november 11
2006-11-11 | 10:54 a.m.

So, it's Remembrance Day.

And over the past two weeks, I have failed to find anyone to sell me an effing poppy.

It's not like I didn't look. I went out of my way to go to places where I thought poppy vendors would be. Malls, metro stations, drugstores, grocery stores (okay, I would have gone to the grocery stores anyway). The place on Sherbrooke where I got one last year. The corner of Peel and Ste-Catherine, that was supposedly staked out by one woman years and years and years ago as her corner. The drugstore at the Guy-Concordia metro station, where Marc told me someone had been spotted.

Nothing.

All I wanted was a poppy to pin onto my coat!

Especially since I'm having coffee with my grandfather this afternoon, and my grandfather is a vet. He flew on D-Day. My great-grandfather was Black Watch in WWI. We still have his uniform in our basement, as well as the letters sent home by the government when not one, but two of his brothers died. And, oh yeah, one of my good childhood friends is in Afghanistan right now.

Dammit. It's not like not being able to find a poppy changes the fact that I am grateful to those people who head off overseas to get shot at on behalf of the rest of us.

I support them, I respect them, I believe in opening debate when missions change so that we can be sure they're over there for the right reasons and not being put at unnecessary and useless risk, and should any of them come back with a head injury, I'll be here to help with rehabilitation (which is actually how the profession of language pathology got started, or so it's said).

It would just have been nice to be able to express all of that by pinning a poppy to my coat.

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