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.
