The U. S. of Eh Peter B. Steiger 07/02/2004 I think it's great that my adopted country celebrates Canada Day, albeit three days later than the Canadians do. The observance of Canada's 137th birthday yesterda started me thinking about how I never learned to speak American correctly. See, I was born in Canada but my mother spent the first half of her life in Virginia and had a mixture of Old South and Toronto in her voice. My father was from Germany, so between his guttural speech and my mother's confused blend and the standard clipped Canadian accent I heard from all my friends, I started off rather confused. Then they made it worse by moving to Texas when I was six years old. Oh, you may have felt like an outcast with bullies picking on you if you liked to read or you always made good grades or you were small for your age, but you don't know grade school torment until you say "oot" around a busload of Texan children. I still remember in vivid detail trying to hang the nickname "Outhouse" on a boy named John, only to have it backfire because nobody could understand what I was saying. "Oothoose? Uthuss? What's wrong with y'all, anyways?" I spent hours in front of the mirror trying to sound like a Texan. More than anything, I wanted to sound like everyone else; I wanted to BE like everyone else. So practice I did, learning to stretch my phonetically correct "out" into the drawled "ahhhooowwwt" that my friends preferred. I should explain that Candians don't really pronounce that sound as "oot"; we pronounce it as the dipthong it was meant to be - two distinct vowel sounds, starting with "ah" and ending with "oo". Of course, with my mongrel heritage that varied from one day to the next so it's not like I speak with authority on the subject. Over the next twenty years, several things changed. That mangled "oot" gradually smoothed into a gentler sound - not a true Houston drawl by any means, but at least I no longer had everyone, including my parents, demanding "Yew ain't from around heah, are yew?" The bullies found more important things to focus on, like my size and my total lack of ability in any sport and the annoying way I acted like I enjoyed tests. The most important change, however, occurred when I finally realized that I did not have to be like everyone else. What a revelation! By the time I left college, I was actively trying to recapture my lost Canadian ethnicity. I worked on rounding those dipthongs back to the right shape. I tried, with limited success, to learn all the words to "O Canada!" and "God Save The Queen." I learned every line of dialogue from the "Great White North" skits on the SCTV show. I took to wearing a knitted toque no matter what the season. These days, I no longer try so hard. Most of the time, I play the chameleon and try to match whatever accent I hear; since I moved to Wyoming I can find a halfway point between Toronto and Houston that sounds just as Midwesternish as the neighbors. Nothing will ever take away the unbridled joy I felt several years ago, however, when my daughter came home from school with exciting news. She was born in Houston and had gone to a Montessori preschool in Dallas since she was four, so I was resigned to having children who spoke like legendary orator Alvin "Junior" Samples from the documentary show "Hee Haw." I sure never dared hope for what I heard that joyous spring afternoon when she rushed in to greet me and announce "Papa, they let me take a book home today. Let me tell you what it's ABOOT!"