WE GOT IT AND DID IT - SENIOR MAN AND SENIOR WOMAN

The call back for the six of us for a commercial advertising campaign resulted surprisingly in Christine and me being selected as principals, but not Jeff and Gina and their two children. Fortunately later last week, Jeff and Gina landed another. Yet what an interesting few days Christine and I have had this week, Monday through Wednesday. This is our first foray into commercial ads. We received word late last week that we were selected as two of six principal cast members, having no idea what we were expected to do. However, we learned that our roles were as senior man and senior woman. There is no doubt that we qualify by appearance and chronology. We arrived for wardrobe fittings on Monday. Then Tuesday and Wednesday were shooting days on a large lakeside acreage with a waterfront heritage home.

This was an atypical production because the cast was much larger than is customary. There were forty extras,and the six principals. The production crew was enormous, ten trucks, scores of production people, camera personnel, grips and gaffers, electricians and lighting technicians, set, props and art decorators, hair and makeup stylists, attendants, catering team, and even portable toilet. In addition the client company had a number of marketing, writing, advertising professionals on hand watching monitors with the developing action and still visuals. It was a very hands-on production. Someone said that this crew was the size often seen on movie productions.

Once on site, and having gone to wardrobe for the right apparel, we sat with other cast in a cavernous barn on the property. This was the sheltered holding area, where there was a constant supply of good foods available. Upon arrival you could grab a sumptuous breakfast at the catering trailer. Lunch was mid afternoon on both days. Tables and chairs accommodated us all during the hours that we waited for a call. Calls came to the entire group sometimes and at other times just couples or several at a time. Sometimes they were still shots taken rapid fire and other times it was action. Christine and I were even called for an audio only for sound bites that might be used. Hours and hours of digital material will be edited into 60 second commercials and magazine and brochure pieces.

We were impressed that while sun, clouds and rain alternated throughout both days, the crew managed their windows of opportunity with expertise.

We finished each day by 9:00 or 9:30 PM and drove home so by 10:30 pm we were weary even though we had nothing particularly strenuous.

We meet some fantastic people, might even have established a casual acquaintance or two that we can revisit. We found the clients very affirming. It was a new and enjoyable experience. After the goodbyes as we walked down the dark lane to our car, we overheard the director on the handheld radios telling his crew to meet the next morning downtown and thanks for a great day.

A STAR WE ARE

Christine and I joined my son Jeff, his wife Gina and their two children for an audition last week. Yes, that's right. Gina regularly stars in TV commercials. She has an agent. This time, the product whatever it is, we are not told, wanted a family. They particularly want grandchildren interacting with grandparents. So we stood together with the camera on each of us in turn, stating our names and answering questions. There were scores of other families there for the same reason last week - $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
 Kadence is four years old. She stated her name and her age. She was asked who is the funny one in the family and she replied "me." And she is comical. 

Well it was considered highly unlikely by Christine and me, but we have all been called back. It is called a 'Call Back.' So tomorrow we go again so they can do another more in depth interview with us. Perhaps we actually have to do some role playing for the camera.

If on the outside chance we land the commercial, we will have to give them three days for shooting the film and we each get paid.

FATHER'S DAY 2011 - EDWARD RICHARD UNRUH

My dad was a good man. He was easy to love.

I can remember him being angry only a couple of times. Once it was with a man who was troubling my mother. Another time it was with me as a youth and I deserved his annoyance.

Edward was his name. Edward Richard. English names bestowed on a Mennonite boy born on the prairies of Canada. His father Cornelius, a more common Mennonite name broke with custom. Only the oldest son carried the father’s name and it was Anglicized as well to Neale. The middle brother was Harry. Three sons, the eldest five years older than the second and eleven years older than the youngest who was my dad.

Dad and mother Tina had three sons, me Ronald James (the eldest) and I am five years older than Murray Dennis and eleven years older than Neale Bryan. In the early years of his fatherhood Dad wanted us to be thoroughly Canadian, hampered in no way by any hang-ups derived from the heritage. Little could he know how important the connection with our family history would be to us when we were adults. He and Mom spoke the Low German dialect at home with which they themselves had been raised in their Saskatchewan homes of Hepburn and Waldheim. Since I was almost five years of age before Dad and Mom moved to Ontario, I was familiar with the dialect, understanding much of it but not able to speak it. For years I did not let on that I understood what they were saying when Mom and Dad spoke privately using Low German.

Our Dad never struck us as a complex man. He was intelligent, interests in politics, current affairs and sports. He completed grade eleven, had no skilled trade but worked at available manual jobs. He was enlisted in the Canadian Air Force, never saw overseas action but was posted in the Yukon. Following WWII, our Dad, a hard working man, began a lifetime of work in factories. He was in love with his wife, committed to the care and provision of his three children, appreciated his church and what the Sunday lesson gave him for the week ahead.

He was not an ambitious man. He respected himself yet he may not have understood how well he was liked by others. He was friendly, helpful, kind. He never owned very much yet he shared what he could. He was satisfied easily. A day’s work and a day’s pay, and supper meal, and a newspaper, a nice place to sit in the back yard, a car to move the family around, a couple of weeks of summer vacation, a small pension at the end of a long time with the company.  He expected no more than that. God was good to him.

I respected him very much. As a young man if I was tempted to do anything that was at all wicked, my esteem for him, held me back. Of course he was much younger then, and most of our memories are of him advanced in years, still with a wonderful sense of humour and a pleasant spirit and endearing love for our Mom. I miss him a great deal. He died at age 93 and that was three years ago.

June 19 Addendum: Father's Day came on Sunday and I was asked to preach at our local church. I chose to speak about "God the Father" and I used the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6. The prayer begins with "Our Father who is in heaven..." Christine had prepared a light lunch and my son's and daughter's families came. After dinner I took my five grandchildren for a long walk to the school yard to play on the apparatus and then to the corner store for a slurpy. We hung around until early evening snacking on lunch leftovers. We enjoyed a good family day. I like that. 

CANUCKS - PRIDE AND SHAME IN THE CITY

We did it in 1994 and again in 2011. We went to game seven of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. And our city's worst residents rioted in the streets.  Yep, again!

I watched the game with my son Jeff and his wife Gina and their two children who were multi-tasking with IPad and other toys. The tensions the three adults felt had intensified since Monday when our Canucks lost in Boston. We knew how important it would be to the team who scored the first goal. We had only put six goals past Tim Thomas in six games so the probabilities were against us. Nevertheless it was home crowd, home ice, tons of talent and desire. But Thomas and the big bad Bruins bombed the Canucks in their wins in Boston.

Canucks began the first period looking strong and determined, and THEN, the Bruins scored first. The noise went out of the building and the fright was on. Then in period 2, goals two and three and still no comeback by Canucks, and another B goal in period 3, and then it was over.  In our viewing room, dressed in our Canucks jerseys, we sat mostly silently all night, glanced at one another occasionally with resignation, and then it was over.

Yet near the end of the third period our Rogers Arena fans were on their feet waving their towels and cheering for their Canucks who did us proud all year long in so many ways, and then when it was over our players also skated around and applauded their fans. Then the two teams did the traditional congratulatory skateby and shook hands but even that had a classiness to it as players showed genuine appreciation for one another's performances. And Tim Thomas in one of the outstanding goalie displays ever through his playoffs won the Conn Smythe most valuable player of the series award. And our fans cheered him genuinely. And they applauded the Bruins as they received the Stanley Cup.

Then within minutes outside and downtown in Vancouver, where 100,000 had watched on giant screens, the vast majority of people moved to go home, but the drunken, easily led, selfish, low esteem, social misfits from 18-24 years of age, broke down barriers, burned cares, taunted police, overturned police cruisers, broke windows, looted stores, hurt themselves and shamed our city once again.

As disappointing as our Canucks loss was, I am far more disappointed that our city's reputation has been sullied across North America by these degenerates.

JUNE 4 IS TINA'S BIRTHDAY

She was born in 1919 in Montana, USA – June 4th. She was an infant when her father died suddenly. Mom’s parents had been homesteading and farming the vast rolling fields in pioneer conditions. One small wooden building served as both a house and a barn. Her name was Tina and she was a toddler when her mother Marie together with Mom’s four year old brother Pete, made a significant decision to leave Montana and come to Saskatchewan. Without much distance between her and the shocking grief she had born at the farm house, she was introduced to Abraham Willems who had also recently lost his wife. He was somewhat more desperate because he had six children for whom to care while farming a small plot of land. Marrying Marie was a practical resolution. Abraham’s children had adored their mother and still cherished her memory when this new woman entered their home. In the ensuing years Marie bore five more of Abraham’s children. The challenges for family life, poverty, tuberculosis, inter-family rivalry and tensions were factors that shaped the family and yet these were people of faith – ancient faith of a Mennonite variety that traced back to Crimea where Mennonite Colonies had found a haven in Catherine the Great’s Russia. Mom’s brother Pete was the odd brother, that is the maternal son, not wholly welcomed by the Willems sons, and decisively as a teenager he himself moved back to Minnesota where his mother’s family resided. It was from Minnesota that his father and uncles as young men had embarked upon that American dream of owning great tracts of land on the prairies of Montana. Pete’s departure was difficult for my mom and her mother Marie. Mom was a young teen and soon a young woman, who managed to complete a grade nine education before working as a domestic wherever she could. In time she met a dashing young man named Edward Richard Unruh who resided in Hepburn Saskatchewan. On June 12, she was married at age 22 and Edward was four years older than she. He had lost his hair by age eighteen yet what hair remained was dark brown and was complimented by a dark and classy thin mustache and dark eyebrows. Dad finished grade eleven, worked at odd jobs, ran a gas station, then called a service station and whistled while he worked. He was 26 when he and mom married, and I was born a year later, and when I was a baby Dad enlisted in the Canadian Air Force because Canada was at war. Following the war mom and dad operated a coffee shop in Hepburn, and then when mom was expecting her second child, they made the monumental move to the job opportunities of southern Ontario. Large factories and car plants and paper mills were installed there. Dad worked at the Ontario Paper Mills and Thompson Products (makers of GM parts) and finally at Anthes Imperial (furnace production) where he was employed on an assembly line for over 40 years.  Soon after the move to Ontario, my brother Murray was born. I was five years old. Murray and I waited another eleven years for our brother Neale to come along. In the years between Neale and Murray, mom miscarried and there was a rumour that she had lost a baby girl, perhaps even twins. Such matters were never discussed with children when we young or older. Mom’s skills were numerous and all of them hands on and practical. She cleaned other peoples’ homes. She sewed clothing and costumes for skating clubs. She cooked meals and specialty foods. She was always involved in church life. Dad was too but far more reserved and quiet. She began her own successful catering business preparing and serving extraordinary feasts for wealthy clients. She had the temperament and traits of a leader but she surprised herself when she became the president of a Christian women’s group with a province wide mandate. Throughout our childhood our parents took us to Sunday school and church and we were involved in assorted children’s and youth programs which influenced choices that we made. The outcome was that all three Unruh sons became trained and involved in Christian work, two as pastors and one as a missionary. Murray and I are retired now from pastoring and Neale completed his mission involvement and began his own retail business. Mom has been gone since 2007 when she was 88 years of age but June 4 marks the recollection of her birthday. When she died, her children and adult grandchildren stood with my Dad Edward and heard him say to her, “Goodbye Sweetheart. I’ll see you soon.” Six months later he peacefully left us as well. The legacy that these two ordinary people left is lived through the lives of an entire family now where children and grandchildren walk with God and live by God’s values.  

KAILYN IS A CHAMPION

Kailyn far in front - Secretariat

Can you see that small statured girl walking to the line at the rear of the crowd. That is my ten year old granddaughter Kailyn. It may appear like a mismatch, but hold on. It doesn't matter how quickly one walks to the starting line but how confidently, how sure of one's own ability. I am sure that Kailyn had a better idea of what she could capably do than I did as I stood high in the bleachers ready to cheer her on. I could kick myself now for leaving too early. But I was there when she ran the 100 m. The gun went off and in the distance to the left I could see her. She looked like she had a good start and was with the others. But something happened about fifteen of her mini-strides into that race. Some afterburners kicked in and at 25 m she was in the lead. We were standing at the 3/4 marker and we could see that at the 1/2 point, Kailyn was three metres in front of the nearest runners. She came tearing past us, eyes riveted on the finish line, and she was now eight metres ahead of everyone. She blasted the field. She was first!

Kailyn is our Winner

Well she did that in the 200 m as well. First!!!!! Yes, I know everyone gets a ribbon. Everyone is important, and she is First. I am so amazed and so happy for her and so proud that she lets me hug her. Wow! 

She finished third in the 4X100 relay, eighth in the 800 m. Sprinting is her strength.

EASTER SUNDAY 2011

It is Easter Sunday morning. There are so many fine paintings from which to choose one that depicts the the intelligent movement from conjecture and hypothesis to conviction and faith. Many great paintings illustrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Most show Christ with scarred hands outstretched, or the risen Christ standing outside the now empty tomb, or otherwise revealing his victory over the grave and death. Perhaps no artist has captured the bewilderment and the emotion associated with human intellect coming to terms with the truth of Jesus' supernatural identity than this beautiful painting by Caravaggio called “Doubting Thomas.” It is an outstanding piece. Caravaggio makes flesh come to life. He brilliantly and dramatically stages the scene. This is Christ living and breathing despite his mortal and still open wounds, standing with his disciples eye to eye. Thomas had expressed his doubt about the report of the other disciples that Jesus was alive again. He said he would not believe unless he himself touched Jesus' wound, actually put his finger in Jesus' gaping side wound. Jesus permitted Thomas to do this, and in this moment, Thomas, astounded and convinced said, "My Lord and My God."

Caravaggio lived from 1573 – 1610. His Christ lives forever. And his visualized victory here is shared. The promise to us is this. Whoever believes in him will not utterly perish but will have everlasting life. 

ICE CREAM CONE DAY - A DELIGHTFUL WAY TO HONOUR MY DAD

Jayden better known as JJ

All of us except Cari the photographer

Ice Cream Selection March 8th, Dad's B-Day

We did it. We honoured Great Grandpa Edward Unruh. Died 3 years ago, Today would have been his birthday, No. 96.


He was an ice cream cone lover and he taught us enjoy it too. One cone was never enough.

This is cone number 8

Ryan took the prize. Ice cream was the main course today, and then savouries, following by, you guessed it, DESSERT.

Kadence is the youngest -

Kadence has tiger tail in her cone.
 
Kailyn is her older cousin and she teaches Kadence many things. 

Kailyn is the oldest G-Kid

 

Nana and Papa and JJ, Kadence, Kale, Ryan, and Kailyn

Papa topping it up for JJ

My Dad, Edward Richard Unruh

Dad, we loved remembering your Birthday tonight. We thanked God for you, and we sang happy Birthday to you.

And best of all, my brother Murray and his family and grandchildren did this in St.Catharines, and my brother Neale and his family did this in Dorchester, ON

Yours Truly

A Cross Canada Celebration!

ICE CREAM CONE DAY

Heh, dear family, welcome to Ice Cream Cone Day.

It's a tradition in our family. My father, Edward, was 93 years old when he passed away three years ago. following the memorial service my brother Murray gathered us all at his home. He and Diane spread ice cream flavours across the table. My dad's children, grandchildren and greatchildren helped themselves to cones of ice cream and more than one. That became the start of our now annual tradition. My grandchildren have been excited for weeks waiting for this. For our evening meal in Western Canada, we will begin with Ice Cream, as much as we want, and then we will enjoy some savories, and perhaps a dessert cone after that.

Grandpa Unruh was an established ice cream lover. One small cone always tasted like one more to him and if we were with him, that became the biggest treat - a gigantic splurge of pleasure. Having more than one cone today is playing by Grandpa's rules as my daughter put it.

So, today, although I and my two brothers and their families live in Surrey, British Columbia, St. Catharines, Ontario; and London, Ontario, we are all filling our cones and lifting them in a salute to Grandpa Unruh. I loved you very much Dad, even more than the ice cream.

New Zealand and Australia and South Pacific Islands

Christine and I have just returned from a trip of a lifetime for us, exploring parts of New Zealand and sampling Australia and visiting islands like Fiji and Vanuatu. We count ourselves privileged to have been able to travel around the globe, specially into the heat of summer down under and away from the cool of our BC winter. I bring back hundreds of photos of exotic places and splendid people that I will enjoy turning into paintings on canvas. Ours was only a three week trip but it has brought us much pleasure.