My D-Day
Never underestimate the gifts that are waiting to discover us when we surrender to being hopelessly lost. A memory from a 1993 cycling trip in France.
We lurched along that sunny Normandy road on our loaded bikes as far as we could. Then the road turned to soft beach sand. Impossible to ride on. We were lost and according to my wife of 2 weeks, it was all my fault. Reduced to walking our bikes, we trudged along the pastoral shoreline until we came to a small cottage where I asked for help. An elderly gentleman clad in shorts and a white singlet hobbled towards us, bellowing barely comprehensible directions as he approached.
Noticing my stiff anglophone accent and rudimentary grammar, he asked where we came from. I told him we were Canadian. “Ahh, Helene, les Canadiens sont ici!” His wife joined us and the stories began to fly. Helene’s village was liberated shortly after D-Day by a French-Canadian regiment. One of the Canadians lost both legs during the battle for the town. A village girl went over to Canada after the war, married this soldier and they were living in Montreal. More stories...
This couple invited us into their home. Regrettably, we still had a long way to pedal in order to catch the train at Caens back to Paris the next day. I remember thinking that we could have stayed there for days drinking their wine and basking in their hospitality, taking advantage of goodwill earned by Canadian troops when I was still in diapers, safely tucked into my crib back on Westminster Avenue in Montreal West.
We deserved none of their gratitude and none of their hospitality. Yet both poured freely, as if, by virtue of speaking bad French and being able to claim citizenship in Canada, I was somehow recruited into a timeless legion of honour. I thought of the Canadian veterans I saw on parade with my kids on November 11: old men in blazers and gray flannels, no longer marching tall, their medals speaking of hardship I cannot imagine. They should be experiencing this outpouring of thanks, not me.