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I have never met Karen Wynne of Matawan, New Jersey.
I probably never will.
But today, as my country marks the 150th anniversary of Confederation, I consider her a dear and valued friend.
You see, Ms. Wynne and countless others across the United States, and in some cases overseas, have reminded my wife, Alison, and I in recent months, how privileged we truly are as a people.
Karen is the town clerk in Matawan, a community of roughly 8,500 souls I doubt I’ll ever visit. Earlier this year, her mayor, Joseph Altomonte – I’ve never met him either – received a letter (snail mail) from my wife and I.
All she and the mayor knew from our letter was this: We were private citizens in Canada representing nobody but ourselves. Canada, she and her mayor were informed, was to about to mark 150 years of nationhood on July 1.
And a pair of ordinary citizens in Kingston, Ont., of whom she and her mayor had never heard, wanted their assistance. This couple, in honour of Canada 150, were creating a time capsule.
It would be buried in our garden in Kingston and hopefully – though we couldn’t guarantee it because we wouldn’t be around in 100 years – future Canadians would read her mayor’s message.
On the day Alison’s and my letter arrived at Matawan town hall, Karen and her mayor and his council colleagues froze. They gathered (I later learned) for a meeting and decided something I honestly think most of us Canadians wouldn’t understand.
They decided – not because of who I or my wife are – as I said, they’d never heard of us – that our request was important.
That it had very real meaning to them.
And, they, as a community, were honoured that two Canadians had asked their relatively tiny town to participate in their neighbour’s 150th anniversary celebrations.
So, Karen went to work.
Oh, I almost forgot, why had I written to Matawan? What possible connection to Canada could a place in Jersey like that have?
Art Milnes has received a collection of letters from people all over the world for a Time Capsule for Canada 150 that he plans to plant in his backyard July 1st.
Fair questions.
Matawan is a town where a young man from Nova Scotia went, for a year or two in the 19th century when he was unknown, to teach kids at the local school. He was 19. Late in life this man, not long before he died in Ottawa – where he is buried with a Canadian flag near his stone even today, reflected on his time in Matawan, N.J.
“There was a flourishing Literary Society of which I became a member,” he remembered fondly in the twilight of his life. “The people of Matawan whom I was brought into contact were highly educated and cultured. I have not seen the village since I left it in 1874. One of my pupils who had become a judge of the New Jersey Court of Appeal wrote to during the War; his younger brother, whom I met during a visit to the south a few years ago, gave me news of other pupils many of whom had passed away during the long interval. It is nearly 54 years since I left Matawan but I still hope to revisit that beautiful village of which I retain happy memories.”
The name of this Canadian who remembered “his” New Jersey town?
Sir Robert Borden.
Karen and her mayor had just learned from a pair of Canadians that their town was a place where a Canadian prime minister, a man who made history and whose country today is a member of the G7, had walked their streets more than a century ago.
This was important.
They were proud to learn that. Very proud.
So whether my wife and I were private citizens or a Canadian first couple or perhaps the leaders of a major Canadian corporation, mattered little to them.
Obviously, to them, there was nothing odd in being asked to mail an official proclamation from their community’s government declaring today, July 1, Confederation’s 150th birthday, “Sir Robert Borden – Canada Day” in their town.
A few weeks ago, their Proclamation, that had to be approved at an official town council meeting and read, proudly I suspect, by Mayor Altomonte, arrived to Alison and me at our house in Kingston – you know, the one where a Canada 150 time capsule will be buried in a couple’s private garden, in front of a few friends and family and after a simple barbecue.
Suffice to say, it is probably about 600 words in length. It contains – and trust me I am not trumpeting myself, as I’m a Canadian, after all – detailed information about our eighth prime minister that even I didn’t know. And again, without being un-Canadian here, I do know my stuff on the lives and legacies of Canada’s 23 prime ministers.
So after I read Matawan’s Canada Day Proclamation two or three times, I called Karen at her office. Luckily she was at her desk. She immediately, when I told her my name, grew serious. “Mr. Milnes,” she said, “we are concerned that our Proclamation might not be totally accurate. Could you and Ms. Bogle carefully review it before it goes into your time capsule?”
She meant it.
I assured her it was not only accurate but that I was confident that most Canadians, even those with graduate degrees from the best Canadian universities, could not, from memory, list Borden’s accomplishments as she and her mayor had.
So I asked her both why she had put so much work into it, and where she found the information.
She seemed shocked that I would ask her why she had worked hard on this.
And then she matter-of-factly told me her research methods. Karen started with Wiki and, as she told me on the phone, when she learned that one of Canada’s late prime ministers, one I would suggest many Canadian students today couldn’t even name, had asserted, firmly, Canada’s independence, particularly as she told me, considering the thousands of young Canadians who had just given their lives in the bloody European bloodbath we call the First World War, she was even prouder.
Her town was a place where a great man, even by world and American standards, such as Robert Borden had lived.
Ever so briefly, in the grand scheme of things.
So that led her to keep researching. She studied Borden via the Canadian Encyclopedia online and then ever got to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography’s lengthy and detailed history of Borden.
And still she wasn’t done.
As she couldn’t spend days at work on the Borden Proclamation – she had a town to administer, after all – she worked, at home a few evenings, on her own time and dime for Canada and our collective big day.
Now, readers would be forgiven at this point in simply dismissing Karen of Matawan, her mayor, his council and even her entire town. A lot of Canadians, and in fairness until this winter-spring I might have been one of them, might have cynically and easily said Alison and I just got lucky.
Americans, they might say, particularly in the Trump era, don’t do things like that. They are not as friendly as we Canadians are, or variations on that theme.
But what Alison and I discovered through our letter-writing journey these past few revealing months – we’ve mailed something like 4,000 letters for our time capsule, if truth be told – is that there are hundreds of “Karens” and her mayor and town, around the world.
The Speaker of New Zealand’s historic Parliament is another. And like her, Mr. Speaker in that country is not likely a man I will ever meet. Nor, and I know my politics, can even I come up with a single political advantage to him for not only sending us, for a private citizen’s time capsule for Canada, a flag of his country’s that flew one day this year above his Parliament’s highest point.
And I also can’t see, politically at least, what he gets in that sense out of the fact that today, in far-away New Zealand, in honour of the 150th anniversary of Confederation in 1867, Canada’s flag right now is flying above New Zealand’s Parliament. And without being critical of anyone in Canada or on the Hill in Ottawa, can you imagine the possible hue and cry that might arise if Speaker Geoff Regan, in a gesture of friendship to a neighbour or nation across the sea, ordered another nation’s flag to be flown above the Peace Tower?
Until this winter-spring, I myself might have written a stinging column. On a light stand on Wellington Street, or on a temporary flag stand on the Hill, OK, but another country’s flag above “my” Peace Tower? No way.
But I digress.
So back to the story. In the U.K., in the community where General Wolfe – yes, that General Wolfe, from the Plains of Abraham – was born, they are having a community street festival for Canada. And before anyone jumps on me, understandably, we wrote to Montcalm’s hometown in France as well. And the enthusiasm for Canada from the council and clerk over in England was so obvious Alison and I were one day at the local dollar store. We spent about $40 on Canadian flags, banners, stickers and such and mailed them off at the town’s request. The mailing charges to the U.K. cost near the same, but Alison and I were so happy we didn’t care.
Still don’t.
And today, in at least one community in Ohio, and in many more in New York State’s Mohawk Valley, North America’s proud Indigenous Peoples are being honoured as towns and cities have officially declared it – again from receiving a letter from a pair of private citizens in Canada – Molly Brant or Tecumseh Days, and again, just like Karen did, clerks, mayors, councillors, took their job very seriously.
And when you pause for a moment, and think about, from an American perspective and not even considering either Canada or America’s shameful record regarding indigenous peoples, consider what the communities and their leaders have done for their neighbour called Canada, it is actually remarkable.
For in fact and regardless whether Brant and Tecumseh were indigenous or not, these Americans, to honour Canada, have put some serious hours on the research side, in public dollars raised from their local ratepayers, to publicly honour two historical figures who fought their nation. In different times and centuries, Brant and Tecumseh were loyal to the British Crown, not America.
So when I opened various Proclamations in the Brant-Tecumseh context, I realized we live, as a country, next door to some very special people. Peoples who know, whatever their politics, what friendship really means.
In New York City today, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you know, that “insignificant” place with a few minor paintings, they are not accepting donations for any Canadians who might visit them today upon entry. The Met, in fact, have declared today Canada Day in our honour.
And there is a pub in Ireland, in Dublin, in fact the oldest one in that storied land – established in 1198 – where the owner and their regulars are today offering special toasts to Canada and reading a few of Father of Confederation D’Arcy McGee’s – you know, the Irishman shot on Sparks Street in 1868 – poems for us.
Not for me and Alison.
But for all Canadians.
I almost forgot, there’s an elderly gentleman who lives in small town Vermont. He and his wife – I presume on the latter – they too took a letter and a private citizen’s Canada time capsule seriously. They went through their possessions and mailed off – paying for the stamps and such themselves as they are retired – a card with a message for Canada from the old guy and his two colleagues, signed by all three with a message for Canada on our 150th birthday on an old picture that, if I were the man, I’d still have in my basement, too.
The man in question is not famous today, but he had his moment in the sun something like 40 years ago. And when I say in the sun, I mean it.
So in my garden today will be buried, not for me but for Canada, a message from the entire crew of one of NASA’s Skylab missions.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting as, in all frankness as we Canadians sometimes do – and I used to do it myself – that we are more important or powerful or perfect than we are as a nation and people.
But what Alison and I have learned through letters and stamps is something we can only hope others will pause and consider today up here.
And I know I’m not wrong.
While the achievement of Sir John A. Macdonald, Cartier, McGee and Brown and others that we rightly should and are celebrating today, we all know Canada is far from perfect – just ask any Indigenous person.
Still can we not, at least for today, pause and give ourselves a quiet pat on the collective shoulder? Yes, we should, and must continue as a people to both face our mistakes of the past, present and the ones we will make for all time, but can’t we do that today?
And let’s be frank, and there are no politics or political motives in what I’m about to say because, honestly, I don’t think the situation – in broad strokes – would be much different no matter what party was in power anywhere in Canada.
Canada 150, definitely, has been no centennial year of legend and lore. The spirit and passion my wife and I – I was born in 1966 and Alison in 1967 – we grew up hearing about from our parents, teachers, uncles and aunts and friends who were older, hasn’t been in the air for Canada 150.
And that’s nobody’s fault. It is just the way it is.
We are a funny bunch, we Canadians. And I love us all the same.
But the reality is, whether we like it or not, and thanks to a time capsule that will be quietly buried in a Kingston backyard today, people around the world – from leaders to ordinary, so-called, citizens that Alison and I and most Canadians will never meet or contact again, they’ve captured that centennial year-like spirit Alison and – and I suspect all members of our generation – grew up hearing about.
And we Canadians, even if we tried, couldn’t now stop them from doing – again in only general terms – what we seemed unable to do ourselves this time out.
But you know what? And Alison and I will not be around to see it, but what I love about Canada, whatever our very real faults, is the fact I’m still confident that by 2067 and the bicentennial of what Macdonald and Cartier bequeathed us lucky people, we’ll have gotten it right – like they did in 1967 – when Canada turns 200.
You can count on that.
Happy Canada 150 Day, from Kingston. Alison and I now have to leave you as we have a time capsule to bury in front of 20 or so friends in our garden.
We’ve been looking forward to it since January and that first letter we mailed.
Both of us missed Centennial Year. But in a tiny way, thanks to so many people – good people, whatever their personal politics or how their nations operate – from across America and around the world — with some Canadians in the Time Capsule mix as well – Alison and I, in the confines of our backyard, now finally feel like the Canadians who remember 1967 must have.
And you know what? Our teachers and our parents, they weren’t making it up.
This is magical.
Alison and I also wanted to tell you about the nuclear powered American aircraft carrier, and we’ve been so busy I honestly can’t remember the ship’s name right now, that somewhere at sea or in port today, will be raising Canada’s flag. My guess is a ship like that has 4,000 or so American sailors on it today.
I suspect they are defying in their own navy’s protocols by doing it but, hey, that’s just what non-Canadians do for Canada when asked.
I think it is kind of nice.
But I really have to go.
A time capsule burial awaits Alison and I have to cut the lawn, pull up some Canadian weeds and do some running around as well.
This is a big day for us. It is, after all, our very first centennial day.
Don’t tell Alison this please as she’ll rightly brain me: She went to bed early the other night and I stayed up. I made a few calculations and, I think, and I didn’t even as I was doing it, spent $10,000 this winter-spring on stamps and such.
Canada Post can thank me later.
And you know what? (I know Alison is going to agree the moment our time capsule goes into the ground in our yard) it is the best money this couple has ever spent. Yes, it might mean I don’t buy that new barbecue I don’t really need. And yes, we might not go to Vermont camping this summer but after what we’ve learned, Alison and I would not change a thing.
Canada – and least according to the rest of the world and who are we to argue with them? – is worth our blowing the $10,000 we didn’t have. But don’t cry for us, we’re doing quite well. We’ll survive.
In fact, as Canadians, we already feel richer. And you couldn’t put a price tag on that.
But I really have to go.
Again, happy Canada Day.
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I probably never will.
But today, as my country marks the 150th anniversary of Confederation, I consider her a dear and valued friend.
You see, Ms. Wynne and countless others across the United States, and in some cases overseas, have reminded my wife, Alison, and I in recent months, how privileged we truly are as a people.
Karen is the town clerk in Matawan, a community of roughly 8,500 souls I doubt I’ll ever visit. Earlier this year, her mayor, Joseph Altomonte – I’ve never met him either – received a letter (snail mail) from my wife and I.
All she and the mayor knew from our letter was this: We were private citizens in Canada representing nobody but ourselves. Canada, she and her mayor were informed, was to about to mark 150 years of nationhood on July 1.
And a pair of ordinary citizens in Kingston, Ont., of whom she and her mayor had never heard, wanted their assistance. This couple, in honour of Canada 150, were creating a time capsule.
It would be buried in our garden in Kingston and hopefully – though we couldn’t guarantee it because we wouldn’t be around in 100 years – future Canadians would read her mayor’s message.
On the day Alison’s and my letter arrived at Matawan town hall, Karen and her mayor and his council colleagues froze. They gathered (I later learned) for a meeting and decided something I honestly think most of us Canadians wouldn’t understand.
They decided – not because of who I or my wife are – as I said, they’d never heard of us – that our request was important.
That it had very real meaning to them.
And, they, as a community, were honoured that two Canadians had asked their relatively tiny town to participate in their neighbour’s 150th anniversary celebrations.
So, Karen went to work.
Oh, I almost forgot, why had I written to Matawan? What possible connection to Canada could a place in Jersey like that have?
Art Milnes has received a collection of letters from people all over the world for a Time Capsule for Canada 150 that he plans to plant in his backyard July 1st.
Fair questions.
Matawan is a town where a young man from Nova Scotia went, for a year or two in the 19th century when he was unknown, to teach kids at the local school. He was 19. Late in life this man, not long before he died in Ottawa – where he is buried with a Canadian flag near his stone even today, reflected on his time in Matawan, N.J.
“There was a flourishing Literary Society of which I became a member,” he remembered fondly in the twilight of his life. “The people of Matawan whom I was brought into contact were highly educated and cultured. I have not seen the village since I left it in 1874. One of my pupils who had become a judge of the New Jersey Court of Appeal wrote to during the War; his younger brother, whom I met during a visit to the south a few years ago, gave me news of other pupils many of whom had passed away during the long interval. It is nearly 54 years since I left Matawan but I still hope to revisit that beautiful village of which I retain happy memories.”
The name of this Canadian who remembered “his” New Jersey town?
Sir Robert Borden.
Karen and her mayor had just learned from a pair of Canadians that their town was a place where a Canadian prime minister, a man who made history and whose country today is a member of the G7, had walked their streets more than a century ago.
This was important.
They were proud to learn that. Very proud.
So whether my wife and I were private citizens or a Canadian first couple or perhaps the leaders of a major Canadian corporation, mattered little to them.
Obviously, to them, there was nothing odd in being asked to mail an official proclamation from their community’s government declaring today, July 1, Confederation’s 150th birthday, “Sir Robert Borden – Canada Day” in their town.
A few weeks ago, their Proclamation, that had to be approved at an official town council meeting and read, proudly I suspect, by Mayor Altomonte, arrived to Alison and me at our house in Kingston – you know, the one where a Canada 150 time capsule will be buried in a couple’s private garden, in front of a few friends and family and after a simple barbecue.
Suffice to say, it is probably about 600 words in length. It contains – and trust me I am not trumpeting myself, as I’m a Canadian, after all – detailed information about our eighth prime minister that even I didn’t know. And again, without being un-Canadian here, I do know my stuff on the lives and legacies of Canada’s 23 prime ministers.
So after I read Matawan’s Canada Day Proclamation two or three times, I called Karen at her office. Luckily she was at her desk. She immediately, when I told her my name, grew serious. “Mr. Milnes,” she said, “we are concerned that our Proclamation might not be totally accurate. Could you and Ms. Bogle carefully review it before it goes into your time capsule?”
She meant it.
I assured her it was not only accurate but that I was confident that most Canadians, even those with graduate degrees from the best Canadian universities, could not, from memory, list Borden’s accomplishments as she and her mayor had.
So I asked her both why she had put so much work into it, and where she found the information.
She seemed shocked that I would ask her why she had worked hard on this.
And then she matter-of-factly told me her research methods. Karen started with Wiki and, as she told me on the phone, when she learned that one of Canada’s late prime ministers, one I would suggest many Canadian students today couldn’t even name, had asserted, firmly, Canada’s independence, particularly as she told me, considering the thousands of young Canadians who had just given their lives in the bloody European bloodbath we call the First World War, she was even prouder.
Her town was a place where a great man, even by world and American standards, such as Robert Borden had lived.
Ever so briefly, in the grand scheme of things.
So that led her to keep researching. She studied Borden via the Canadian Encyclopedia online and then ever got to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography’s lengthy and detailed history of Borden.
And still she wasn’t done.
As she couldn’t spend days at work on the Borden Proclamation – she had a town to administer, after all – she worked, at home a few evenings, on her own time and dime for Canada and our collective big day.
Now, readers would be forgiven at this point in simply dismissing Karen of Matawan, her mayor, his council and even her entire town. A lot of Canadians, and in fairness until this winter-spring I might have been one of them, might have cynically and easily said Alison and I just got lucky.
Americans, they might say, particularly in the Trump era, don’t do things like that. They are not as friendly as we Canadians are, or variations on that theme.
But what Alison and I discovered through our letter-writing journey these past few revealing months – we’ve mailed something like 4,000 letters for our time capsule, if truth be told – is that there are hundreds of “Karens” and her mayor and town, around the world.
The Speaker of New Zealand’s historic Parliament is another. And like her, Mr. Speaker in that country is not likely a man I will ever meet. Nor, and I know my politics, can even I come up with a single political advantage to him for not only sending us, for a private citizen’s time capsule for Canada, a flag of his country’s that flew one day this year above his Parliament’s highest point.
And I also can’t see, politically at least, what he gets in that sense out of the fact that today, in far-away New Zealand, in honour of the 150th anniversary of Confederation in 1867, Canada’s flag right now is flying above New Zealand’s Parliament. And without being critical of anyone in Canada or on the Hill in Ottawa, can you imagine the possible hue and cry that might arise if Speaker Geoff Regan, in a gesture of friendship to a neighbour or nation across the sea, ordered another nation’s flag to be flown above the Peace Tower?
Until this winter-spring, I myself might have written a stinging column. On a light stand on Wellington Street, or on a temporary flag stand on the Hill, OK, but another country’s flag above “my” Peace Tower? No way.
But I digress.
So back to the story. In the U.K., in the community where General Wolfe – yes, that General Wolfe, from the Plains of Abraham – was born, they are having a community street festival for Canada. And before anyone jumps on me, understandably, we wrote to Montcalm’s hometown in France as well. And the enthusiasm for Canada from the council and clerk over in England was so obvious Alison and I were one day at the local dollar store. We spent about $40 on Canadian flags, banners, stickers and such and mailed them off at the town’s request. The mailing charges to the U.K. cost near the same, but Alison and I were so happy we didn’t care.
Still don’t.
And today, in at least one community in Ohio, and in many more in New York State’s Mohawk Valley, North America’s proud Indigenous Peoples are being honoured as towns and cities have officially declared it – again from receiving a letter from a pair of private citizens in Canada – Molly Brant or Tecumseh Days, and again, just like Karen did, clerks, mayors, councillors, took their job very seriously.
And when you pause for a moment, and think about, from an American perspective and not even considering either Canada or America’s shameful record regarding indigenous peoples, consider what the communities and their leaders have done for their neighbour called Canada, it is actually remarkable.
For in fact and regardless whether Brant and Tecumseh were indigenous or not, these Americans, to honour Canada, have put some serious hours on the research side, in public dollars raised from their local ratepayers, to publicly honour two historical figures who fought their nation. In different times and centuries, Brant and Tecumseh were loyal to the British Crown, not America.
So when I opened various Proclamations in the Brant-Tecumseh context, I realized we live, as a country, next door to some very special people. Peoples who know, whatever their politics, what friendship really means.
In New York City today, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you know, that “insignificant” place with a few minor paintings, they are not accepting donations for any Canadians who might visit them today upon entry. The Met, in fact, have declared today Canada Day in our honour.
And there is a pub in Ireland, in Dublin, in fact the oldest one in that storied land – established in 1198 – where the owner and their regulars are today offering special toasts to Canada and reading a few of Father of Confederation D’Arcy McGee’s – you know, the Irishman shot on Sparks Street in 1868 – poems for us.
Not for me and Alison.
But for all Canadians.
I almost forgot, there’s an elderly gentleman who lives in small town Vermont. He and his wife – I presume on the latter – they too took a letter and a private citizen’s Canada time capsule seriously. They went through their possessions and mailed off – paying for the stamps and such themselves as they are retired – a card with a message for Canada from the old guy and his two colleagues, signed by all three with a message for Canada on our 150th birthday on an old picture that, if I were the man, I’d still have in my basement, too.
The man in question is not famous today, but he had his moment in the sun something like 40 years ago. And when I say in the sun, I mean it.
So in my garden today will be buried, not for me but for Canada, a message from the entire crew of one of NASA’s Skylab missions.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting as, in all frankness as we Canadians sometimes do – and I used to do it myself – that we are more important or powerful or perfect than we are as a nation and people.
But what Alison and I have learned through letters and stamps is something we can only hope others will pause and consider today up here.
And I know I’m not wrong.
While the achievement of Sir John A. Macdonald, Cartier, McGee and Brown and others that we rightly should and are celebrating today, we all know Canada is far from perfect – just ask any Indigenous person.
Still can we not, at least for today, pause and give ourselves a quiet pat on the collective shoulder? Yes, we should, and must continue as a people to both face our mistakes of the past, present and the ones we will make for all time, but can’t we do that today?
And let’s be frank, and there are no politics or political motives in what I’m about to say because, honestly, I don’t think the situation – in broad strokes – would be much different no matter what party was in power anywhere in Canada.
Canada 150, definitely, has been no centennial year of legend and lore. The spirit and passion my wife and I – I was born in 1966 and Alison in 1967 – we grew up hearing about from our parents, teachers, uncles and aunts and friends who were older, hasn’t been in the air for Canada 150.
And that’s nobody’s fault. It is just the way it is.
We are a funny bunch, we Canadians. And I love us all the same.
But the reality is, whether we like it or not, and thanks to a time capsule that will be quietly buried in a Kingston backyard today, people around the world – from leaders to ordinary, so-called, citizens that Alison and I and most Canadians will never meet or contact again, they’ve captured that centennial year-like spirit Alison and – and I suspect all members of our generation – grew up hearing about.
And we Canadians, even if we tried, couldn’t now stop them from doing – again in only general terms – what we seemed unable to do ourselves this time out.
But you know what? And Alison and I will not be around to see it, but what I love about Canada, whatever our very real faults, is the fact I’m still confident that by 2067 and the bicentennial of what Macdonald and Cartier bequeathed us lucky people, we’ll have gotten it right – like they did in 1967 – when Canada turns 200.
You can count on that.
Happy Canada 150 Day, from Kingston. Alison and I now have to leave you as we have a time capsule to bury in front of 20 or so friends in our garden.
We’ve been looking forward to it since January and that first letter we mailed.
Both of us missed Centennial Year. But in a tiny way, thanks to so many people – good people, whatever their personal politics or how their nations operate – from across America and around the world — with some Canadians in the Time Capsule mix as well – Alison and I, in the confines of our backyard, now finally feel like the Canadians who remember 1967 must have.
And you know what? Our teachers and our parents, they weren’t making it up.
This is magical.
Alison and I also wanted to tell you about the nuclear powered American aircraft carrier, and we’ve been so busy I honestly can’t remember the ship’s name right now, that somewhere at sea or in port today, will be raising Canada’s flag. My guess is a ship like that has 4,000 or so American sailors on it today.
I suspect they are defying in their own navy’s protocols by doing it but, hey, that’s just what non-Canadians do for Canada when asked.
I think it is kind of nice.
But I really have to go.
A time capsule burial awaits Alison and I have to cut the lawn, pull up some Canadian weeds and do some running around as well.
This is a big day for us. It is, after all, our very first centennial day.
Don’t tell Alison this please as she’ll rightly brain me: She went to bed early the other night and I stayed up. I made a few calculations and, I think, and I didn’t even as I was doing it, spent $10,000 this winter-spring on stamps and such.
Canada Post can thank me later.
And you know what? (I know Alison is going to agree the moment our time capsule goes into the ground in our yard) it is the best money this couple has ever spent. Yes, it might mean I don’t buy that new barbecue I don’t really need. And yes, we might not go to Vermont camping this summer but after what we’ve learned, Alison and I would not change a thing.
Canada – and least according to the rest of the world and who are we to argue with them? – is worth our blowing the $10,000 we didn’t have. But don’t cry for us, we’re doing quite well. We’ll survive.
In fact, as Canadians, we already feel richer. And you couldn’t put a price tag on that.
But I really have to go.
Again, happy Canada Day.
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