Meal Plan

A single lunch can change the trajectory of a life, as mine was changed over a bowl of rice noodles at Thai Garden in downtown Lincoln, Nebraska. Having completed my bachelor’s in literature and history, I was working an office job on campus before pursuing a graduate degree and had come there to discuss options with a former professor and friend of mine, George Wolf. As we ticked off the pros and cons of various programs — at Princeton, Brown, Chicago, Wisconsin, Minnesota — he suddenly asked, “Why not Toronto?” Why not, indeed.

Raised in rural Nebraska, with access to just four or five television channels and certainly no internet for most of my childhood, I had few associations with Canada. From an early age, I was vaguely aware of Habitat 67, thanks to a short documentary that aired several times on PBS. I knew about the Chilkoot Pass, because of Walt Disney’s 1991 adaptation of White Fang. And in grade 6, I read about the CN Tower, still claiming to be the world’s tallest building. I was crestfallen when I realized I would never see it. Although I hadn’t travelled at that point, I was sure I would someday visit the pyramids of Giza, the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, and all the rest. But why on earth would I ever go to Toronto?

My knowledge of Canada remained limited in university but grew slightly through my interest in the Great Plains, which extend into Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. The University of Nebraska Press published a number of books by Canadian scholars back then (as it continues to do), and several of my undergraduate professors were members of the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States. I had researched Sitting Bull’s time in the Cypress Hills, read Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House, and flipped through issues of Maclean’s at the library. Still, I had yet to cross the border before that lunch with George.

When I applied for a six-year fellowship that would pay for graduate school, I didn’t know that it had been established by a late Canadian tycoon, Jack Kent Cooke, or that he had wanted to attend the University of Toronto before getting his start in media by selling encyclopedias door to door in the 1920s. It was only after I received the funding that I appreciated how fortuitous it was that I’d said in my application that I planned to earn my doctorate at his not‑to‑be alma mater. I hadn’t even been admitted at that point.

When I finally drove across the Blue Water Bridge in the middle of the night in August 2005, I thought I was relocating temporarily for school and would definitely cross back. Having grown up in a town of 2,000 and having just left a city of a quarter million, I was bewildered by Toronto: by its height, by its density, by its impenetrability. I longed for the open sky and for the horizon, which no amount of time along Lake Ontario’s shoreline could replicate. I was embarrassed when people went out of their way to correct my pronunciations — especially of place names with French etymologies. I searched and searched for soft running trails. I was repeatedly shocked by how cavalierly dismissive those in my cohort were about Indigenous history and treaty rights. Thankfully, such attitudes have improved in the two decades I’ve been here.

Having once thought I would never see the CN Tower, I now see it constantly, whether walking from the subway to the office or looking out my window in Riverside. Southern Ontario still had smog days when I arrived, with one advisory that first summer lasting more than a week, and the iconic landmark was often obscured in haze. After the province shuttered its last coal-fired power plant in 2014, the smog went away. Today, when I look at the CN Tower, still tall but less defining of the skyline, I am reminded of the city as I found it: the slender needle once again shrouded in polluted air, now from the wildfires that are increasingly common and devastating.

Twenty years ago, Donald Trump had been a reality TV star for four seasons, but his ascent to the presidency would have been a laughable proposition. Social media meant Facebook, and you had to have an institutional email address to join. Twitter didn’t yet exist, and YouTube hosted just a handful of videos. Nonetheless, the political landscape that I had left behind felt fraught and tumultuous, with visions of 9/11 still fresh in our minds.

In my first semester of graduate school, Paul Martin’s Liberal government fell. During the campaign that followed, a classmate declared his support for the Conservatives, only to be ridiculed by those who supposedly knew better. I didn’t yet understand the nuances of Canadian politics, but I sensed a divisiveness that would grow more pronounced as the years passed.

Over those years, both Canada and Toronto have changed for the better and for the worse. However accidental, I have too. I’m forever grateful for that distant pad thai.