I like the Canadian flag. I grew up under the Union Jack/Canadian Ensign but I was quite pleased to get a flag of our own. The debate about it was going on at the time my father was dying. He asked me to write a letter to his M.P. in Ottawa expressing his feelings about the new flag. He dictated; I was his amanuensis. He said that he had served under the old flag during two wars and he felt a loyalty to it that he couldn't fake for a new flag. That was his basic argument. It didn't wash, as you know. Parliament passed the adoption of a new flag design and it was up and flying before Canada's hundredth birthday in 1967.

We were living in Winnipeg then and we celebrated that birthday by taking the kids to Expo '67 in Montreal. We noticed the new flag flying as we drove across the country. It was especially visible, in great numbers, in the home riding of our Prime Minister, Lester B. Pearson. We stopped on the way east to attend the theatres in Stratford and Niagara-on-the-Lake, and we saw with some surprise, that the Union Jack was still flying in great numbers in N-O-L. We asked the owner of our B'n'Bs about this old, now out-dated allegiance.

"I'll tell you the reason," he said. "There's the enemy, over there." And he pointed across the Niagara River to the fort on the other side, the American side, with a Stars and Stripes flying above it. In Niagara-on-the-Lake they were still fighting the War of 1812.

So it's our flag's fiftieth anniversary and there are two generations who have never known anything else. All it took was time.

Have you heard of "source memory"? I guess I knew about it but I just read something about it, related to a faulty or augmented memory. You might remember a fact or something that happened to you in the past but you might not remember exactly how you knew it or where you discovered it. Was it something you read or something someone told you or something that happened that you connected with something else? You can't remember where it first came from. I guess it's not important but I think it's interesting. I keep picking up little remnants of my past, not important, but with little insights useful to me as a writer, if not to my memory store.

Okay, here's a stupid example. I never put the cap on the end of a stick pen or any kind of pen because, I remembered from more than half a century ago, the cap on the pen I was using stuck on the end and I couldn't get it off and the pen leaked. It must have been a fountain pen - where did I get a fountain pen? Anyway, the memory was embedded and I didn't realize until just recently where that bit of behaviour of mine came from. That's an internal source. What if a memory comes from another person? The source might be contaminated or layered over by other memories. Okay, so what?

So, it's a clue to the spotty memories of people with Alzheimer's or a similar dysfunction of senility. Memories come wrapped up with emotions and other people and have to be unravelled to be understood, that is, for you to understand yourself. I don't think I can ever solve the puzzle, but it's fascinating to try.

What do you remember? Where did the memory come from?