Hello

Windsor seemed a kind of purgatory to me, a temporary stop between whatever hell my parents had left behind in Italy and the vague promise of the skyline that opened up beyond the Detroit River. In winter that skyline's tall buildings stood unnaturally still and crisp in the cold air, on the verge, it seemed, of singing; in summer they shimmered and burned in the heat and smog. But always they had a strange, unreal quality, at once both toy-like and profound, as if my eyes could not believe their own power to hold so much in a glance.

My great uncle Bert had come over before the war, smuggling into Canada after he'd been turned away at New York and then working his way on road crews down the St. Lawrence and along the Great Lakes till he'd arrived finally in Windsor.

`I stopped here because it was so close to the border,' he said. `In those days there were people who would take you across the river at night, in little boats. But by the time I had enough money to pay them, well, I got lazy.'

Uncle Bert had shown me a picture once of the tiny room at the back of his old shoe repair shop on Erie Street where he'd lived alone for twenty years, a room as grey and bare and gloomy as a prison cell. It seemed astonishing to me that he'd done that, that in all his years in Windsor he'd never so much as set foot in America, though its image had loomed over him daily, close enough to throw a stone at; and astonishing that we had all ended up in Windsor on account of him, family after family, aunts and uncles and cousins, stuck there in our narrow brown brick houses out of sheer inertia, like Dorothy falling asleep on the road to Emerald City. When my parents told stories about Italy they always talked about miseria, a word which meant `poverty' but which conjured up in my anglicized mind images of vague tortures and chastisements; though according to my mother we were poor in Canada as well, owed thousands of