Hey everyone. Congrats to your daughter, Front! Wow, I hope she has a great time travelling.
So my grad today went well. I didn't trip. But at the end of the grad, they played "The Ode to Newfoundland" and we grads and all the audience had to sing it. See, technically the province is "Newfoundland and Labrador" (and I'm originally from the Labrador part) but everyone just says "Newfoundland". So the last sentence of the ode goes "God guard thee Newfoundland", and right afterwards when it went quiet, a man yelled out "AND LABRADOR", and a few random people laughed. I thought "who was that? Embarrassing but kinda funny anyway!" Turns out it was MY DAD!! LOL
But anyway, the ceremony was very nice. The graduate part was typical, but afterwards they gave an honourary degree to this man who came to live in Newfoundland a long while ago, a man who survived the Holocaust. He was at Auschwitz. I remember meeting him two summers ago in my hometown when I worked at this Museum Artifact Hall for the summer. He wanted to see Labrador, and meeting him was incredible. Prisoner 97806. He lost his entire family there. When he was denied his request to come to Canada in 1946, Newfoundland welcomed him (Newfoundland was not a part of Canada until 1949). He started crying when they gave him the degree. He spoke about when he first came to Newfoundland and how everyone was so nice to him, asking him if he needed/wanted anything, and he said: "Me? No, nothing. I don't need anything! I just want to be a free man." Wow! He had most of the women and men in tears, and my makeup ran everywhere, but I didn't care. (If you wanna hear what he said, go to:
http://www.mun.ca/convocation/honorary/spring_2006.php. He's Philip Riteman, the second man there, and you can listen to what he addressed.)
My parents and a good friend came to my grad, and we came home where my mom had flowers and cake and such. And we went out for a great supper tonight. Very nice. It feels good to have accomplished this. I don't have the pics up yet, but what I can post is a pic that we took with my cam phone (it's small and shitty 'cause it was taken with the phone), but I'll post it anyway:
(and yes, I'm as tall as my dad! lol. 5"10.)
Thanks again to everyone for their kind words.
