The lunch seemed more elegant than it really was: jambon, fromage et tarte framboises. My dining partners, enjoying ham sandwiches with cheese and strawberry tarts, were fellow travellers – a retired public servant, a photographer and a D-Day veteran – in the Normandy region of France. Suddenly, however, the lunch became secondary, when a stranger approached us. She spotted our Canadian pins.

“Do you know about the ceremony today at l’Abbaye d’Ardenne?” she asked.

We nodded. We told her our group of 47 Canadians – on a tour of Normandy for the 65th anniversary of the June 6, 1944, invasion – had included the ceremony she mentioned. We knew that on this day – D-Day-plus-1 – members of German commander Kurt Meyer’s 12th SS Panzer Division had captured and executed 20 Canadian soldiers and then hurriedly buried their bodies in the garden of the thousand-year-old Catholic chapel.

“It’s the most important thing in my life to remember the murdered Canadians,” she said on the verge of tears, “and to make sure the story doesn’t die.”

Her name is Joelle-Lise Perthuis. At 56, her lifetime occupation has been as a teacher of French, Latin and Greek at a Paris high school. But her more recent life’s preoccupation has been the murders at l’Abbaye. She described the shame she felt when she first came to the chapel near Caen, a decade ago, to find just a cultural centre and no acknowledgment of the SS atrocity (she called it “crime de guerre.”) She trembled with emotion, trying to articulate her anger both at the Hitler youth soldiers who shot the Canadian troops and equally the French government for ignoring the gruesome deaths.

“I come here every year without fail,” she said. “It’s impossible to forget these liberating Canadian soldiers.”

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There were plenty of telltale signs:

Pup tents and tarpaulin lean-tos set in groupings around the park. Planted staves crowned with wildlife insignia. Backpacks and rucksacks neatly arranged around the picnic tables. The inviting scent of wood smoke wafting through the trees. And everywhere the playful chatter of boys and girls industrious in their Saturday morning activity. And at the entrance to my local park, a sign proudly identified those inside:

“Owasco Area Scouts,” it said.

When I snooped a little further, I learned what I had stumbled into was the annual “Camporee,” a weekend gathering of about 70 youngsters actively involved in the latest regional edition of the century-old scouting movement. Patrols (groups of roughly 10 scouts each) represented youth from Ajax, Pickering, Uxbridge and even an American group – Troop 67 from Catawisa, Pennsylvania (Uxbridge’s official twin community in the U.S.) Guiding the scouts – ages 10 to 14 – were about 35 adult leaders.

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There were plenty of telltale signs:

Pup tents and tarpaulin lean-tos set in groupings around the park. Planted staves crowned with wildlife insignia. Backpacks and rucksacks neatly arranged around the picnic tables. The inviting scent of wood smoke wafting through the trees. And everywhere the playful chatter of boys and girls industrious in their Saturday morning activity. And at the entrance to my local park, a sign proudly identified those inside:

“Owasco Area Scouts,” it said.

(more…)

When invited to a luncheon sponsored by a wine company, one might expect a predictable event – a variety of wine samples and an extended commercial for the company’s product.

Last week, a travel agent friend invited me to a 75th anniversary tribute to an Australian winemaker. The sample tasting was pretty straightforward. But when it came time for the guest of honour to be interviewed in front of the guests, a stout gentleman in a dazzling bow tie leapt onto the podium.

Simultaneously, someone at the back of the dining room cracked a joke about the man’s diminutive height. The vintner immediately stood on his chair and came back with a crack of his own.

“I used to be this tall,” he said, “but the wine industry cut me down to size.”

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About 5 o’clock last Saturday night, I stepped into 1962.

I didn’t feel any different at that moment. I don’t think I looked any different. Neither did my wife. Except that for her, last Saturday night brought together alumni of Ancaster High School (in Ontario). And for her it was a chance to see and hear the impact of nearly 50 years on some of her former classmates, as more than 400 ex-students and faculty gathered to celebrate the school’s golden anniversary. At one point, one of her former classmates summed up the general feeling of the reunion.

“Too little time,” she said, “to remember so much.”

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A student of mine sent me a distressing e-mail this week.

In it, Caroline George apologized for her absence. She said she’d been distracted. She explained that her sister had been vacationing in Mexico where she was stricken with an asthmatic attack. But because of the apparent outbreak of the so-called swine flu there, the family couldn’t get her sister, Victoria George-Pazzano, onto an air ambulance to fly her home to Canada.

“I was hoping you might be able to help,” Caroline George said.

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There’s a spot on the calendar that belongs to a friend of mine.

Every year, on a day late in the summer, he and I usually get together to remember how he once spent that day. I remember out of homage. He recalls the horrors of August 19, 1942, the day he landed on the chert-rock beach of a seaport in France during the Second World War. One year, I phoned ahead to his home to make sure he was up for my visit. When he remembered it was the anniversary of the Dieppe raid, he said:

“That’s right. By this time on that day I had about 23 chunks of shrapnel in me and I was the unexpected guest of the Fuhrer.”

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The line between teaching and learning grew more blurry this week.

On Monday, I read a story in the National Post about the University of Ottawa firing a controversial professor. The report recounted the stormy relationship between advanced physics instructor Denis Rancourt and the U. of O. Board of Governors.

The two sides had collided over Prof. Rancourt’s controversial grading system. Instead of evaluating each student’s work individually, he chose to award all of them an A+. He said by giving them all an A+, his fourth-year students would stop worrying about grades and concentrate on learning the concepts of advanced physics.

During a discussion of the day’s news in a college reporting class, this week, I put the question to my first-year journalism students.

“If I gave everybody an A+ would that inspire you to greater learning?” I asked.

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On Monday afternoon, I met members of the Imperial Oil Annuitant Club for the first time.

About 70 of them had invited me to speak about the significance of remembrance during this the 90th anniversary of the signing of the 1919 Peace Treaty following the Great War. Among the retirees were no fewer than eight Second World War veterans and the widow of a ninth. Over lunch I spoke with one of the vets – 85-year-old Gerry O’Neill – who had left work and school in 1943 to serve in the Royal Canadian Air Force.

“No questions asked,” he said at one point. “Britain and Europe needed us.”

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