Remembrance Day in Ottawa

Finally in Ottawa. I experienced Winnipeg and Brandon the way people from warmer climes experience them: they were frigid! Minus 15, and windy. It’s been a while since I’ve lived in that climate. Walking there brought back memories of my adolescence, walking without a hat (being cool!) and freezing my ears one after the other.

I had a really good visit with Caley and Joe. Enjoyed Angus’ one word responses; Mr. ‘why use six words when one will do.’ Visits with Emma at U of W were great. She seemed no longer an adolescent, but now a young woman, settling into campus life, finding the best clubs for dancing (Fame, the gay club, is the best…cover charge is only $5.00!). She’s back in improve, looking at Biology Club…becoming Emma again, in a new setting, in a new phase in her life.

Arrived Ottawa late last evening. Poor Jennifer, her plane from Halifax was late, late. Rapha picked her and drove her home. She then came right back to meet my plane. It was a late night for me…later for her, as she visited a neighbor after we got home!

Today is Remembrance Day. I had planned to walk down to the National Memorial for the service this morning, until I heard that there would be 80,000 people there! All I would see would be the backs of their heads, so I’ll watch on TV, and walk down and place my poppy on the memorial this afternoon. That way, I won’t have the annoyance of watching our PM, “Harpo,” sucking for popularity as he lays a wreath, just home from selling out the country in China. Grrrr!

On Remembrance Day, I think of my father. He was a Vet of WW2. He joined the army early in 1940, at the age of 38. He never would have been conscripted. Most of the young men in his Service Corps unit were 17 and 18 – he was the father in the unit. Their job was to truck supplies to the front lines. This meant finding roads and just getting there, no matter what. Dad often rode motorcycle, sussing out roads and leaving markers for the boys to follow. He was blown off his bike at least once, because he wrote home for us to send him a new watch…his got damaged in the blast! His other major job was pulling his young guys out of bars when they got wasted, and getting them home to camp before the MP’s caught up with them!

Back then, we didn’t know about PTSD, but we saw it in him now and then. I remember one day, not long after he came home. We were eating lunch (I can’t remember why he was home at lunch time…or maybe it was dinner…fuzzy…. A car went by on the street in front of the house, and it backfired, as old vehicles often did back in 1946. Bang! It went…and my Dad was under the table before the sound had died away. He was so embarrassed…he covered it with anger, as he so often did in those years. But I remember being shocked by this, and realizing, even at the age of 12, that something important had just happened, even if I didn’t understand what.

It will be important for me to lay my poppy on the war memorial this afternoon. My Dad didn’t die in war, but his life was marked, bent, wounded in some way. Much later in his life, after he retired, he and my mother did something on summer Saturdays that recapped my Father’s wartime activity. On a Saturday morning, my mother would pack a lunch, then they would get in their little Volvo and d rive east from Transcona, into fairly primitive farm country, with only mud and gravel roads. They would drive until they were lost, and then my Father would drive this way and that until he found a way to get home. It was like re-doing his wartime job of finding a way to get through to home, rather than the front lines. It always amazed me how much pleasure my Dad got from these jaunts. He was back in his prime, doing what he did best, getting stuff through to the men who needed it. And on these trips, no one was shooting at him or shelling him!

It was so like my Dad to “join up” voluntarily, when he was almost overage, to do his part. He was too young to be in WW1 – 13 or 14 – and almost too old for WW2. But not quite, so off he went. I imagine there were thousands of men like him who did that, and I’m sure there were a lot of them who never came back.

I remember being 8 or 9 years old when the news came back to our little town that Mike Moroz had been killed. Everybody knew Mike. He was a baseball player, among other things, and therefore a local hero and well known to everyone. I remember people talking about his death in the Post Office, in hushed tones, with solemn faces. Like the whole town lost someone.

Another memory: Red Campbell. Red Campbell was a member of the Cameron Highland Regimen in Winnipeg. He was a piper in their band. When his regiment landed on the Normandy beach – “Juno Beach” was the Canadian landing spot -  Red was in his dress uniform, kilt and all. He stepped off into the water, and then stood there, piping his regiment ashore. In the process, Red was wounded in the hip, and sent home.

But that was the high point in his life…it ruined him. After the war, he mostly sat in the Legion and drank himself silly. He was permanently crippled, walked with a cane or crutches. In a way, he “gave his life” in the war, and never had any life after that. He was a sad man, who had one moment of heroism in his life.

All of this, and more, runs through my mind on Remembrance Day, along with the fact that when the Korean War started in 1950, I was 16, and wanted badly to join up. But like my Dad, 25 years earlier, I was just too young…. So I will remember them, for sure.