Life in General

Happy New Year!
That’s right. Today is the first Sunday of Advent. For those of us who identify as Christians, today marks the beginning of our calendar year.

It’s Remembrance Day. On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of each year we stop everything we are doing and we remember. We even have a symbol, the poppy, which is meant to help us to remember.

I’m gonna be honest.
I sheepishly need to confess that I am a bandwagon jumper and currently caught up in Blue Jays fever.

My little girl, the one I walked to her first day of kindergarten with just yesterday (it seems), will jump on the subway tomorrow morning and head off to her new school.

I didn’t think she even knew who I was. After all, she’s lived all over the world and has seen and done everything. Everyone who is anyone in The Salvation Army world knows her name.

I was a friend of her husband Commissioner Stanley Walter. We worked together when I was director of Friendship Room and then Gateway. He was our accountant in his retirement. He came to work every week in his SA uniform, smiled at everyone, did his 4 hour per week job more efficiently than any form of accounting I’ve ever experienced, updated me on our financial situation, gave me a word of encouragement and/or constructive critique, and left. I loved him and was deeply saddened when he told me he was sick and wouldn’t be back. In 2004 I quietly sat in the backseat at his funeral to pay my respects, didn’t talk to a soul, and left. I didn’t even bring greetings to his grieving wife, not wanting to interrupt her grief and thinking she had no idea who I was anyways.