PALM SUNDAY 2020 AMID COVID-19

It has been as uncommon a Palm Sunday as I can recall. Born during WWII, my memory doesn’t hold a recollection of what must surely have been an atypical Palm Sunday or two. Palm Sundays that I remember as a child embraced colour. Flowers embellished the front of the church. It was a celebrative ambiance. Women wore stylish hats and pastel shaded attire to church. Those were days when men and boys wore suits, shirts and ties to church, and it was standard and it felt respectable. In the afternoon our family would drive to Niagara Falls where we would walk through the Floral Showhouse to enjoy orchids and tropical flowers. 

Christine remembers Palm Sunday of her childhood in Britain with a song. Who would have guessed? I’m facetious. Her life and career has been music. “Hosanna, loud hosanna, the little children sang, through pillared court and temple the lovely anthem rang. To Jesus, who had blessed them close folded to his breast, the children sang their praises, the simplest and the best.” She remembers waiving palm fronds or other branches. 

Perhaps again today our modest, isolated at home worship will be the simplest and the best adoration we can possibly offer to our Saviour. We know the outward adornment doesn’t count for much when God is looking at our hearts. Today, may the whole multitude of Christ’s disciples worldwide rejoice and praise God with loud voices for all of his mighty works and may we say, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the LORD! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!

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.

A Pink Wedding – My Mom and Dad

It was 1941. The war was on in Europe. Who knew what the future would bring. Mom was in love with Dad. He was the youngest son in a respected church going family. He played hockey and ball on local teams. He completed grade eleven before beginning work at various jobs in the community. Then he owned and operated a gas station, well the one and only gas station in Hepburn. His brother Harry owned the local hardware store. His father was the town Reeve. Dad, Edward by name and known as Eddie, was a debonair man, prematurely bald, with a manicured pencil mustache. He whistled everywhere he walked. Church was not on his priority list. For that reason, when Mom fell for him, the counsel she received was cautious.

Mom had worked ever since she was a teenager. Compelled to work for the sake of the family she had to end school after grade 9. She always regretted this and bore a sense of educational inferiority through her adult years. It was against the general will of the Christian community for her as a committed Christian to marry someone who had not yet settled eternal matters with God as far as anyone knew. Dad and Mom loved each other. He was 26 years of age and Mom was 22. So on June 12, 1941 Edward Unruh and Tina (Doerksen) Willems exchanged wedding vows. Mom couldn’t afford a traditional wedding dress, white and clearly sanctified. She wore pink and she wore a hat. They honeymooned in Saskatoon. They were very happy.

Ed and Tina wasted little time in beginning a family which began with me, firstborn, on Sunday, September 13, 1942. WWII was raging and Hepburn’s inhabitants were primarily Mennonite people with a pacifist position with regard to conflict. They would be exempt as conscientious objectors. Dad was not bound by such religious strictures. My father had already made up his mind that he was a Canadian and he bore responsibility for the nation into which he was born and into which his child was born. Against the predictable community behaviour he and a handful of young townsmen enlisted. Dad joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and Mom became a war bride who would spend much of the next years on her own. Dad was never shipped overseas. When he was sent to Gananoque, Ontario, Mom was able to accompany him. When he was sent to White Horse for an extended time, she felt his absence. They would remain in love and together for 66 years.

Photos:
• Mom in her wedding dress and hat June 12, 1941
• Mom and me in the Hepburn Central Office and residence where mom and dad operated the switchboard.

The Memory Hole

A NEW LEARNING

A memory hole is a term applied to the deliberate concealment of elimination of information. It refers to that place where information is consigned when someone does not want it to be known. It is commonly agreed that the expression derived from the George Orwell novel ‘1984’. During World War II, the author and broadcaster Eric Blair whose pen name was George Orwell, worked for the BBC’s Eastern Service. This excerpted passage from his novel “1984” is believed to have been an allusion to his tenure at the BBC where classified or secret or damaging documents were immediately destroyed.

“In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.” - George Orwell, 1984

Whether or not BBC had such a provision as Big Brother did, the notion points in contrast to the severe liability of electronic messaging today. Many a time we have wished for a memory hole. We can buy shredders for paper but we don’t have an electronic e-equivalent. Not only can the involuntary click of the enter button send a dispatch on its irretrievable trip to the recipient’s inbox before it has been proofed or refined or discarded altogether, but once sent or posted, our e-stuff is not recyclable. It is often permanent. You can purge your own system but not someone else’s and certainly not the memory banks of twitter or Facebook and other networking sites. There are vestiges of your communications floating out there accessible by Search tools.

If you, like Christine and me, have been journaling in paper journals for years, do you ever consider what your children will think when they read some of your recorded rants? Christine has trashed some of hers. I need to yet they serve as resource if I get enough resolve to write some real memoirs. That’s why my blogged memoirs are as opaque as possible, so they don’t return to haunt me or someone else.