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the loans was told to me by my Dutch relatives, so perhaps we are just trying to gild our own lilies. I have often wondered though about “the one family.” No one seems to know where this“one family” lived, so perhaps it is similar to the Dutch supposedly having nine words for
clean
, although no one seems able to recite all of them.
    My Dutch grandfather once told me that during the dark days of the German occupation, a young girl who was his relative was “keeping company” with a young German soldier. Her family was in the underground resistance, and her grandfather kept a scribbler with the names and addresses of his fellow resisters in a drawer beneath his socks and underwear. She had often seen the scribbler but, in the manner of the young, paid little attention to it. One day in a discussion with her young man, the subject of the scribbler came up. He asked her if she could get him the scribbler and in return he would give her a tiny radio that played all the current pop songs. She agreed to the bargain. Most of the people whose names were in the scribbler were lined up and shot, including some members of her immediate family. The people were shot early in the morning when most of them were still in their nightclothes.
    The soldiers never came for my grandparents. No one knows why. Perhaps the soldiers had other things to do. Perhaps they ran out of bullets. Perhaps that particular page of the scribbler was torn out. Perhaps they turned two pages at once. Perhaps the scribbler itself was lost and trampled in the mud beneath muddy boots. It all seemed based on the fickleness of chance and the desperation of those caught up in the war.
    After the Liberation, the girl’s hair was cut off because she had been a collaborator, but her life was spared because it was felt she had suffered—and wouldsuffer—enough. She, too, apparently came to Canada and blended in with the Dutch families in Ontario. Her descendants raise flowers for the large urban markets of southern Ontario. We all make mistakes, especially during war.
    Because my father was permanently maimed, he became, in his small community, a figure of some sympathy and the recipient of “a government job.” The job, with the Department of Highways, was running the road grader in summer and the snowplow in winter.
    It was traditional at this time that if there was a change of government, all the employees of the defeated government would be fired and replaced by those from the winning side. My father, however, was more or less “left alone,” and considered himself fortunate for most of his working life.
    One winter his snowplow went off the road in a blinding blizzard. Prior to the event, he had been almost frozen, protected in his cab by only a thin sheet of plastic. He had found it necessary to urinate on his hands so that he might restore some warmth and movement in his fingers, in order to handle his controls. After the accident, he limped toward the nearest light. Inside the house was a family of Dutch immigrants, including my mother. The house was warm and sparkling in its cleanliness. At this time, he and David MacDonald were living alone, dining on potatoes and salt pork or fish, with occasionally a can of beans. He was amazed at the difference in lives and at the possibilities that lay before him.
    I am thinking of this as I stand by the road. Everything going back to the war.
    In the darkness of this Remembrance Day I will go to stand with the David MacDonalds. First, they will see the headlights of my car coming though the trees. All three of us up too early for the day that lies ahead. I will smile when my grandfather embraces me and says, “Thank you for coming.” Sometimes he adds, with a smile, “We vets have to stick together.” He knows it’s a bad joke but likes the punning repetition.
    He sees me, as I see myself, as a link in a chain reaching back to the Second World War and to its aftermath. “He has never denied his love,”