Cold one today, but also shopping day, so I’ll have to brave the cold if I want to catch the ten % discount on my groceries today. However, for now I occupy myself with indoor activities such as writing my daily entry.
Last night I found a good place for the fancy desk calendar that Tieneke sent me for my birthday. It stand opened to this weeks pages with a photo of a Dutch scene on the left page and the seven entry spaces for this week one (1) on the right hand page. I intend to make a simple entry for each day. This week’s scene shows a canal in the Friesian town of Dokkum [It is here that Bonfacius was killed for cutting down the sacred tree inca 800!] in winter. Hiltje and I drove through this town in 2000 when returning from Easter on Schiermonnikoog island and had some half cooked soup there, tasty but tough, Friesian style!
Saunders mentions the provincialism of the decades leading up to the 1967 centennial, something that struck me in 1959 when I started my life at an emigrant from Holland on the eleventh of August that year.
Yesterday’s Globe & Mail had a fine ‘folio’ article by Doug Saunders on Canada in and around 1967. He was born that year, as was my son John. Doug relates many facts and perspectives that are familiar to me as we lived as a young family in Toronto on Wellesley street east (108) I think in its only 2 bedroom apartment on the ground floor.
Saunders also fills in many social and political aspects that I was unaware of at the time as a newly minted father and graduate student in Civil at UoT. He mentions the provincialism of the decades leading up to the 1967 centennial, something that struck me in 1959 when I started my life at an emigrant from Holland on the eleventh of August that year.
I remember classifying Toronto for myself as an ‘over grown provincial town’ after I got to know it a bit. ‘Toronto the Blue’ competed with ‘Toronto the Good’ as title in those days, when politically it was ‘Tory Toronto’ until it became Liberal territory with the Trudeau sweep. It was also that year that Ina, my spouse at that time, and I became Canadian citizens since we wanted our soon to be born child to be a Canadian.
<8:44am, time to get ready for my first shopping trip!
<11:11pm, sign off.