After dining with other lost Canadians the evening before I became a citizen, I found myself walking the not-so-mean streets of Ottawa alone an hour before midnight. So I wandered into the Royal Oak, an English pub on Bank Street. I persuaded some game locals, Austin and Rachelle, to share a toast and snap my picture in front of the Maple Leaf hanging behind the bar. Midnight! To gain a citizenship in one magical moment, without exertion or will, is to experience as an adult the national baptism that comes with birth. I felt exhilarated, if a bit of a fraud. Austin and Rachelle were exceedingly kind to me. We exchanged cell-phone numbers. We agreed to connect on Facebook. We all understood that I am a thoroughgoing American, qualifying as Canadian through a weird technicality. But they were happy for me, happy to have me. Because they’re Canadians, I suppose.

My first full day as a citizen turned out to be overclimactically surreal. While arranging an interview with Jason Kenney, the minister of citizenship, immigration, and multiculturalism, I had agreed in passing that his office could point reporters toward me, an example of a newfound Canadian. So the morning of the 17th, I discover that an article about the just-effectuated bill from the Canadian Press wire service begins and ends with the case of Will Wilkinson. (For the first time, it is said that I have an “American” fiancée.) Through Twitter, I learn that a pundit friend in D.C. has received an e‑mail from the Canadian government that mentions me by name. I have become the exemplary lost Canadian. I’m vain enough to be tickled and Canadian enough to be mortified, as I tour the carefully curated office of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, with other lost Canadians, many of whom have waited decades for this day.

In the afternoon, I meet with Kenney to discuss the new law. An assistant photographs us shaking hands in front of a flag. The minister himself seems damn happy to have me.

At dinner after our first Canadian day, one of us, Dean Echenberg, a physician from California, produces his Canadian passport, which he has managed to secure on the first possible day. We pass it around the table and marvel. It is real.

I return to Iowa with a Maple Leaf pin on my backpack. I give my American fiancée her present: a ridiculous action figure of Macdonald, complete with reading table and book. He was a “father of confederation,” I explain. I tell her what the enthusiastic Parliament tour guide told me: “Sir John A. Macdonald was a dreamer.”

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