Comments:
Went to Puerto Rico for a couple of months the summer after I graduated (sent there by my parents to bust up a romance they didn't approve of). I guess that gave me a taste for globe-trotting. Came back and spent my first year of college at University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee -- a beautiful gothic campus run by the Episcopal Church. It was academically demanding, and Culkin just hadn't given me the foundation for it. I spent my next three years of college at Belhaven in Jackson, Mississippi. My dad died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage at the start of my senior year. Shortly after that I married Mary Paul Duval of Vicksburg, Mississippi.
I was pressured by parents and professors into applying for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for postgraduate studies in English Literature. Amazingly, I got it -- and of course, the academic foundation thing came up again. WWF Foundation wanted me to go to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, none of which would have me in spite of the WWF. Neither would Rice or Tulane. It came down to a choice between University of Kansas and University of Toronto in Canada, and I chose U. of T.
Three-quarters of the way through my Master's Degree programme, I took a look around at my fellow grad students and my professors, and decided that was not the kind of life I wanted -- and walked out on the whole thing. I had loved Canada from the moment I crossed the border. For me, the South had been in a downward spiral since the mid-1950s with its eerie echoes of Reconstruction. To me it felt like a broken society, and I was relieved to find somewhere else that was so different and exciting. You could feel the difference in Canada. I applied for landed immigrant status as soon as I was in the country, and intended to stay. Once I was no longer in school (remember this was in the middle of the Vietnam "War") I was reclassified by the SS and ordered to report for a physical examination. I was married, making a new life in a new country, and I didn't want to return to the USA. But I didn't want to become an illegal "draft-dodger" either. Luckily the local SS Board told me they would not pursue the matter if I would go before the US Consul in Toronto and renounce my US citizenship. To stay in Canada legally, I did just that -- and spent the next five years as a "stateless person" with no passport, unable to cross any international border. In 1972 I became a Canadian citizen.
(To be continued!)
