When I read certain writers who are associated strongly with a specific time and place; like Heaney with the Irish countryside, Flannery O'Connor with the dusty rural South of midcentury, Cheever and the genteel suburban homes of Westchester county, I feel a sense of envy. Having grown up in a new development suburb dotted with strip malls I feel a little cheated. Rhapsodizing about my surroundings feels as if it will inevitably come across as irony. There are only so many 'Odes to Tim Horton's'' I can get away with.  Would I have more to write about if my ancestors had tilled the soil in my birthplace instead of thousands of miles away on the mountain sides of Limnos? When my Uncle from Strasbourg came to visit our 60's-era split-level house, he asked how to get to the town square. When we explained that such a thing didn't exist, he was a bit confused. "But where's the center of town?" he persisted. There is no center in this suburban municipality, we told him. He looked perplexed and pitying. How to explain that here it was all outskirts. Flat and featureless. What little history there was -  a rural dirt road, diminishing forest, and the few remaining farm houses, were being paved, cut down and destroyed. History was something being made in the corridors of Greendale elementary and John Rennie High or at Fairview Mall  - the closest thing to a Town Center we got. Now when I go back, little is recognizable from when I lived there. The acres of unkempt fields at the bottom of our street was our battleground for a game we called "War" - two teams of scrawny kids armed with only some toy guns and a deep imagination, crouching silently in long grass waiting to engage with the enemy. Summers were hours spent like that with only the buzz of the electrical wires overhead. Now that patch of land is a series of interlocking car dealerships, our old battlefield underneath glass-walled showrooms filled with Hondas, Subarus and Lexuses. Sometimes when I drive past I think there should be some marker. A plaque that says. "On this site Jason, Aris, Bruce, Dave, Billy,Tommy, Joanne and Paul fought the battle of Dollard des Ormeaux...