Your Other Left

Several times a year we drove from Tecumseh to my aunt’s place in Michigan, and each time Dad got us lost. The 1968 New Yorker transformed into a powder-blue vomit comet as the journey, which should have taken less than an hour was stretched to at least ninety minutes. Years later several forays to find York University all ended on the Arrivals’ ramp of Lester Pearson. I tell my father that it was due to his family’s retarded sense of direction that the Leclairs never made it to the treaty, and were left with only a spurious whiff of a Métis past.