The Air Marshal

 I'm just guessing at the date. It was some time in 1984.

I saw the Burma Star Choir in Guelph. The president of the Burma Star Association, who I think was Air Vice Marshal Sir Bernard Chacksfield, was with them and he explained, still stand ramrod straight, during a pause how he brought a poet who wrote the lyrics of one song out of a Japanese prison after the end of the war. "We flew him out", like the poet was Orpheus being flown out of hell by a charitable god.  

When he was walking by himself down the stairs with a cane, with just me there, he stumbled a little and I heard something squeak, maybe an artificial limb or knee brace or replacement. He looked at me with a shy smile.

Long bicycle ride back

 I rode back from Quebec on bicycle at the end of the summer of 1984. I rode up Mount Royal and talked to an elderly Jewish lady after thinking the Yiddish spoken in the group of people she was with was German. She showed me some writings of her late husband that she still carried with her. One was a memory of serving in the Polish army and camping in the barn of an orphanage - the nuns had told the orphans that the soldiers had nothing to eat and the children gave their supper to the soldiers. During the night they awoke to the orphanage being bombed by the Luftwaffe and the children were killed.

Mikado bike, made in St-Augustin-de-Desmaures, Quebec, c. 1984 - I rode it from the middle of Quebec to Guelph.