Saturday, November 11, 2006

Remembering Bruno

It is of course Remembrance Day and I woke from a particularly moving dream, which included my family and the family of a good friend.

My kids were young and I was walking with them and their mother Karen and we passed a little nondescript gray unpainted house. In the window I noticed Brigitte, Bruno’s wife, wearing a brilliant orange colored dress and bustling about her chores. We had come to visit them.

Her flower garden was filled with multicolored roses, and there was one display set up to look like a Remembrance Day wreath, a pink cross with black flowers at the periphery of the arms.

When we came in Bruno was just coming home from work, all smiles and we had an impromptu lunch, adults and children all toasting our reunion with fruit juices and non-alcoholic beverages. At one point, Bruno appeared to offer Brigitte a glass of home made wine, a light milky rose in color, and she motioned for him to offer me one. In the old days, it would have been let the wine flow, but in the dream I declined. It seemed fitting not to drink, as the offering of wine was made especially to his wife.

Their house was situated in a grassy field in the midst of a city, but from a certain vantage point, all one could see were what looked like farm buildings and it seemed we were out in the country. It was a one-story house, more like a long shed but immaculately clean and roomy inside with large windows and shining with the spirit of those who lived inside, sort of like a Quaker home. The place seemed to be rented from a landlord who lived above in a more luxurious mansion, and as I explored I saw a huge garage filled with expensive older foreign cars, like Bentleys, Mercedes and Jaguars. It seemed to be a business that had rented out the smaller house to Bruno’s family.

As we all sat around the table, I tried to explain how I wished I could have provided such a beautiful surrounding for my own family. And then, I began explaining to them how much I regretted the loss of my good friend Bruno Castellan, who although there in the dream, actually died from cancer at the age of 40, leaving behind his wife and 4 children. Tears began to well up with huge emotions, and I could not find the words to describe the loss of such an important person in my life.

When I woke from this dream, I lay there for a long while still savoring the emotions that the dream awoke in me. How much we take for granted, and how quickly the beautiful things in our lives vanish like mist!

Friday, November 10, 2006

The Day Before Remembrance Day

It is the day before Remembrance Day and this morning on CBC radio host Shelly Soames played a BBC radio recording of a nightingale singing in the English countryside during the 2nd World War. It was a crystal clear recording of the intricate patterns the birdsong makes done for a nature program but in the background, the steady drone of bombers taking off from a nearby RAF base could be heard, “A stark reminder of the contrast between peace and war”, as the host remarked!

I had just got up to get ready for work but stood transfixed as I listened to the complete piece, which probably lasted no more than 3 minutes. I remembered driving my sons and my brother Ken back to Winnipeg in 2003 to attend mom’s funeral, and taking the boys to visit the military graves where my father’s headstone stands. The inscription says he was a gunner in the army but when I was a boy, he told me he was in the signals corps.

He said that he and friend got drunk one night in Toronto, and when they woke up the next morning, they were in the army.

He refused to talk about the war, other than to say his nickname was “Flash”, because when the bombing started, he was the first one to flash behind a rock. Occasionally and after a few drinks he would gross us out by turning up sharp fragments of what he told us were bullets under the skin of his arm. I am not sure to this day what they were, but most likely bone or cartilage.

Like many veterans, my father seemed to be haunted by the past, and as we children grew older, he turned to drinking and was drunk more often than not. Along with drinking came the anger, and he was not a pleasant person to be around when he was angry. As children, all we could see was that he was getting angry for no reason, but we knew little of the circumstances of his struggle to survive and support a family of 8 children.

He was a gifted violinist and when we were younger he would often play at home, but when I was about 12 he pawned his violin and we never heard him play again, except once when he was admitted to Deer Lodge Hospital and astounded the whole family by playing the piano in the lounge. None of us knew he could play as we never had a piano at home and he didn’t bother to tell us.

What happened in those few years on the European front, that slowly took the peace and happiness from my father’s heart and replaced it with bitterness and deep regret? I will never know for sure, but I feel it is directly connected with what my father experienced during those war years.