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facts & arguments

JORI BOLTON FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Facts & Arguments is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell?

My call to the front to defend my country came when I was a Canadian kid in the United States in the 1960s.

There wasn't much to distinguish a school-aged Canadian from his American peers in those days. There was a rumour that our peanut butter was better than theirs, but I couldn't speak to that. I had come to the U.S. so young that I knew next to nothing about Canada.

Every now and then, however, the issue of my origins came up in the course of playing some game or other.

One time, some friends and I (all with fathers who had served in the Second World War) were playing a war game in which the coveted item was a hand lawnmower with cast-iron wheels, which we used as a tank. Rolling it on concrete made a great roar such as we imagined a Sherman tank would have made.

This mower was my family's property, and I had been running around with it, making the best noise of anyone, when I got the notice of one of my pals. He asked several times to use it, and I, enjoying the status it conferred, refused. The roar of the imaginary tank engine was just too cool to give up. Finally, he played the best card he had. He claimed that Canada had lost in the war.

My tank roared on, but with less confidence. I had no idea if he was right or wrong.

Although I had many family members who had fought in the war, I didn't know much about their experience. But I knew a lot about the relatives of my friends. One had been at D-day. Another had served on a submarine. Still another had been on the Manhattan Project. How do you compete with that? His dad was a guy who knew how to blow up the world!

Did I have anyone in my family who had such spectacular credentials? Not that anybody had told me. Someone had said I had a cousin with access to firecrackers, which was impressive enough, but not really anything to brag about. Besides, he was up in Canada and his pyrotechnic skills would not help me in this battle.

And the U.S. was putting people in space. Back in Canada, so far as I knew, they were trying to decide on a flag. A flag! John Glenn, Wally Schirra, Gus Grissom and the rest took a spaceship for a spin around the Earth while my people were trying to decide on changing the design on a piece of fabric.

I was in an unfair fight, but I had to find a way to make my humble people proud. I was a kid-Canuck surrounded by all of Uncle Sam's wealth, might and sense of adventure, looking for a little mark to distinguish myself.

Some time later, my moment came. I overheard my mother spelling out some word over the phone, and when she used the last letter of the alphabet she pronounced it "zed."

There it was. In this quaint Britishism, my identity presented itself. Shakespeare's "unnecessary letter," the "whoreson zed," became my champion.

We had recently been working on the alphabet at school. Our dedicated teacher had been asking us to come to the front of the class to identify and frame letters with our hands on a beautiful old block-letter, woodcut alphabet.

With her gentle encouragement, we came up to the front one by one.

"Scott, choose a letter at the front of the room."

And Scott marched up and correctly framed and said, "L."

"Well done."

"Christine, now your turn."

"P."

"Good." And so on.

It finally was my turn, and nobody had taken my letter.

"Mark …"

I stared at my desk for a moment and decided to go through with it.

I strode to the front as purposefully as any elementary school pupil ever did, framed the letter at perfect right-angles, and said "zed."

If the world did not straighten on its axis to pay attention at that point, it should have.

I turned to look at my teacher and saw that her normally sunny face had become darkly perplexed. I could see her mouthing the word "no" repeatedly, but I could not hear her because the class had erupted into a cacophony of recrimination, helpful attempts at correction and phonological debate.

I looked to my friends and saw Mike shaking his head angrily. He seemed to think I was either stupid or subversive. David just looked confused. And Jeff did not meet my eyes.

I returned to my desk while Susan was called to the front of the class, where she restored linguistic order with a careful and emphatic pronunciation, "zee."

Normal class activities resumed, and soon turned to some form of arithmetic.

My friends, a forgiving lot, had forgotten my error by 3:30 p.m. and I did not lose my place in the social order on the way home. That is, no McCarthyesque inquiry into unAmerican pronunciations followed.

So I'd lost the war, but at least the subject of the correct month in which to celebrate Thanksgiving had not arisen.

It would have been a laugh if my teacher had asked me to spell the letter "a," eh?

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