Welcomed by Howard Park School

It’s 1956. I’m 6 years old, and we’re moving — again. This was the third move since I’d turned 3. Apparently there were others before that I don’t recall.

My Ukrainian parents and I were among the displaced of postwar Europe — bounced from bombed-out cities to refugee camps in Germany, to Displaced Persons camps in England, to sponsors in Winnipeg, and finally to Toronto.

I was Canadian by birth, but the rest of my family had to be “naturalized” — a word that underscored just how foreign, how different, how “unnatural” they must have seemed.

Howard Park Public School, a big old Edwardian brick edifice, welcomed me and taught me the rudiments of expected behaviour and acceptable norms.

I made friends (one of whom I ran into 60 years later at a hospital while visiting my mother) and settled.

I learned that grade 1 students in Canada did NOT wear grey flannels and bow ties to school.

I learned that nobody had ever heard of a first name like mine before.

Or a last name, either.

I learned which school entrance was for boys and which was for girls — a separation so taken for granted then, so strange to explain now.

I very quickly learned to read and write, and very slowly learned the rudiments of various sports, which I still mostly don’t understand.

And I learned about prejudice, and groupthink, and tribalism, and about the many differences between “us” and “them,” which even 65 years ago struck me as far too fluid to be real.

We moved that summer.

Again.