Memory lane

There was a new person at church today, sitting in the front row of the songsters. She's been there a few weeks, apparently, but this is the first time she and I have been there at the same time.

I recognized her immediately as Helen's mom, but I couldn't remember her name until I asked my MIL (since Helen is now married and her maiden name wouldn't come quickly to mind.) Still, I knew where I knew her from, and when she spotted me, she recognized me, too.

Twenty-one years ago, I went to my first Salvation Army Music Camp at Roblin Lake camp, not far from Kingston. I was living in Peterborough at the time. I sat in the front row of the vocal group, which met in the main lounging area of the conference centre at the camp. The couches had been moved aside for music camp, so we could set up chairs in rows. It was not my first experience with choral singing. My dad ran a singing company (read: youth choir) at Winnipeg Citadel when I was six, and I was involved in the singing company at Peterborough Temple, too, even though my official corps was Peterborough South - a small outreach corps that died a few years after my parents were moved out of it. Though the leaders of those singing companies were decent musicians, Mrs. Watkins was the first real formally-trained singer I ever had as a leader.

There are choruses I learned at that camp that I still remember and hum to myself from time to time. One in particular has always stayed with me. It's a paraphrase of the verses from Proverbs: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not unto your own understanding. Acknowledge him in all your ways, and he shall direct your paths." With her chorus, we did it as a round, a pretty, flowing melody with an easy broken-chord accompaniment that even now, two decades later, I could probably reproduce on the piano without too much work. I remember being told I was a soprano, and learning the melody line, but I also remember singing along with the altos whenever I could get away with it. I'm certain she knew, and let me. I was an avid student, and you don't discourage those from illicit participation unless you absolutely must.

It was she whose eyes lit up when the announcement came over the camp P.A. that I should come to the camp office for a telephone call. I got up so fast my chair fell over backwards. My little sister had just been born, and my dad called the camp to tell me. She was kind, mothering, and talked like my grandmother, only moreso - she had been in Canada for less time than my Nana. I followed her around like a puppy, struck with a bad case of hero-worship, as girls that age often do. With my mother so busy and my other relatives so far away (Hamilton, St. Catharines, and my aunt in Sudbury at the time) I needed someone to look up to like that.

Today, she said hello without calling me by name, admired my daughter, and then moved on. It was that five minutes at the beginning of the service where people get up to greet each other. I'm not sure if it was casual recognition of a familiar face, or if she knew immediately who I was. Either way, she probably asked her daughter later and figured it out.

These types of encounters are happening with increasing frequency recently. It's partly because the Army is a small world unto itself, and the people who were important to me in it are not that widely separated by time or space. I also like to think there's some serendipity in it.

Attention stress_kitten

I summarized the key points of the BC teachers' strike in the canpolitik community. So far, the comments are mostly positive. Only one person trotted out the three talking points of any anti-teacher-strike campaign: 1) don't care about the kids, 2) trying to get more money (as though that automatically makes them horrible people) and 3) teaching bad lessons about breaking the law when it suits them to the kids. There have been a few other comments that suggested some lack of sympathy with the methods employed, while still expressing some sympathy for the issues faced. I can handle that. I believe that as a society, we need to move away from antagonistic employer/union relationships. I also believe that when the employer is being antagonistic, it's sometimes necessary to fight fire with fire.