The cenotaph was very busy today and it made me think a lot.

The crowd there was alive: I could feel a mixture of pride, nervousness, and a strange kind of yearning. The shaky resonance of a single old helicopter flying above felt eerily emblematic of the creaky tenuosness that our country is caught amidst in this moment.

A lone American flag flying in the delegation felt more homage than something present and active.

Everywhere I felt as though eyes were searching; everyone caught between the questions of what is going on, and what is goign on here.

The sun was shining. The air was not too cold.

Some relief here.

Elsewhere – Ottawa, Washington? – less so.

Beyond the immediacy of the moment, however, a bigger question floated above us. Wrapped in and around uniforms and symbols and monuments that represent, all at once, our past, our present, and, perhaps, our future. The intermingling of them raising that oldest and most bedeviling of questions we know as Canadians: who are we?

We are not the injustices of the past, but many of us are still their beneficiaries. We are descended from visionaries, thieves, explorers, extractivists, bridge-builders, bigots, and caretakers. The children of both terror and kindness, this place and those of us here have never been simple. What we will become remains ever in flux, blurred between the lenses of who we think we have been, and what we think we are yet capable of.

I remember my maternal great grandparents, fleeing despotism and landlessness on faraway steppe, only to unwittingly become a thief to another. I remember my grandparents, one of whom travelled an ocean he had never seen to fight in places he had never been, while the other watched an ocean, preparing daily to fight an enemy who would never come. I remember the idea of progress – with mixed feelings.

I saw many small children, smiling, and the teenagers, faces stuck in indignity of wanting to be serious and not yet knowing how to be. May their learning be slow. The adults near them smiled sometimes, cried at other times, a grief was present – not necessarily for something we have lost, but something we may yet be losing. Something those we remember seem to have wanted and fought for.

The day was beautiful, and it was sad, in the way that it always is and in ways I have still not yet felt the edges of.

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