Ted Barris

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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I’ve never really understood the significance or relevance of this so-called “March Break” week.

It’s not quite the end of winter. It’s not quite the beginning of spring. It rarely coincides with any religious holiday – Easter, Passover, etc. Parents with school-aged kids get excited about it – especially if they have access to a sun-belt or ski resort time-share condominium. And of course, college and university students think it’s the highlight of the school year. They all dream of escaping to the Florida beaches for sun, fun and libation, etc. I remember one of the campus slogans invented during the time I was at university:

“Come on down to Fort ‘Liquordale’ for fun in the sun,” it said.

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It was getting down to the wire.

I was running out of time and options. I had to get that special something – a small gift – and my search was yielding nothing. At the time – the middle of last month – I happened to be travelling out of Toronto en route to my small home town and I sensed my gift-search mission was going to fail. Within the hour, I reached town and turned onto the main street. That’s when it hit me. Stores in town were still open. I dashed into one shop and bought some flowers, then into another for my card. Mission accomplished.

And I thought of Dorothy’s epilogue in The Wizard of Oz: “There’s no place like home.”

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A few weeks ago, in a letter to the editor a woman in my community took the township council to task over budget accountability. Another reader of the local newspaper commented that a story about the war in Gaza lacked fairness and balance.

On Monday, I met a journalist from Afghanistan. As recently as 2001, if he had criticized his government or commented on any current events, he might not have lived to see another day. Today, Ahmad Zia is editor of international news for Kabul Weekly, a newspaper based in the Afghan capital with a circulation of 10,000.

“Even today you have to put your life on the line to criticize,” he said.

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They were perhaps the quickest 90 seconds in Canada’s history.

On a frozen bay, near the Nova Scotia community of Baddeck – about midday on Feb. 23, 1909 – a group of avid young scientists and engineers gathered, they hoped, to make history. Under the direction of perhaps Canada’s greatest inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, the men fired up a small engine attached to a Bell-designed glider. J.A.D. McCurdy, the son of Bell’s secretary, climbed into the open cockpit, eased the throttle powering the propeller and guided Bell’s “Silver Dart” across the ice at increasing speed. Then, in front nearly 150 witnesses, the flying machine left the ice surface and remained airborne for perhaps a minute and a half.

“Canada’s first heavier-than-air machine,” reports said, had been flown by “the bold aeronaut Douglas McCurdy, a Baddeck boy born and bred.”

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What is it about February and Canada?

It’s certainly a month that defines this country. Whether it’s the frigid temperatures and snow we’ve endured or the national symbol we sort of celebrate (it was on Feb. 15, 1965, that officials raised the Maple Leaf flag on Parliament Hill for the very first time), this month makes most people between Bonavista and Vancouver Island express their distinctiveness. But in February we have another aspect of Canadiana to celebrate. It was 30 years ago this month that Canadians acknowledged Black History Month for the first time.

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The other day on the radio, somebody mentioned that a person over the age of 18 loses about a thousand brain cells a day. Yikes!

First, I worried about the impact that might have on my memory. Then, I recalled that somebody else had told me that a full grown adult has over a hundred billion brain cells in there to begin with. I did the math (I had to use a calculator, however, not my brain) and I figured out – at that loss rate – it would take about 300,000 years for my brain to run out of cells. Still, I think the most dreaded question in the English language is:

“Can you remember…?”

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My mother would have made a great finance minister.

She had a knack for survival. The same way many men and women of her generation – those who survived the Great Depression – understand such things, she practised the rules of sustainability (reduce, reuse, recycle) throughout her life. She saved autumn seeds for the spring garden. She continued to use every piece of clothing in her wardrobe until its threadbare areas overtook those parts that were intact. She never dumped the last of the morning coffee, preferring instead to reheat it with her lunch or an afternoon snack. And she saved her pennies for the things her husband or children wanted, but maybe couldn’t afford. Why?

“Always saving for that rainy day,” she would say.

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I met Barack Obama in the Washington, D.C., area 44 years ago.

Yes, I know, you’re already doing the math. The newly inaugurated 44th president of the United States of America was only three years old in 1965. Obama’s parents had just recently divorced by that time. And shortly thereafter the young son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father found himself in Jakarta, Indonesia, attending grade school. How could Barris have met the man who – on Tuesday at midday – became America’s first ever African-American president?

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In my lifetime, I’ve heralded the new year on the Pacific coast, the Atlantic coast and even the Gulf coast. I’ve watched Dick Clark count it down at Times Square. I’ve counted the seconds down myself, hosting my own radio show. On Y2K, we stayed up most of the night watching TV coverage of the new millennium arriving in Sydney, London and New York. I’ve brought in the new year alone, at parties with total strangers, but most often with members of my immediate family.

I observed the passing of 2008 a bit differently. Actually, it was the day before New Year’s Eve. I stood on the Wynford Drive bridge late last Tuesday afternoon in a biting north wind, waiting for the hearses carrying the bodies of the three latest Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan to pass.

“I suddenly felt the urge,” I told a fellow who arrived shortly after I did with a Canadian flag tucked under his arm.

“I live nearby,” the flag-bearer told me. “I try to be here each time they go by.”

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