Things That Are True - Lest We Forget

Today, as we do on every November 11th, we took The Imp to Victory Square for the Remembrance Day ceremony. He handled it well, singing O Canada with enthusiasm, being quiet when quiet was called for, listening to the amplified voices and trying to make sense of what he heard.

I don't know how much he understood. I don't think it matters, at this point. We haven't talked a lot about war with The Imp; he is, after all, only three. But he knows that his Granddad was in the air force during World War II, and he knows that a lot of people, including a lot of Granddad's friends, didn't ever come home.

Granddad - almost certainly the source of The Imp's good looks

The Imp did recognize that it was a solemn occasion. When the uniformed men in front of us saluted, The Imp raised his arm and brought his fingertips to his temple in imitation. When the children's choir sang, "In Flanders Fields" The Imp, in my arms, whispered, "They sound sad." And when the guns boomed out their twenty-one salutes from nearby Portside Park, The Imp looked at me with wide eyes and said, "That sounds like thunder."

Yes, yes it does sound like thunder.

May you never hear them in any other context, my beautiful boy.

Things That Matter - Lest We Forget

Cenotaph, Victory Square, Vancouver

This is where I'll be this morning, to watch Vancouver's Remembrance Day ceremony. I go every year. I'm descended, on my father's side, from a long line of pacifists. Some of them, while objecting to the motivations and machinations of war, still served as stretcher bearers, contributing what they felt, morally, that they could. Men on my mother's side of the family served their country in World War II. One of my cousins served as a peacekeeper in some really hellish places. HWSNBN's father and grandfather both answered the call.

Victory Square, Vancouver

I go to honour them. To honour their commitment to duty, to what they thought was right. I go to remember those who didn't come back. I go to honour those who serve in war-torn places all over the world today.

Statue honouring the war dead of Canadian Pacific Railways, Waterfront Station, Vancouver

And I go in gratitude that because of them, my son is growing up in a peaceful nation, with the freedom to be who he is. May he never need to know anything different.

But I'll teach him to honour, and to be grateful.