Remembrance

I was at the Cenotaph. There was a good crowd in attendance. Traffic was stopped. Two minutes of silence observed. For me, that 's the significance of the day.

When I was a child ,the sound of Big Ben's chimes were broadcast across the land. at the hour of eleven. a.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Children in  classrooms.stood beside their desks and bowed their heads for two minutes of silence.

In the streets, traffic stood still .I imagined London's cab drivers cabs leaving cabs and standing to attention beside them.

In Aurora this morning, the sky was clear and  brilliant  in the morning sunshine. The nice young police officer who let me park in the Canadian Tire parking lot entrance opposite the Cenotaph, told me there was snow north of Newmarket and two inches of the stuff in Barrie.

In  the U.K., the sky would most likely be leaden. In year's past, the first of London's pea soup fogs would  be drifting through  the streets.

We are in the tenth decade of the time when the first Armistices day was marked, to denote a nation's sorrow.

The war was over. Almost an entire generation of men in the flower of youth had  been wiped out and loved ones  devastated.

Thousands of others, missing limbs or disabled by mustard gas became familiar sights.

Years passed. Life went on. The 1914/18 war was resumed and yet another generation of youth was annihilated  during the 1939/45 war,  even more horrifying than the first if possible, with  new and terrible weapons invented for the purpose.

Whoever thought of  people gathering throughout the world to  mark two minutes of silence to remember the awful sacrifice, did a good thing.

It  has not  ended  wars.

But it makes us pause and dwell upon those who paid the price.