Early Immigrant Days-1

[Today's posting will be the first in a series about my "early immigrant days" in Canada]. It was a long drawn out trip from
Georgetown, Guyana, to Toronto, Canada, in those days. At that time you had to overnight in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. That
night in Trinidad was like a year in limbo. Yes, I had finally started on my odyssey, but here I was suspended between
continents, just across from the dark north shores of South America. When you are twenty years old and restless, a night like
that hangs heavy with tension, and I wondered if I'd ever really reach, the Land of Milk and Honey to the North, I was heading
towards. Holed up in the little hotel outside of Port-of-Spain, I finally couldn't stay put any longer and headed out for a late afternoon walk. I remember passing an East Indian man walking in the other direction, who was whistling "Cherry Pink and
Apple Blossom White". Neither grow in Trinidad but such was the fruit of our colony days. It perked me up momentarily as it
painted a picture of the paradise I was headed for, where the cherry and the apple trees, blossomed in spring. The sun going
down in a scarlet sky, was setting on my Guyana days, as the last note of that siren song died behind me. I returned to the
hotel with a resolve, never to return to those evenings of wandering the sea walls at Georgetown, looking north across the
Atlantic, like a caged jaguar, feeling there was nothing there anymore that would take my young life forward...feeling the
answer lay North...the answer to my longing...the answer to my tomorrow. The following day I was Canada bound, arriving
at the airport outside of Toronto, one evening in June, at the age of twenty... never more to live again...in the country of my
origin. [To be continued tomorrow]..................Quester.