Day: August 22, 2011

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Blowing Through Town

I got an email today from my friend Sarah. She and Oz spent the summer traveling across Canada and are on their way back to Dawson City. This afternoon they were in Medicine Hat and on a major detour so they could come and see me. Hopefully I had a few hours free.

I did! This was the first week night in recent memory when I had nothing pressing to do!

Sarah and Oz arrived at my job at about 4:30 and it barely felt like a year had passed since we last saw each other! We enjoyed a long (and delicious) sushi dinner at O-Sho, then finished up with tea on a Starbucks patio. There wasn’t time to say everything that needed to be said, but the conversation about the various dilemmas in our lives did us a world of good. Sometimes it’s the people outside our world we confide in best.

I am just awed by her perfect timing; she had planned to be here Wednesday, when I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy such a long, carefree evening. It’s been a down and up kind of day and a beloved friend blowing through town was just the morale boost I needed.

 

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Shock and Grief on a Monday Morning

I awoke to news that Jack Layton, chief of the National Democrat Party and Leader of the Opposition, died early this morning after a lengthy battle with cancer.

I truly feel that this man was Canada’s last and best hope for a cohesive, sensible, transparent, and just government. His victory at the last federal election, sweeping through Quebec and forever changing its political map, not to mention gaining the keys to Stornoway, shook many Canadians out of their political torpor.

Now, the party is in the hands of an interim leader, Nycole Turmel, whom I have never trusted. She will not be getting my vote for new leader of the NDP! I wish the reins had been handed over to someone else, perhaps Thomas Mulcair.

It will be strange to no longer get the orange emails from ‘Jack’, to not see that handsome and trustworthy face speak so eloquently and with such passion, to not have someone at the near-helm of this government that I believe actually truly gives a damn about the Canadian people.

Rest in peace, Jack, and may someone worthy of you pick up your fight.