I wake up; it's 5:05am. I make my way down the hallway to the kitchen. Luigi does not follow me but remains in the warm bed. I set out to make a pot of coffee only to find that I have practically run out of dark roast.  I think, this must be a metaphor for something.

There is a spiteful tin of decaf lurking behind the neglected vitamins and supplements, the ones I buy but rarely use. I reach for the tin of fake coffee because even decaf is better than no-caf at this point. Today is supposedly a special day. Many people would give their right-eye for a day like today; some have.

This is the day I become a Canadian Citizen; the shindig begins at 8:30am.

There are reasons for why I suddenly decided to get my Canadian citizenship after 46 years of living in Canada. Sometime during my 45^th year of life, I woke up and realized that I had never voted...anywhere!

I began to feel like a permanently displaced person, like I had been living in a kind of no-man's-land, where my heart was hopelessly drawn to New York City, the city of my birth, while my feet were firmly rooted in Toronto.

I landed in Canada on day five of my life. I was the youngest person to ever fly on Air Canada in 1961. Whether it is actually true or false is not important, but that is how the story goes.

I have lived my entire life in and around the Toronto area, first because my parents had moved back from New York to start a business just shortly before my brother and I were born. Later, it was force of habit combined with relationships and obligations that kept me here; clearly, not all roads lead to Rome, much less to New York City.

When I was younger Toronto felt almost like home, but as I grew older it felt more and more like a large indoor mall with vaulted Plexiglas ceilings and overheated vestibules; with its acres of ubiquitous brown-ochre ceramic flooring which seemed to spread out in endless tedium from where I was, all the way to the north pole.

Growing up in Canada you couldn't help but get the message that hockey was one of the big distinguishing characteristics of Canadians: If you were Canadian you had to love your hockey and your case of Molson Canadian beer. I couldn't have cared less for either.

While most of the boys in the neighborhood were "shooting" and "scoring," I was busy figuring out how to overdub my voice with the 2 track reel to reel I had in the basement. I quite literally felt Un-Canadian; the fact that the rest of my extended family lived in Austria, Germany, and Sweden didn't help matters either.

So where is home?

How many times do I need to click my heels together before I can go there or find out where it is? I look down at my feet; apparently they did not come equipped with ruby slippers, nor do I think a Canadian passport is going have a similar magical effect.

And so a new day begins...with me swearing my allegiance to the Queen of England.