A fellow I know named Dan died last week.

I didn’t really know him well enough to be able to write, “My friend Dan died last week,” but I knew Dan just well enough – and knew just well enough of Dan – that I was sorry to hear of his passing.

Part of my world involves writing a weekly newsletter for a Rotary Club in Ottawa. It’s a project I’ve been doing for about a dozen years and now more than 500 issues, even though I haven’t actually been a member of the Club for several years.

But while I was a member, one of the regulars I could count on seeing every single week was one of the Club’s older members, Dan Darling.

By the time I actually joined the Club, Dan’s membership highlights were spoken of in the past tense… he had been Club President; he had been heavily involved in the fund raising work that led to the building of Ottawa’s ROTEL; he was this… he did that. A long time ago.

But it was something else Dan did in the past – outside of his Rotary activity – that made him, to me, a pretty special kind of guy. On June 6, 1944, as a member of the Stormont-Dundas-Glengarry (SDG) Highlanders, Dan was one of thousands of young Canadian men who plunged from the front ramps of landing craft into the shallow English Channel waters off a patch of Normandy shoreline that had been given the designation Juno.
For the next few days, he and his colleagues pushed inland from the heavily defended beach until shortly after D-Day when a small group – Dan and a few friends – were surprised by a hidden German machine gunner. In a single well-aimed burst that was directed at the young Canadians, Dan lost a couple of his buddies instantly and he himself caught, as he was always rather flippantly to describe it, “three bullets in the tummy”.

That was the end of Dan’s war, but not of his memories.

By the time I joined the Club, Dan was pretty well the owner of any of any annual November 11th services and reminiscences that were held at the Club’s weekly luncheon. And as the world came to observe the 50th anniversary of the landings in 1994, Dan was front and centre in a great many of the activities that marked the Ottawa memorials to Canada’s role that day. He marched or rode in the parades of aging veterans; he spoke at local schools; he travelled to Normandy to soak in the wash of French gratitude that was so generously poured over the D-Day veterans, and no doubt he told and retold the story of his “three bullets in the tummy”, always with the tearful aside that he was the lucky one of his group. His story was also featured in the 50th anniversary commemorative edition of Time Magazine. Or maybe it was Life. It was certainly big and glossy. But there was Dan, and there, too, was his story. An accompanying photo shows him looking off about a million miles away, back across that same Channel as he stood again on the strip of beach forevermore called Juno, fifty years after he last was there. Lest We Forget.

Beyond the tears, one of Dan’s happiest wartime stories, which he also never tired of telling the Club, was of sweeping his lifelong love, Connie, off her feet the first time they met and he had to prove to her by displaying his identity disks that he really was a man named “Darling”.

Dan gradually had to stop being an active member of the Club. It was just too difficult to get himself out to its distant location every week. I heard that he had taken up residence in a rest home. As an Honorary Member, he still received the Club newsletter and still showed up once in a while escorted by one or another of the Club’s old-timers. While I was Club Secretary, I used to make sure that the annual letters went out to all the Club’s Honorary members telling them that the Club had voted to continue their status as Honorary members. There is something in the Rotary constitution that requires it. I was later told in a quiet aside by a close friend of Dan’s that what was to us an innocuous little bit of administration really meant a lot to Dan. It told him that not only was he not forgotten, he was still held in the esteem of “Honorary” member. Some days I wonder if the Club still does that for its Honorary members. And if not, why not?

Some of the Club’s younger members, I suspect, were just barely tolerant of the repetition of the same old stories whenever Dan came for lunch, and I count myself among them on those busier days when the Club’s business made for a pretty full agenda and thanks, Dan, that sounds terrific but we don’t really have time just now to hear all about the “Charity Players” latest old-age-home performance… but that’s often the way of it too, in a world of business types who sometimes – a little too quickly – just want to move on.

But Dan would tell his story, at his own pace and with all of the details. And without even having realized it at the time, we all left the luncheon a tiny bit richer for having shared the experience one more time. And I know now that if anyone could be said to have earned the right and the respect to be heard as many times as he wanted, it was Dan.

It saddens me a little to realize as I write this that I don’t even know if Connie is still alive or whether she was mentioned in Dan’s obituary in his local newspaper with the note, “Pre-deceased by…”

But today as I recall the little I knew of Dan, I like to think that there’s a forever SDG pub somewhere up there, and that he is once again in the happy company of his D-Day buddies, once again in the full flower of eager youth. And as sure as that pub exists, Dan has just half emptied his glass with his very first pull and thumped it back down on the table. He’s just on the verge of spotting Connie once again for the very first time, but before that happens he has already started in on another in what will be an infinite number of re-tellings of the day he caught those “three bullets in the tummy”.

Rest in Peace, Dan. Thank you.

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We now return you to our regular whining.

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Here’s a brief note for anyone wondering if Windows Vista is a worthy upgrade. I have two thoughts based on recent personal experiences.

1. There may come a day when I have high praise for MicroSoft’s watching out for all of our best interests by introducing a new version of Windows every time it rains in Vancouver, and on most days, I really wouldn’t wish ill on anyone. But at the moment I’m leaning more towards thinking if I hear that Bill Gates had a wolverine burst from the underbrush near his bazillion dollar mansion on the shores of Lake Washington and I hear that it chewed his leg off, I will not be too upset. Two legs are just too good for the megalomaniac who has foisted Windows Vista on a public that neither wanted nor needed it.

2. You know that “Security” commercial from that hilarious “Hello, I’m a Mac…” and “I’m a PC” series where “PC” is backed up by a tall, sunglasses-wearing bodyguard type who interrupts every single phrase uttered by both to say something like, “Mac has just issued a salutation; cancel or allow?” And PC goes on to say that he is populated with the new Windows Vista and its security requires authorization of every single thing you do…? Well, up until I started driving Windows Vista on my PC, I had always thought that commercial was an hilarious exaggeration. Now I realize it’s a documentary.

‘Nuff said about that.

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News on the March!

Stop the presses!

“Affordable housing for seniors means housing they can afford” (Charlottetown Guardian, August 13)

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And in this week’s dripping-with-irony news (“Love Demonstrated Ministries”???), call this, “What the #$@% is the MATTER with people?!”:

“BANQUETE, Texas - Authorities charged the director of a Christian boot camp and an employee with dragging a 15-year-old girl behind a van after she fell behind the group during a morning run. Charles Eugene Flowers and Stephanie Bassitt of San Antonio-based Love Demonstrated Ministries, a 32-day boot camp for at-risk teens, are accused of tying the girl to the van with a rope June 12 and dragging her, according to an arrest affidavit filed Wednesday.” (Everywhere, August 10)

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But there’s good news out there too!

Somewhere.

I’m sure of it.

Let me know if you find some.

À la prochaine.

Sloooooooooow news week. Feeling good; not much lately to induce a rant.

So time for a scintillating movie review. (The review being “scintillating”, that is. The movie, as will quickly become apparent, less so.)

Here is a list of things that the researchers, writers and producers of the movie “Flyboys” apparently discovered about the history of aerial combat in WWI that somehow escaped every other person on the face of the earth who chose to explore the subject, including the authors of a few first-person biographies, who were actual WWI pilots – Canadian Billy Bishop with “The Courage of the Early Morning”, American Eddie Rickenbacker with “Fighting the Flying Circus”, and the UK’s James Norman Hall and Charles Nordhoff’s’ “Falcons of France” leap immediately to mind, without even my touching the Google button. (As an aside, Hall and Nordhoff also penned a few other works, not about World War I but including this one for which they might even be better known than for “Falcons of France”.)

At this point, I’d warn “spoilers”, but that would be to suggest somehow that further spoiling is possible of something that already reminds the casual viewer of a picnic of cheese sandwiches and cooked chicken left for three weeks in the summer sun. In a metal box. So let me instead warn, “Lots of ‘Flyboys’ plot revelations follow.”

The War in the Air 1914 – 1918, as viewers of “Flyboys” saw it:

1. Apparently, the appearance of “Based on a true story” at the start of a movie can be as tenuous a link to the truth as, “There was a World War I; some people flew airplanes in it.”

2. After fledgling pilots receive just a few hours of rudimentary training – and that at the airdrome where they arrived having never so much as seen an aircraft outside of a flickering theatre newsreel – at the first announcement of an alert, fully a dozen or so of them are capable of leaping into their respective cockpits, launching themselves into the air in a squadron take-off -- all doing the same thing at the same time, and all the while maintaining a scant few feet of separation while climbing at precisely the same rate and angle of lift so as to arrive at their cruising altitude fully assembled in a beautifully constructed “V” formation.

3. Sitting behind a roaring seven-cylinder rotary engine, the pilot of an open-cockpit World War I aircraft can communicate perfectly well with another colleague in the air – in a separate airplane – simply by shouting at him.

4. The same German pilot who mercilessly machine guns a downed American pilot standing on the ground waving to signal that he is unhurt will shortly thereafter gallantly refuse to shoot down another American pilot who has failed to unjam his machine gun.

5. All that has to happen for large twin-engined World War I bombers to be devastatingly accurate with their vast quantities of wing-slung bombs is for their fighter escort to get them to their destination. At that point, they will release their bombs and not a single one will miss the target.

6. A typical young French woman during this period in history who lives a couple miles from the Western Front in a farmhouse while raising three young children apparently can readily find all the food they ever seem to need, all the while looking like a supermodel with fantastic teeth and a superb command of how to use (not to mention having a seemingly inexhaustible supply of) lipstick, eye shadow, shampoo, conditioner and a shape-enhancing peasant wardrobe.

7. An American pilot in the Lafayette Escadrille always has instant access to a two-seater airplane that he could commandeer in order to fly a few miles to visit the aforementioned French supermodel, and from there take her up for a pleasant joy ride while enemy aircraft and anti-aircraft gunners, always respectful of young love, leave them blissfully alone as they soar over lush green farmland curiously untouched by almost four years of trench warfare and literally millions of artillery explosions.

8. An entire German army advance, complete with several of the house-sized tanks of the day, will, as it draws progressively closer to the French supermodel’s farmhouse, only become audible to the supermodel when she happens to glance out her window and sees several hundred soldiers in field-grey uniforms and a half dozen land battleships moving across a field directly toward her. She will then resort to the supermodel’s first art of defence against an advancing enemy army. She will close the curtains.

9. The French captain of the Lafayette Escadrille will not only be aware of the American pilot’s frequent personal use of one of the squadron’s aircraft, he will winkingly give the American a medal when the American saves the lives of the French supermodel and the three children in her care with not one, but two, successful mercy flights. He will then admonish in a Pepé le Pew accent, “Zhus don’ do it agayn.”

10. After being pulled back from the brink of bleeding to death from an aircraft machine gun bullet wound, a young French supermodel will need only a few days in a World War I French city hospital to regain not only her previous peasant beauty (complete with lipstick, eye shadow, shampoo, conditioner and beautifully-mended, now-bloodstain-free wardrobe), but also the full use of her right arm.

11. After a bare few minutes skimming the pages of a handily-available French / English dictionary, a young French supermodel who previously could speak no more than a few rudimentary words of English (“Me prostitute not”) is capable of speaking not merely good English, but downright poetic English ([Saying good-bye]: “I will always keep you here [touches forehead], and here [touches heart].”)

12. A flimsy little WWI American airplane can suffer literally hundreds of canvas-perforating hits from German aircraft machine gun bullets and still manage to return to its home airdrome safely. A flimsy little WWI German airplane hit by a single American machine gun bullet, however, will immediately either explode in the air, or suffer the loss of an entire wing and plunge to the ground.

13. When an American pilot crash-lands upside-down in No Man’s Land, halfway between French and German trenches and after tumbling from his cockpit finds his hand trapped underneath part of his aircraft, despite (a) German riflemen and a machine gunner blazing away at him, (b) French riflemen blazing away at the Germans, (c) a second American pilot landing his own aircraft nearby on an apparently runway-smooth section of the Western Front, who then runs helmetless out into No Man’s Land beside the first wrecked aircraft, (d) the subsequent arrival of a French soldier who rushes forward from his own lines to help the second American try to lift the aircraft up, (e) the rather abrupt battlefield amputation of the first pilot’s trapped hand by one swipe from an entrenching tool, (f) the subsequent rush by the second American pilot back to the French lines carrying his wounded friend (now named Lefty) over his shoulder… despite all of this: the only person killed in the whole episode will be the luckless French soldier who rushed forward from his own lines. (Fortunately though, he will have had the presence of mind to have rushed forward carrying his entrenching tool-cum-scalpel.) Oh, and the originally wrecked aircraft will be blown to bits by shellfire just five seconds after the American pilot pulls his buddy Lefty to safety. Despite enemy gunners having had at least half an hour to try to find its range.

14. An American pilot is fully capable of flying and fighting an open-cockpit combat aircraft while using a hook where he used to have a hand.

15. In a whirling one-on-one dogfight with a master enemy ace, it is possible, through the simple expedient of “stepping on the brake” in mid-air and rolling over the top of your enemy, to draw your pistol from its holster and, with your very first shot, shoot your opponent right through the eye of his goggles.

16. American pilots in the Lafayette Escadrille won World War I’s war in the air all by themselves, with only the occasional bit of help from inept German pilots who occasionally crashed into each other while concentrating on trying to machine gun the same American plane.

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One definition of “chutzpah” has it this way:

“(Yiddish) unbelievable gall; insolence; audacity” (Princeton WordNet)

Here’s another:

Alberta law enforcement officials recently erected a fence around a “controversial” and growing Edmonton “tent city” of homeless people that has been steadily growing on a patch of provincially owned land. The August 1 Globe and Mail said the settlement had “become an eyesore and a major headache for social agencies and local and provincial politicians”.

When interviewed about the new fence around his community that at last count consisted of some 70 tents and a population variously between 100 – 200, with at least one brothel under canvas (now closed), the tent city’s “mayor” Dean Cardinal said the fence is, in fact, a welcome addition: “’Hopefully it will keep out the riff-raff,’ the 50-year old man, wearing white gloves, said as he picked up garbage off the dead grass.”

Like I said, chutzpah.

One hopes that the Alberta authorities don’t have among them a Douglas MacArthur fan.

À la prochaine.