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| Ye Olde Stratford, Ontario |
How this for some gratuitous name dropping ?
One time, when I was desperately trying to make small talk with filmmaker Michael Moore (actually the only time we met) at the Atlantic Film Festival, I mentioned that all my relatives came from South Western Ontario and the link with Michigan across the water were closer than most outsiders imagined.
Unexpectedly, the very tired and drained looking Moore lit up and got animated.
His medium-sized but working class and remote city of Flint MI (Davidson, rural suburb more specifically) was many miles away from Ontario.
But the flat open waters of Lake Huron, and the flat countryside generally, made the TV and Radio signals from the bigger and richer cities of South West Ontario as clear, if not clearer, than local Flint area signals.
Teenager Moore gained an intimate knowledge of Canadian and Ontario retail politics from his listening and watching, a fascination for Canada that obviously never left him.
I doubt he was alone - few Michigan residents who regularly take vacations haven’t hopped over to SW Ontario at least once in their lives.
Now Gabriel Wortman’s paternal grandmother Doris came from a English family that emigrated to Ontario when almost all the kids, but for Doris,were already born.
They settled in Stratford Ontario , almost all lived there and almost all died there.
The exception was young Doris, who left Stratford for remote Moncton during the war years, for reasons unknown.
Doris’s first husband ,Stanley, died in 1977 and Doris soon took up with a mystery spouse from Michigan who was Gabriel’s “Second Amendment” teacher and illegal gun smuggler.
Most people seem skeptical of her son Paul’s claims about his son Gabriel and this Michigan man. Moncton to Michigan ? It seemed such a stretch.
But my folks visited their SW Ontario relatives as often as our scant finances permitted - why not Doris as well ? And that summer, just happened to meet a vacationing Michigan man...
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