Little Big Things

To be honest, I've always had a complex relationship with Remembrance Day. In my head, in a purely intellectual sense, I know that it falls every year on November 11, the anniversary of the official end of WWI, and is meant to be a time of reflection and thankfulness for the servicemen and -women who have fought and died for our country. I also know it to be a time when we pause to reflect on the continued physical, emotional, social and financial needs of our veterans, the oldest of whom have been hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, if you were to ask me if that knowledge in my head ever made it down to my heart...hard to say. I suppose there were moments when it must have: like when I finally discovered, as a Grade 8 student, that Canadian forces were deployed in an attempt to defend Hong Kong from the Imperial Japanese during WWII ; or when the brother of a close friend I had in university was a soldier who could potentially be deployed to Afghanistan. But w...

He shall have dominion also from sea to sea. This line, from the King James Version of Psalm 72, forms the basis for Canada's national motto: a mari usque ad mare  (from sea to sea). It's a reference to the country's vast geographic range, from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west; recent iterations of the concept have even made it three-way by including the Arctic Ocean in the north as well: "from coast to coast to coast". (The farthest east and west I have ever been in Canada: Halifax, Nova Scotia on the Atlantic, and Victoria, British Columbia on the Pacific) Looking back through the archives, I notice that my first post on this blog was on Canada Day 2017; now, during this revival of the blog four years later, I've come back around full circle to Canada Day 2021. Or, have I? The truth of the matter is that this year's Canada Day will not be like any other Canada Day many of us have seen. No-one planned for the recent grim dis...