," made us eat crinkle-cut French fries and gravy from cardboard boats. We were lined up against a wall, and the whole class measured for the prom. The woman with the measuring tape touched the inside of my thigh, as if I had no rights, was not a person. Have you bought good shoes lately? We were given almost no choice. Under the new regime the only work my father could get was teaching existential philosophy at the University for 50 grand per. He was never the same after that. He never saw his gleaming taxi again, that waxed taxi that shone like a bright sun in the macadam driveways of my childhood. I wonder what profiteers ride on those black rubber tires now. Do they know what those ripped seats meant to our rootless people? O those smelly sacred rootless ripped seats of my skipping childhood innocence! I tell you truly, things have not always gone my way. I have been made to feel slightly less than the center of the universe. But in this country, this is ignored. Do they teach me in school? No. This shameful chapter in our country's rich mosaic is hidden. In our mosaic I am your sacrificial lamb with a festering cold sore coming home to roost with the chicken in wolf's clothing in a swimming pool of tears for fears where the fox is in the greenhouse effect. And all you can ask is, Can a mosaic have a chapter? Sometimes others laugh in the cafeteria and I don't know, do they laugh at me? Food in their privileged mouths and bits spray in a diaspora, like my people in exile. I steer my little cart on the misty golf course and wonder if we can ever be adequately compensated for these many, many wrongs. Sometimes when I am alone with my dry evening martini, Magic Sam Live on the silver Yamaha stereo, I remember what they did to us, and I dream of the day when things will be set right, when they will apologise for events, when the cream-colored government cheque will enter my rusty hinged mailbox and tears will fill my eyes (closure! closure!) and I will cry all the way to the bank.