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A Wedding Dress, A Uniform
So, here I sit. It’s November 6th. It’s unseasonably warm, a bit overcast and not very November- y. This week, like a lot of you, I’ll be remembering the women and men who served, and who serve, to ensure peace and prosperity for people like me, and like you. My father served in the Second World War. Not quite old enough to sign-up in the early forties but signup he did, a soon to be eighteen-year-old. I think about my Dad a lot these days, especially when the weather turns from the warmth and brilliant colours of Autumn to the dark, cold and grey of November. My father, Flight Sergeant Patrick Joseph Durning, wasn’t the kind of guy who sat with his family and waxed loquacious about his time in service to the Dominion of Canada. Mostly, we all knew him as the dad he was, sometimes very outgoing and charming, sometimes very quiet. In a way I am grateful he let the seven of us just be his kids. He was our Dad. His burden was not shared.
One day, it might have been in an early1950s November, the oldest of my younger brothers and I were playing hide-n-seek. He and I had a rivalry to end all rivalries as sibling rivalries go. The only rule we had in our game was to hide in the house, not outside. The longer it took to find the hider, the better for the sibling scorecard. We became very adept at finding the most frighteningly bizarre places to hide. Each game became a bigger challenge to the hider and to the seeker. It was during one of our epic hide ‘n’ seek games one of us was brave enough to hide in Mom and Dad’s bedroom closet. Now, the bedroom itself was not out-ofbounds, we often hid under the bed or behind the chair but their closet was out-of-bounds. Their closet was often where the Christmas presents were stored —I won’t get into how I knew this. But, oldest of my younger brothers and I never hid in their closet until we did.
My parents’ closet was deceptively large for a 1950s VLA home. If you opened the ordinary-sized door you might have been completely unaware of how far the storage area reached to the left and to the right. Our first hiding spot only took us as far as the scooting in behind the clothes “right there” when you opened the door. Behind Mom’s Sunday coat and dress, Dad’s suits and overcoat. As soon as it became the first place we looked for one another we decided to switch-up and one day we went deep. I think we were just surprised by the size of the area we had not “discovered”. Deep into the closet was where the winter jackets, leggings, galoshes and other seasonal attire was stashed. Deep into back of the closet there were shoe boxes and suitcases. One day oldest of the younger brothers and I went deep enough to come across my father’s RCAF uniform hanging with my mother’s Wedding Dress. This discovery needed a flashlight. And a flashlight needed a reason to be used because “Batteries don’t grow on trees”, Mom and Dad would have said. However, we managed to sneak “the flashlight” upstairs to explore the back of the closet. Dad’s uniform was what caught our interest. Uniforms were something we saw in our Faith and Freedom Readers at school or, occasionally, in a magazine. We rarely saw anyone, except a police officer, in a uniform and we couldn’t even imagine our dad wearing a uniform. In their formal wedding picture, however, there was our mom in her beautiful dress and our dad in his RCAF uniform. They certainly looked very fancy in that photograph.
If our parents told us the story of their wedding day and why Dad wore a uniform and who made Mom’s dress, I’m sure we would have remembered. Perhaps we were too young. Over the years, the stories of their early married life came out, in bits and pieces. Someone told us of Dad’s enlisting when he was far too young to enlist. Someone mentioned Dad going to Edmonton to complete the Navigation Course for Navigators and Air Bombers. We didn’t know our parents were wed shortly before Dad “shipped overseas”. We understood the story of our oldest sister not meeting our father until she was almost two but never really understood. Talk of our dad becoming a Flight Sergeant and a Bombardier, flying night missions over Germany near the end of the war was something we didn’t learn until we were teenagers. Even then, it was “the Coles Notes” of “What Our Parents Did During the War.”
I miss my parents. This week I’ll think about them, often. I’ll think about how frightening it surely was for a very young man to train and to take up arms thousands of miles from home and I will think about a very young woman who had wait and wonder. I’ll think about that beautiful wedding dress hanging next to a uniform and remind myself how brave my parents really were.
This week, I Will Remember Them.
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