The idea of an origin had a romance to it before you were born. When I was your age, it was the easiest language I had with both of your grandparents. Stories about where they came from, and therefore stories about where I came from; a series of steps originating from two points on nearly opposite sides of the globe and landing in a little three-bedroom house at the edge of a brand-new suburban development west of Toronto. An explanation for our presence there, an unquestioned talisman. I was born somewhere else. Life there was good, but difficult. I came here, where life was good, but difficult in other ways. I worked hard. This place kept its promise to me.

Everyone among us has an origin story of some kind, though not everyone among us is encouraged to talk about it honestly as part of the social fabric of what we call Canada; an unspoken price of belonging to a place that relies on such stories in order to become real in a way that does not betray its own parasitic origins.

“Too much has been made of origins,” writes Dionne Brand in A Map To The Door of No Return. “All origins are arbitrary. This is not to say that they are not also nurturing, but they are essentially coercive and indifferent.”

A few years ago, I told you an offhand story about how your grandfather delivered Swiss Chalet meals as an evening job in his first years living in Toronto. It was the fourth lockdown of the pandemic, and when we ordered our Friday pizza treat, the courier would leave it in a sticker-sealed box at the foot of our door. When you finally saw Pa again, you asked him if he was still a “pizza man.”

I was not prepared for how much this would bother him. Not because he felt it in any way embarrassing or undignified, but because, despite telling me his own versions of origin stories for years, it was the first time he had been materially presented with the fact that such tellings could be relayed differently, understood in a way he did not expect—that they took on a life of their own after they were given. Specifically, it was the first time he had been presented with the fact that the stories he told could be passed down more than once, repurposed, the idea of beginnings diluted and debunked.

You were barely four at the time, and it’s unlikely that much of what either of us wanted to say would have stayed with you in the way we intended. I wanted to tell you a story that contextualized your family in the world around you as it was in the moment; he wanted it made........

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