August 1 was anniversary number 55 for Chris and I. We were tentatively planning a short trip to Moose Jaw where it all started. But that was for later. Today we were taking Chris’s serger to a sewing machine repair shop in Saskatoon. The serger had sat in one place in her sewing room for 15 years and for some reason neither of us remembered that it had a carrying handle neatly folded down on top. So there I was walking up the narrow walkway to the shop carrying this big, heavy machine in my arms. My right foot hit something one the walkway, throwing me off balance, my left foot came down beside the walkway and I couldn’t regain my balance because my arms were encumbered with this bug heavy machine. I went down face first and the corner of my right eye hit the hard plastic corner of the serger.

There was blood streaming down the side of my face. I felt stunned, and my glasses were bent. Yet it didn’t seem that the eye itself had been hurt. I got cleaned up, the bleeding from the corner of my eyelid stopped, we got my glasses straightened, and went home.

Sunday morning there was still bleeding from inside my eyelid, so, while everyone else was driving to church, we drove to a walk-in medical clinic in Saskatoon. I saw a nice lady doctor, who wore a hijab but had no trace of an accent. She said the area around my eye was going to heal, but she wanted to have an ophthalmologist look inside the eye. Thus I learned that the Eye Centre at Saskatoon City Hospital always has an ophthalmologist on call. We had dinner then went to the hospital for a 2:00 PM appointment. Dr. Paterson, probably about 25, examined my eye, applied a dilating drop and came back later to shine a very bright light and look inside my eye with her apparatus. She declared the eye to be unharmed and said the eyelid would heal without antibiotics. And it has.

That was the low point of the month. Once the eye was healed we made plans for our trip to Moose Jaw. Even though we didn’t live there for any length of time, this city has a strong pull on us. I was born there, we were married there, my parents are buried there, and we both have family there.

So it happened that at noon last Tuesday we arrived in Moose Jaw and stopped at the Town and Country Mall to look for a quick meal. The mall has seen better days, the big stores are all gone. There is a Smitty’s restaurant, but that wasn’t really what we were looking for. We walked around a corner and there was a new place, called Engage Café. It looked really inviting, yet it was empty. There was one man back in the kitchen area, and he looked familiar. A second look and we recognized my cousin Jeff Goodnough. He told us they are not quite ready to open, but his wife, Beth, came along, Jeff poured coffee and we sat down at one of the tables and visited for an hour. We also visited Jeff’s parents and my wife’s sister and her daughter. Those visits were the main high point of our little trip.

Wednesday morning went to the Tunnels of Moose Jaw and took the Bunker 24 tour. This is set in the Cold War era and those who take the tour are treated as candidates for highly secretive counter-espionage work. The other two tours involve a lot of walking and going up and down stairs. This one has no stairs and they provided a wheelchair for Chris. The tour guide led us out of the main building, around the corner and to a building a block away. We were taken to an underground bunker, led from room to room, often through secret passages, and watched films explaining the Russian espionage threat during the Cold War and all the surveillance activity being conducted to monitor Russian spies and sympathizers. At the end of the tour we found ourselves back in the lower level of the building where we had begun.

It makes one wonder what CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) is up to today. They have thousands of employees but one never hears much. Except that a couple of years ago a Chinese couple who worked in the high security disease research laboratory in Winnipeg were suddenly fired and evicted from the country.

Before leaving for home Wednesday afternoon, we drove out to Belle Plaine, a tiny village 25km east of Moose Jaw. This is where Chris and I met, I was managing a grain elevator and her folks ran the little café and post office. Both businesses are long gone, but there are twice as many houses now. A few miles north and west of the village there is a cluster of large industries, a potash mine, a salt plant, a natural fertilizer plant, an ethanol plant and a nitrogen fertilizer plant. A second, farmer-owned, nitrogen fertilizer plant is being built. Billions of dollars of investment out in flat prairie fields.

We also drove by what used to be my cousin Dennis’s farm. It is now the Moose Jaw Municipal Airport. That was the end our little trip down memory lane. So much has happened in 55 years, we have lived in five provinces during that time, and now we are living a two and a half hour drive from where we started out.