Last Sunday, about 1 o’clock in the afternoon, I disappeared. I wasn’t hiding. I wasn’t trying to escape. In fact, I’d just returned home from a getaway-weekend hockey tournament in Bancroft – an annual event my oldtimers teammates and I enjoy.

As I arrived home, however, I felt my pocket, noticed my wallet was missing. I began retracing my steps. One of my hockey buddies and I had stopped for coffee. I’d paid the cashier, picked up the coffee cups and pastry and promptly forgot my wallet at the cash.

“Did anybody turn in a wallet left on the counter?” I asked an employee over the phone.

“Not that I know of,” she said.

I asked her to check with a supervisor or manager. But the answer was the same. Nothing in the lost-and-found. Nothing on the counter, the floor, anywhere. The wallet I’d absentmindedly left behind was gone. (more…)

Tank Man, 19-year-old Wang Weilin faces Chines tanks on Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Wikipedia.

It’s an image that endures. It’s not old enough for us to call it historical yet. It only goes back about 30 years. But the frames of video taken by an amateur videographer show a man in a white shirt, dark pants, facing a column of military tanks. It was June 4, 1989. It was the final day of the student-organized, non-violence demonstration at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, just before China’s People’s Liberation Army gunned down hundreds of civilians for protesting government corruption and lack of free speech.

“Tank Man,” they called him. But the Sunday Express newspaper in Britain later claimed the man was Wang Weilin, a 19-year-old student, who’d joined the weeks-long protest, despite the threat of annihilation. (more…)

Ted Barris

author | journalist

Posts with the D.C. tag

Identity lost and found

Youth versus Bullets