Ted Barris

Monday night was bittersweet. Through the evening, a lot of friends and neighbours shared food and drink in anticipation of holiday festivities, just days away. But in the middle of a special wine and food tasting at the Tin Mill, a local eatery in Uxbridge, Ont., I listened to a friend of mine grieve. He couldn’t fathom that just eight weeks ago, his son Christopher was as alive as ever.

“I wake up each day thinking he’ll be there,” Warren Skinner told me. “It’s absolutely surreal.”

Christopher, Warren and Ellen Skinner’s 27-year-old son, died on Adelaide Street in Toronto on Oct. 18. He’d been celebrating his sister Taryn’s birthday in the city’s entertainment district. He’d begun to walk home about 3 a.m. As best authorities could determine, it appeared that Christopher and occupants of a dark-coloured SUV had a confrontation. The police said his attackers beat Chris to the ground, then drove over him and sped away. That cowardly act snuffed out an extraordinary young man’s life and devastated his family.

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There’s a standard post-game joke that circulates in most recreational hockey or oldtimers’ dressing rooms. Especially if the butt of the joke has made a ridiculously bad pass, missed an obvious goal or (in the case of a goalie) blown an easy save during the game. It doesn’t take long – within minutes of the end of the scrimmage – and it usually follows a short period of silence as players catch their breaths on the dressing room benches. Then, it comes with the predictability of a sunrise.

“So what happened?” the jokester begins. “Did you trip on your toe picks?”

In case you didn’t get the reference, toe picks are the jagged edges common to the leading edge of most figure skaters’ skates. The point is that the hockey player involved in the gaffe, looked so hopelessly inept during the play, that the worst comparison the jokester could imagine would be the hockey player being only good enough to try figure skating or ice dancing.

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Recently, I spoke to a midday session of the International Writers’ Festival in Ottawa. I projected images of veterans I have known onto a movie screen. Then, I told stories about the men’s and women’s nearly total reluctance to speak about their wartime experiences. It’s the subject of my latest book, “Breaking the Silence.” And I finished my talk this way:

“I’ve spent many of the past 30 years writing the stories of battle,” I said. “In this latest work, I’ve attempted to write about the battle to get the stories.”

In my talk, I offered several key illustrations of the way Canadian veterans have almost universally refused to share with their families and civilian friends the extraordinary moments of their war. Among the examples of this unwritten code of silence, I cited the story of my closest air force friend Charley Fox. Though he had completed 234 successful sorties in air force Spitfires and won two Distinguished Flying Crosses, he rarely spoke about his successful airborne attack on the highest ranking and most important German general in occupied France, Erwin Rommel.

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The world ended that night. A high school girl in a major eastern city was hysterical; she claimed she and her girlfriends cried and held each other preparing to die. Rural residents on mid-western farms prayed harder than they ever had before. And thousands more rushed headlong into the streets of New York City that night. They hallucinated that aliens from outer space were invading their city, their country, their planet. They’d heard a radio broadcast – 71 years ago tomorrow night – and thought it was really the end of life on Earth.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” they heard the announcer say, “this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed! … Wait a minute! Someone’s crawling out of the hollow top … Someone or something. I can see peering out of that black hole two luminous discs … are they eyes? It might be a face…”

Fright, real fright was born Oct. 30, 1938.

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It was a Tuesday – Sept. 15 – and we were rushing in a number of directions, as usual. I had just finished delivering a broadcast history lecture and was also about to drive to a photo session out of town. My wife had just received word from her magazine publisher that she would have to cover a story in the Arctic; she’d have to rush home, pack for a 12-day trip, and immediately catch an airplane bound for Greenland. All of our plans, however, moved down the priority list, when our son-in-law phoned with an urgent message.

“You’re grandparents again,” he said, “of a baby boy.”

Detours are generally not difficult to accommodate in our family. We’re used to them. We alter plans all the time. But this detour proved different. By early evening, Jayne and I had made our way to the Port Perry Hospital to meet the latest addition to our family – Sawyer Massey. And, you know, as much as we figured we would react very differently from every other grandparent before us, we didn’t. We smiled, sighed and cooed over the little guy the same as every other doting grandparent that ever entered a maternity ward.

We wanted to know how much he weighed. We wanted to know when his mother, Quenby, had gone to the hospital and how long the labour was. We had to know if the baby’s dad, J.D., had made it to the birth in time. And we needed to have photographs taken, as each of us held the newborn as if he were a piece of prized china.

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About 2 o’clock that Saturday afternoon, somebody moved across the floor at an old automobile showroom on the south side of town. She was holding up a long-sleeved, over-sized shirt. For a second she showed off how clean and new it looked to the rest of us. But then she needed our help.

“Does anybody know what this is?” she asked. “Is it a men’s shirt or what?”

“Well, what side are the buttons on?” someone else asked, knowing that men’s shirts button from right-to-left, vice versa for women’s tops. But that didn’t solve the mystery of what it was.

Then, a voice piped up from the corner: “Looks like a men’s night shirt,” he said. And because the assessment came from Ahmad Golan, we all agreed he must be right and the “nightshirt” was gently packed into cardboard box quickly filling with men’s clothing.

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I think I can recall the exact day I discovered my nationality. My younger sister Kate was there.

My parents – both transplanted Americans – were there. We had all made the trek from our home outside Toronto to Montreal. We couldn’t get hotel accommodation that summer of 1967, so we booked into a small trailer camp outside the city and planned our several days of sightseeing at Expo 67. Everything about the exposition was a thrill. But nothing – not Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, not Labyrinth, not the monorail nor even the hydrofoil on the St. Lawrence – could compare to my visit to the Ontario pavilion.

That’s where I discovered what it was to be proud of my home.

There, inside the pavilion theatre I was dazzled by a short film that had me sighing as if I were watching fireworks, shaking my head as if it was all a mirage, and breathless as if I’d just come off a roller coaster. And, as if that weren’t enough, I came out of the pavilion theatre singing a kind of anthem.

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There is always a day in life one looks forward to. For me it was not necessarily the day I turned 16 (nor, as I described last month, the day I turned 60). It wasn’t the day I first went to high school nor to university nor even to my first paying job. Those dates were exciting, all right, but the day I truly savoured was the day I first became eligible to vote – July 12, 1970. Problem was, just 16 days before I turned 21 – June 26, 1970 – Canada lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.

The federal government had taken the thrill out of becoming legal.

It wasn’t the end of the world, however, because eventually I had the chance to exercise my franchise in a federal election that brought in a minority Parliament. Later, I voted in a provincial election in which my chosen candidate unseated a cabinet minister. And because of my lifetime fascination for politics, I’ve had ample opportunity to cover elections from the municipal through to the federal level. The fact remains, however, somebody else had decided whether I was old enough to make an informed decision.

All this came to mind, this week, as I read about Laura Dekker. She’s the Dutch teenager who had planned to set sail last Tuesday aboard her 8.3-metre yacht, Guppy. In so doing, she hoped to become the youngest sailor to circumnavigate the globe. As it turned out, Laura couldn’t launch because a court in Utrecht, Holland, considers her underage. But what’s underage?

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