Quitting Canada: Why I am moving to the United States

Grainy videos hide more than they reveal. They smooth out the texture and contours of life in a single moment. We often look back on these relics as beautiful, simpler times.

But it’s hard to grasp what life felt like for the protagonists in the frame. The anxiety and excitement. The stack of bills collecting on the counter or the sick grandparents out of view. The optimism or dread of whether a child’s life will be more promising than a parent’s.

Last year, my father digitized the entire catalogue of our home videos that had piled up in basement boxes over the decades. My dad, being that dad, seemed to have a camcorder melded to his right hand throughout my entire childhood, his eye permanently fixed to the scope.

He captured the beauty of life in Toronto three decades ago. School recitals and Bar Mitzvahs. Cousins’ birthdays and baseball tournaments. The sun shined brighter in those years and, for some reason, the smell of sunscreen hangs in the air of memories. The Jays were champions and Vince Carter put us on the map.

My corner of the suburbs was still green then, with looping roads cutting through farmers’ fields and grain silos standing guard, artifacts attesting to an older way of life that once was but was no more. On summer evenings, my mom took the train home from her corporate job downtown, winding through the Don Valley. We’d pick her up at the Richmond Hill kiss-n’-ride, drive to Wonderland in a dozen minutes and walk around the spindly rollercoasters, the park wafting with the smell of cinnamon donuts.

They were good years for the Blaffs. My parents were in their 30s, had a house, three children, two cars and vacationed twice a year. They lived within their means. By the time my mom turned 40, they decided it was best to grow up with a parent home full-time, so my dad became the rare stay-at-home nineties father, dropping us off at school (frequently as the morning bell was pealing) and making lunches (often of the microwavable variety). My mom had done well for herself as a communications specialist, but we weren’t rich. We were part of a solid Canadian middle class that I saw everywhere around me.

My dad’s sister had a similar setup four doors down. In the wintertime, my dad and uncle shovelled a walking path between our houses in the new subdivision so that my cousins and I could tramp through the snow to see one another. We carpooled together and played baseball in our backyard, dreaming, one day, of playing for the Jays or my dad’s hometown New York Mets. My uncle’s house was home plate; my neighbour’s shed was second; and if you put one on the deck or roof beyond that, it was a home run.