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.
= = =
We now return you to our regular whining.
= = =
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.
= = =
News on the March!
Stop the presses!
“Affordable housing for seniors means housing they can afford” (Charlottetown Guardian, August 13)
= = =
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)
= = =
But there’s good news out there too!
Somewhere.
I’m sure of it.
Let me know if you find some.
À la prochaine.
No comments:
Post a Comment