Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
There was a time when I felt embarrassed if anybody asked me where I was born. Unlike the exoticism that a name like Beirut or perhaps Shanghai engenders, I felt cheated. Nobody’s eyes twinkled with wonder, no voice ascended octaves in curiosity about what that might be like; nobody asked why I had no accent or why I dressed like any other Canadian and had coffee at Timmies.
No, my birthplace is only known to be parodied at length by people who think they are being funny but definitely not original. When I tell them I was born in Biggar, Sask., I always get some version of the town motto: “New York is big” (or maybe they insert the name another city like Toronto, Montreal, London or Paris...) “but this is Biggar” and expect some laughter. Not a shrug, not an eyeroll.
This has been my fate for, well, 82 years. But to tell the truth, if I’m in a forgiving mood, I’m rather proud of where I come from. Biggar may not conjure up remote and foreign buildings and traditional folk clothing, but hey, Biggar has a lot of farmers who don’t live up to city dress codes and the languages they use on Bingo nights at the legion are foreign enough to qualify. (Prairie farmers have a lingo of their own and they use it at Bingo amongst people like themselves who understand.)
I have no memory of Biggar. There is one black-and-white photo of my brother holding me as a baby in an orchard, but that’s it. He was 10 years older than me but he didn’t remember where we lived in Biggar, either. I depended on my parents’ story of the photo – it was a depot town for the railway for which my father worked. The houses then were mainly wooden shacks I think.
My next thought was to check with the hospital to see if they still had my birth records but when I asked at the Town Office of Biggar where the hospital was, nobody knew. In fairness none of the employees could have been older than 40 or 50 and it wasn’t until an oldtimer walked in asking that I learned that the hospital where my mother must have given birth had burned down years ago.
Biggar is about 90 kilometres west of Saskatoon, where I usually stay when I am visiting Saskatchewan, so it’s a long pilgrimage through miles and miles of rolling prairie to reach it.
I never recognize Biggar even when I finally take the exit road off the highway; it looks like any other small Prairie town I suppose: a main street filled with stores of the usual variety, a drug store, a barber shop and so on. I always find a place to park along the street – everything’s pretty central here.
On my last visit I went to the Biggar Museum and Gallery, hoping to find some 1940s pictures of the town and streets; of course, even if my house were in one of them, I would have no way of knowing which it was. I thought I’d have better luck searching for names, but alas, there was no mention of anything like our family name in the records. My father was a Canadian National Railway accountant and since we were transferred every three years or so, I doubt that his presence was of sufficient importance to have withstood the test of time.
I did have a brief soupçon of hope at the Museum, though. One of clerks told me that her grandmother who had been a teenager in the wartime was still alive and living in Biggar. But when I asked if she might remember our family, she shrugged. “I doubt it,” she said. “She’s over 100 and has had dementia for a long time now; she didn’t even recognize my mother when she died five or six years ago.”
I wanted to continue my ritual of getting a haircut in Biggar but a sign said the shop was closed for lunch. I suppose the barber didn’t expect much business at noon.
I was running out of reasons to stay, but as a last resort, I thought I’d find a Biggar hat or a Biggar T-shirt, something that didn’t hint that some city might be big, but this was Biggar. I knew I’d never wear one of those. I actually found an attractive tee in the Biggar Dollar Mart on Main Street. It was a gorgeous golden yellow colour and just said BIGGAR in huge letters, with a smaller SK below it. There was also a credible sketch of some wheat that was not at all embarrassing.
That shirt said all that needed to be said about Biggar: it is a place to be proud of. This was my Biggar; I am Biggar now.
Gary Kinney lives on Bowen Island, B.C.
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