20. Moving Forward

I was straddling two separate realities. In one, I was finalizing the sale of a business I had dedicated several years of my life to, walking the dog, worrying about my now adult children who were starting jobs, and picking up the dry cleaning. The other reality was a world with medical paraphernalia and a slight scent of disinfectant. Here the elderly dozed in chairs, a lady in a floral dress paced in the corridor and asked when she could go home, and my father patiently waited in a wheelchair.

As much as I enjoyed seeing my father, I could not get used to the feeling that hit me each time I returned to the long-term care home. It was an end-of-the-road kind of place, and the abundant evidence depressed me. I tried reminding myself how lucky I was to be resuming the conversation with my father and to be hearing about events in his life he had never shared with me before. He was filling in the blanks and gaps and silences, year by year, and I hoped our time would not run out.

On the next visit to the long-term care residence, I asked him how he had ended up in Sarnia.

“I needed to find work,” my father replied. “So I left for Toronto within a few days of arriving in Montreal because I heard about a fellow Pole who owned a hotel there and was hiring. While I waited in the bar for him, I started talking to this guy who told me I was crazy to look for work in a hotel. He said, ‘Go to Sarnia. The chemical companies are looking for chemists.’ A job in my field sounded good.”

It was better than becoming a milkman, which Edward had also considered somewhere along the way. “I was a city guy,” he explained. “I couldn’t manage a horse and failed the test.” In those days, milk was still delivered by horse-drawn carts.

“And going to Sarnia was a way of escaping that rundown Spadina boarding-house room I was sharing with a Polish guy, who was also looking for work.” While they searched for work, Edward and this man took turns tossing and turning in the single bed with a lumpy mattress.

To check out the feasibility of the Sarnia idea and whether his hopes were realistic, Edward found a payphone and called a Polish friend he had met in Germany, who was now living in Welland, Ontario. His buddy drove to Toronto and accompanied him to the city of Hamilton for a job interview at a chemical company he knew was hiring. After that, he put Edward on a train to Sarnia. Friendship is golden, people say, and Edward always seemed to have friends to rely on.

Edward arrived in Sarnia on a windy late-January afternoon. He walked the two miles from the train station to the home of a contact provided by his Welland buddy, a Polish friend of a friend, and knocked on the door.

I interrupted the story to ask my father if he had been wearing his new overcoat.

“Of course. It was freezing.”

The couple who answered the door were still in their pyjamas, drinking coffee because they worked the night shift at Polymer Corporation, a synthetic rubber manufacturer. They invited Edward to stay for as long as he needed.

The next day, the generous friend of a friend brought Edward to Polymer, where he met with the assistant head of the manufacturing plant, a Ukrainian man who spoke some Polish. They managed to communicate in a mixture of halting English and Polish. Forty-eight hours later, Edward received a telephone call with an offer to start work the next day. He also received a telegram from the Hamilton company. He chose Sarnia because he had no money for a return train trip.

Edward wrote to Maria, his soon-to-be wife—he called her Mariha, a diminutive that only he ever used—to let her know he had secured a job. She arrived by train three months later, on the first of May. With their new friends as witnesses, they were married two days later.

As I sat chatting with my father, I realized there had been many defining moments in his life. But his story was just one among thousands. In the decade following the Second World War, approximately 55,000 Polish people immigrated to Canada, each carrying their own hopes, dreams for a new start, a few dollars in their pockets, and their stories. Like my father, many must have been eager to put the difficulties that they had been through behind them.

The start of a new chapter in Canada was a shift in a positive direction and to the parts of my dad’s life I was most familiar with. But there were still a few surprises to come.