IT'S ICE CREAM CONE DAY FOR THE UNRUH CLAN

We eat cones of ice cream on March 8 each year in tribute to my father. My brother Murray began this tradition a few years ago.

Ed Unruh loved ice cream. I was ten years old when he took me to a junior hockey game. On our walk home we stopped in at an ice cream parlour and he bought us each a cone. We had no sooner reached the corner of the block when he was finished his cone, looked at me and said, "That cone tastes like more," so we turned around and went back for a second cone. So we emphasize more. Kids can dip their own, and more than one.

He loved Ice Cream. It was an inexpensive treat in the old days. A triple scoop cost .25, yes, twenty-five cents. My mom worked the counter at Avondale Dairy one year which served the family well. Into his senior years when we visited one another and we were en route anywhere, ice cream signage caught his attention, and he would suggest that we stop. No one objected.

Edward Richard Unruh was my dad. Born to immigrant Mennonite refugees from Crimea, Ukraine in 1915 and bestowed with English given names to mark his new homeland.  Proudly Canadian, in 1942 my father enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force while living within a pacifist culture. I was an infant. He and mom raised three of us, all sons. He had acquired a grade eleven education but no skilled trade. He earned a living using his body. He was 5 feet six inches in height but in his youth and into his forties he was a strong man. After his post WWII departure from the prairies, he found employment in Ontario factories, staying with one company for well over forty years until his retirement. He worked on an assembly line at Anthes Imperial building furnaces in St. Catharines. His three sons grew up, received educations and were able to move forward. At about his forty year mark in the company, we three asked him, "Dad, why did you stay there doing that hard work for all those years?" His reply was, "I did it for my boys." He aspired to little more than being a good man, a good husband, a good father, a good worker and a good friend. He was a man with a simple faith in God. He read the Bible. He trusted preachers. He raised three boys who became preachers/missionaries. He loved us, and he loved our wives and he loved our children, and he loved his great-grandchildren.  His legacy entails far more than a love for ice cream.

Remembrance Day - my father - Edward Richard Unruh

Edward Richard Unruh - I honour my father today and his love for Canada, the country of his birth to parents who emigrated from Mennonite villages in Russian owned Ukraine during the 1800's. From within the Mennonite town of Hepburn, SK, which was predominantly pacifist by conviction, Dad stepped forward to join the Royal Canadian Air Force when I was a newborn. He returned home. My brothers and I were blessed to grow up with his influence in our lives. I am proud to remember my father and his comrades on the Remembrance Day and will forever be grateful for our freedoms that they preserved.

LEAVING A LEGACY - MAY THEY FIND US TO HAVE BEEN FAITHFUL

Both maternal and paternal sides of my heritage derive from a persecuted people group known as Mennonites who found refuge in Empress Catherine II's Russia and were permitted to establish themselves in colonies in Crimea. Stalin changed that. Researching my paternal ancestral tree has taught me that in every generation going back into the 1700’s, there was a missionary, a pastor, a church elder, a theologian/teacher. From a family of seven siblings living in Temir Bulat, Crimea in the late 1800’s my grandfather was one of three who emigrated to North America. Coming through the northern states to Saskatchewan where he settled with a new bride. In Hepburn, my father and I were born. I began my personal journey of faith when I was ten years of age. As I write in 2010, fifty seven and one half years have passed. I am more convinced today than I was as a boy that an exclusive trust in the Son of God is imperative. Further, the legacy of faith which I received has been nurtured far beyond a superficial institutional belief to something enduringly exceptional. I am convinced that I must leave my children and specially my grandchildren an example of faith and the prescription for making faith their own.

American recording vocalist Steve Green hit his stride during the 1980’s and one of his songs was ‘Find us Faithful.’ These lyrics speak my sentiments. I have linked two YouTube files where you can hear him singing this today, twenty-five years later, and also when he sang it as a young man. Of course the studio settings are a wee bit churchy and clichéd but appreciate this for the tune and the words.

Find Us Faithful - Steve Green
We're pilgrims on the journey
Of the narrow road
And those who've gone before us line the way
Cheering on the faithful, encouraging the weary
Their lives a stirring testament to God's sustaining grace

Surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses
Let us run the race not only for the prize
But as those who've gone before us
Let us leave to those behind us
The heritage of faithfulness passed on through godly lives

Chorus:
Oh may all who come behind us find us faithful
May the fire of our devotion light their way
May the footprints that we leave
Lead them to believe
And the lives we live inspire them to obey
Oh may all who come behind us find us faithful

After all our hopes and dreams have come and gone
And our children sift though all we've left behind
May the clues that they discover and the memories they uncover
Become the light that leads them to the road we each must find

Repeat Chorus

* Steve Green sings it for the Gaither Vocal Band
* Steve singing it as a younger man when the song was first introduced.
* A link to Steve Green’s Web Site and Foundation

Steve Green (born August 1, 1956 in Portland, Oregon) is a Contemporary Christian music singer notable for his vocal range (tenor) and flexible solo style. Over his twenty-five year career, Green has been honored as a four-time Grammy Award nominee, seven-time Dove Award winner, has had 13 No. 1 songs, and has sold over three million albums.

Low German Language, Grandma and Sugar Bread

I understand the unique dialect known as Plautdietsch, otherwise known as Low German. It is my lifelong regret that I cannot speak it. Here is how this came to be.

I knew her in the formative years of my childhood, my father’s mother, Katrina Loewen, my Grandma Unruh. We lived in the prairie town of Hepburn. Grandma and Grandpa lived in town having moved from their farm years earlier. They were now in their seventies. I surprise myself with the clarity of my recollection of that small house. During those years when I was three and four I was at her house a lot. My parents ran a coffee shop on the town’s main street. Inside Grandma’s back door one entered the kitchen which had a large wood burning stove. There was a small pantry on the right in which Grandma kept her jars of preserves, jams and much more. All of this was done during summer months in preparation for the long severe winters. I remember particularly the large Mason jars with white cooked chicken preserved in liquid. In the depth of winter this meat would be baked or roasted and one would never know it had spent so much time swimming in its Mason aquarium.

When I was at her home we talked together. She spoke the Low German dialect that all the townspeople spoke and she required that I speak to her in English. She wanted desperately to learn how to speak the dominant language in Canada long before mandated French/English bilingualism. While I liked anything Grandma Unruh made for me, I was a sucker for home baked bread with butter and white sugar sprinkled on top. She could keep me there for hours. As I fed my sweet tooth I heard and learned Plautdietsch but I never spoke it. Years later when I was twelve and thirteen, Grandma and Grandpa left their Hepburn home to live with us in Ontario. They were in their eighties then and Grandma still did not speak English.

What a privilege to have a second language, even one as uniquely peasant and appealing as Low German. No translation does justice to some of the nuances of this language when telling stories and sharing jokes.

Mennonite communities settled in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Canada using Low German in their religious services and communities. These people were largely ethnic Germans whose ancestors moved to newly acquired Russian territories in Ukraine before emigrating eventually to the Americas in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The type of Low German spoken in these communities and in the Midwest region of the United States has diverged since emigration. The survival of the language is tenuous in many places and has died out in some places where assimilation has occurred.

If you are interested:
* A Learning to Speak Plautdietsch Site:
* A Low German Grammar is a very helpful site
* Listen to a podcast called plautcast http://www.plautcast.com/
* Historical Society Site
* Elmer Reimer has produced a Plautdietsch New Testament in both written and spoken form, and both are available on the internet and the Biblegateway site and can be used simultaneously.
* Canada’s only low German radio station

Remembrance Day in Canada

A NEW LEARNING
It’s Remembrance Day in Canada. I will go to the local Cloverdale Cenotaph this morning. I feel a need this year to stand with others in tribute to my fallen countrymen in past wars. A TV journalist asked people yesterday how it felt to wear the red poppy and the predictable one word answers resulted – “proud.” Whenever I have travelled internationally I have been glad for the Canadian flag on my luggage and backpack. Other countries welcome us. I am compelled this morning to visit the Cenotaph because my father was in the Canadian Air Force during World War II. Coming from the town of Hepburn, Saskatchewan, a largely Mennonite community, and himself the youngest son of Mennonite immigrants from Ukraine, he stepped out of cultural pacifism to enlist. I am proud of him for that. I am. He never saw action overseas. He was assigned to aircraft maintenance and stationed in Vancouver, Gananoque and the Yukon. Christine’s father was an officer in the British Royal Navy and saw action at sea. Both of these men are gone now. During my adult years while Canada has been involved in conflicts overseas, conscription never required my personal investment. I and my children and now their children have grown up within the shelter of a freedom that was very costly. I acknowledge that with deep gratitude today. I am proud of my heritage and proud to be a Canadian.

I still think that the dated Molson sponsored "I Am Canadian" rant is an inspiring piece of Canadian culture and I treasure the words of our Canadian National Anthem.