25,553 Days Plus

I recently had a birthday, have lived through a lot of changes in my life, from just after the Second World War in Germany to the current year in Canada.

My young father had been a prisoner of war in Canada before he married my mother. I was born the year of the Berlin Airlift; my father grew up in that city, and although his mother wanted him to move back there, he declined. Both my parents feared another war in Europe, so when Canada began accepting German immigrants again, they chose to leave, partly because my father had good memories of Canada.

We left a small, modern city and moved to a not very modern farm where my father worked. Low pay and not very good housing, but milk and eggs for the children. Years later I wrote a fictionalized book of short stories about some of our experiences. My father found work at a better farm.

Our lives gradually improved to the point where, with help from locals, we bought our own house in a small town and both my parents worked. We never had a lot of money, but enough eventually for a second hand car and later a few return trips to Germany to visit relatives. During that time the world continued to change. The Canadian flag debate resulted in the red maple leaf flying over our public buildings. US president John Kennedy was assassinated while I was still in high school, and Martin Luther King when I was in university. The Vietnam War was on, students and other protested, hippies proliferated, and some of us talked about living in communes.

I married and taught school. We lived in southern Saskatchewan and in northern Saskatchewan. I had a child and we moved to the west coast for a while, then back to Saskatoon. The women’s movement was on (1970 a Royal Commission on the Status of Women tabled a report to eliminate sexual discrimination) and the War Measures Act was enforced in October 1970 with the FLQ crisis in Quebec. In August 1972 Rosemary Brown became the first black woman to be elected to a provincial legislature, in B.C.  She later (1975) ran for the leadership of the federal NDP and lost to Ed Broadbent. I wonder what would have happened if she’d won? In June 1976 MP’s voted not to reinstate the death penalty. In 1977 the Canadian Citizenship Act was amended to allow women to confer citizenship on their children. In 1979 Nellie Cournoyea became the first native/First Nations woman to lead a provincial territorial government.

I’ve had many different jobs in my life, from babysitting and waitressing, to teaching, working in advertising, arts administration, consulting, and writing. I’ve been enriched by working with and getting to know people from many different backgrounds and cultures.

In the 1980’s my marriage broke and I learned to live and prosper on my own. I’m lucky to have a wonderful son and grandson and their families. My brothers and their families are important to me as well, and my parents are still alive, in their nineties. I have great friends.

I continue to learn and grow through the ups and downs of life, and hope for a few more thousand days!