Halloween in Canada started in 1988
for me. I’d left the RAF in June after serving my country for 12
years.
I experienced my first ‘H’ in
Toronto on Yonge Street, at about 10:30PM and it was alive!
My second H was visiting my lovely
bride, Jane, in hospital after she had given birth to our very first family
member; a baby boy called Martin. He was only three days old.
Thirty-seven years later good old H is still happening. But what has changed?
On my second H I visited Jane and
three-day-old Martin in the hospital. Things were
different. After all the visitors had left and only the ‘parents’
remained, along came the trolley/cart with drinks and sandwiches; and they were
for the moms and dads.
Today’s ‘thing’ is all about mental
health. How do you think that this young man felt sitting next to
his wife having a sandwich and a cuppa while our son was sleeping
peacefully? It is a moment etched in my memory. It was a
moment where everything from the busy day slowed to a crawl, a time to
take stock of a brilliant day and a brilliant life and a brilliant world.
Is this because I was just a
thirty-one-year-old new dad? Perhaps, but more importantly there was
a human/personal element back in the day. New moms were given time
to recuperate before they were allowed to go home with their new family
member. And we were not inundated with constant bad news through
media. We slowed down enough back then to smell the roses.
And my first H? That
showed me that Canadians are awesome and reaffirmed that I had made the right
decision to start our lives as a young married couple in a land that was far,
far away from England’s shores 37 years ago.
Time and tide wait for no man ~
Geoffrey Chaucer
Carpe Diem ~ Horace
Blimey that went by fast ~ Paul
Freeman
