The Plural of Moose
At the age of five, Italian was the only language I spoke and understood. I remember my father, who didn’t speak English either, trying to teach me a word here and there, and worrying about my upcoming start of kindergarten, where I would be thrown in with English-speaking children. He was learning the language himself, but slowly, as our neighbours, friends, and his fellow labourers at our local steel mill were also immigrants and more of them spoke Italian than English.
After a rough start at school, where the teacher interpreted my silence and blank stares as obstinacy rather than lack of comprehension, I overcame the language barrier and became a studious and serious student, making frequent trips to the neighbourhood library and checking out as many books as were allowed.
My father and I learned English together as he studied my early readers and library books with curiosity. He found joy in learning a new word or mastering the pronunciation of a word he had been struggling with. He practiced his pronouns, plurals, and tenses with silent determination, sounding words out and repeating them under his breath. He even started speaking to my brother and me in English. So, while we conversed with our mother in Italian, we spoke English with our father.
One day, so very proud of himself when he thought he had conquered pluralization at last, he said to me, “If ‘trucks’ means more than one truck, then ‘mooses’ must be the word for more than one moose, right?” I knew it wouldn’t help him if I lied but I still hated to deflate his enthusiasm. “No, Daddy. ‘Moose’ can mean one or more. It’s just one of those exceptions.” He muttered something about English being a very strange language and walked away shaking his head. He was undeterred though. Learning to speak correctly was important to him. He was a Canadian and believed he was indebted to his new country for giving a chance to a self-declared uneducated peasant. In contrast to post-war Italy, Canada was a dream come true. He felt it was his duty to give back, and learned English because he wanted to, not because he had to.
An unassuming, non-judgmental man, one of the few things that irritated him, was when fellow immigrants reminisced about their homeland and whined that life would have been so much better there. He felt this was disrespectful to Canada and with his hallmark patience and diplomacy, reminded them of the poverty and lack of prospects in Italy, but urged them to go back if they believed they could build a better life there.
We often found my father lying on the couch, reading the newspaper with the Italian-English dictionary at his side. When the grocery store started selling encyclopedias for a couple of dollars per volume in exchange for stamps earned from every grocery purchase, we looked forward to each volume, a new one released in alphabetical order every few weeks. It was an exciting day when we had a complete set of Funk and Wagnalls. While this prestigious addition to our home library was intended to help me and my brother complete our school assignments, these encyclopedias and the upgrades that came later, took their place of honour in the bookcase beside the couch where my father liked to read. He sometimes lay on the carpet and used the thick texts as pillows, as if he could absorb knowledge through their covers. It wasn’t unusual to find him surrounded by books or fast asleep with a book open on his chest and another one or two nearby, waiting their turn.
While he was concerned that he couldn’t teach me English, my father taught me precious lessons that could not be learned in readers or classrooms. He taught himself to speak, read and write a new language in a new country, and while he respected his Italian heritage, he embraced his Canadian identity with pride. He wasn’t afraid to ask for help when he stumbled, and took every opportunity to speak English, accepting feedback with gratitude and humility. He read anything he could get his hands on, collected words to add to his repertoire, and never boasted, not even when he conquered yet another perplexing exception.
Originally published in Our Canada magazine’s October/November 2023 issue.
