I remember now

In 1994 LOML and I packed up the kids and set out to see the world. Well, we set out to see France, Belgium and Switzerland. The trip was a little bit about working with a soupçon of finding some French language fluency, a whole suitcase full of being on a long vacation and passively about soaking up some Euro-culture to spread across our North American horizons. During the northern France part of our odyssey, we rented a house a few kilometres outside of the city of Bayeux. Yup, just a hop, skip and jump from the home of the ancient Bayeux Tapestry (the EC part) and practically next door to the beaches of Normandy. By the time we’d reached Bayeux we managed to put “paid” to a whole lot of things on our list, but it was in that region that I found an unexpected bond to my father and an understanding of how his military service during World War II had shaped his life. My Dad was a quiet, hardworking kinda guy. You were more likely to get a sigh and a look from him when you screwed up than a harsh lecture.

The trip! Believe me, I hadn’t made any part of the three-hour trip from Picton to Pearson Airport, then eight and a half hours on a plane, two hours in a foreign airport and weeks trying to figure out how to get from here to there in a car with a hydraulic suspension, filled with luggage, comic books and kids, only to have a beach make me understand my Dad. Nope, it wasn’t on the list. If you’d asked me then I wouldn’t have figured on that part at all. By the time we dragged our travel-weary behinds out of that crazy car each evening, all I wanted to do was sleep, awake refreshed and get back to soaking up the Euro-culture. And, actually, we did that for the first six weeks of our trip, visiting Paris, Brussels, Geneva, Bourges, Aix-en-Provence, Avignon, the Camargue, Grenoble, Dijon, Annecy and Caen. In my mind it was to be the trip of a lifetime. Little did I know it wasn’t just about my own lifetime.

One afternoon, a few days after our arrival in Bayeux, we’d visited the cemeteries and as we walked up the Point-du-hoc and looked out across that vast beach, it occurred to me (and to LOML) that both of our sons would have landed on or flown over those beaches in a different time. In 1994 our oldest son was just 22 and our youngest son was almost 17, both fit and able. Their fate in the 1940s might have been military service, not graduations, girlfriends and horntrips to County beaches. The reality for us, as parents in the 1990s, was almost overwhelming. In May of 1944, all of those troops landing on and flying over Omaha, Utah, Sword, Gold and Juno beaches were real people. They were sons. I was very choked up over what did happen during June almost 50 years before our trip and for what might have happened, had we lived in that era.

In 1944, my Dad was one of those sons. Until our trip in 1994, I only knew enough of Canada’s contribution during World War II to pass a Grade 10 Canadian history test. I only kinda wondered about the scratchy woollen uniform, wrapped in tissue tucked away in the trunk. That uniform seemed awfully small to have been worn by the man who was my father. As for the rest of it, I wore a poppy in November and on the eleventh of the month bowed my head in silence because that’s what we did. I wasn’t really connected. I had nothing to remember. My Dad’s war hadn’t happened during my time. It hadn’t been my war. I was born after WWII—I’m a baby boomer, a “honey I’m home” kid. I knew my Dad had spent about four years in the RCAF, but he never was the kinda guy to give up any of his “military” secrets. It was all a mystery to me. The reality of his youth was my mystery. Oh, I knew my Dad had been a Flight Sergeant, it said so on the little bit of paper tucked in between the sheets of tissue in the trunk with his uniform. And, from that paper I knew my Dad was a bomber. Dad once mentioned he flew in Lancasters and he was a night flyer— whatever that meant. But, my, how he loved the Lancasters. Those he spoke of; as if I could figure out the rest from his technical talks about the Lancasters.

Upon returning to our home-away-from-home, after our trip to “the beaches,” I called home. A long distance call from France to Toronto to thank my Dad for what he’d done, to tell him about what I’d seen and tell him I loved him. True to form, Dad asked me where I was calling from and wondered why I’d waste any part of a day on that godforsaken beach, then told me not to waste money on a telephone call and send a postcard or, better still, drop by on the way home from the airport for dinner and a visit. He wasn’t going to be tricked into saying any more than he already had. No more than those very few words about being a night flyer on the Lancasters.

In 2009, weeks before my father’s death, he spoke a bit more about his time in “the Air Force.” He told me about being on leave in April of 1944 when he and Mom got married. He told me it wasn’t much of a honeymoon because he took the train to Montreal two days after the ceremony and within weeks was night flying in a plane that sometimes got so cold a guy’s hands stuck to the instruments and levers during their night flights— “couldn’t wear gloves ‘cuz you needed to feel what you were doing, no light in the belly of the Lancaster during night flights.”

On November 11th at eleven o’clock in the morning, two minutes of silence used to seem like a lifetime— someone else’s lifetime—to me. Now there hardly seems to be enough time to remember the men and women who volunteered for the cause of our freedom and our peace. Remember them, on Remembrance Day. Remember them.