Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [4]
“What about school?” he said. “What about your Ph.D.?” The Depression had cut short his own education before he reached high school, and the value of education was one of his favorite subjects—“education” meaning knowledge that could be practically applied to save you from a lifetime in the coke ovens. I could see what he foresaw for me—the future opening up, the path leading over a low rise just ahead into an assured future, a secure career, a good marriage. He wouldn’t understand if I told him that my future seemed to be closing in, getting smaller and narrower and more rigidly fixed with each essay
I completed.
He had spent his whole life making his world safer, smaller, more secure. The basement pantry was lined with tins of food we would never eat, he saved bottles, nails, envelopes, old wrapping paper, broken toasters, bits of wire, cloth and carpet. “You never know when you’ll need it,” he said. Caution was his religion: you never know, you can’t be too careful, better safe than sorry. In his experience, change meant loss. His own parents had immigrated from Poland, making the dark, cold journey across the Atlantic, moving up through New York, Pennsylvania and Michigan, into Ontario. They settled in Sault Ste. Marie, in the shadow of Algoma Steel, but even after the Depression, when things got better, they were not at home in this harsh new unfinished world, this Canada, and talked longingly of Poland, in Polish, until they died. This is what happened when you uprooted yourself, my grandfather believed: you could not go back and yet you did not belong. He believed in staying put.
I sat in my old bedroom, looking out the small window at the steel plant, with its wire fences, enormous grids and towers, smoke stacks staining the sky all year round. We had grown up chanting the names of the mysterious places inside—coke ovens, coal docks, blast furnace, slag dump. We knew you could grow up and get a job there, make good money working three-to-eleven, eleven-to-seven. “Your father could have been making good money there now,” my grandfather said, shaking his head. “Would have made something of himself by now.” When my father went to Toronto after the divorce, we were in awe. If you grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, Toronto was the ultimate destiny. If you got all the way to Toronto, you did not have to come back. My mother was proof of this; after the divorce she had only gone to Europe, and then she had come back. We did not consider that she wanted to be close to her children, we thought she had just not gone far enough away. My father returned only for brief visits, his long hair falling down the back of his black silk shirt, hundred-dollar bills folded in half and clipped in his pocket. “Your father seems to have done well for himself in Toronto,” people said, their admiration ending in a question mark. “He’s in the music industry,” my brother and I learned to say, “he’s a promoter,” but my grandfather was not impressed. “Working in goddamn barrooms. Would have been foreman by now.” Toronto meant nothing to my grandfather, and he would not allow us to visit there when we were children. Traveling was something you did because you had to—if you got a job in another city, a real job, not in the music industry, but, say, as a dentist, my grandfather’s dream profession—“Look at the Miller boy,” he kept saying, “he’s making money hand over fist.” Traveling was not something you did for fun or experience or love. “Waste of money, that’s all it is,” my grandfather said. It had taken quite a bit of work just to convince him to allow me to leave home to go to university, first in Ottawa and later in Toronto. And now I wanted to go