One of our first stops was just outside of Shakespeare at the Cemetery of Lingelbach United Church. (like Centennial United, Lingelbach was founded first as a German speaking Evangelical Church. It held it's very first services in an old stone building that used to stand on our home farm just across the road from it. When I was a kid you could still play in the building - today the site where it stood stands under a building constructed after the farm moved from Ankenmann hands for the first time in decades)
In the south east corner of the Cemetery lie my dad, three uncles, a cousin and a number of other members of our extended family. Then northward and over a few rows lie various other members of the Ankenmann family - my Grand parents, my Great Grand Parents, my Great Great Grand parents and a variety of Great Aunts and other family members.
I did my best to show Noahkila, Ms H and Beetle where the graves are so they will know where to look if they ever happen back this way again ...
That day we also stopped and had a visit with my "little brother" Wayne. Wayne and I were matched up as Big and Little Brothers through the Big Brothers Agency of Stratford. Wayne was six and I was 17. I had become a Big because I had been a Little. I was only the second little in Canada to make that jump (today serving on the Board of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Minnedosa, may make me the first to serve in three capacities in Big Brothers Big Sisters ...). I hadn't seen Wayne in a number of years, so it was good to get caught up. We visited in his back yard while the kids played with his very hyper dogs.
From Shakespeare we did a jaunt to the Kitchener-Waterloo area, then returned home for dinner with Grandma.
The rest of the day saw the kids watching tv with Grandma, and playing (finally) with the big box of LEGO I had hauled upstairs a few days earlier ... In my childhood, my friend Darin and I constructed a huge city of Lego that stood on a table top made of a 4X8 sheet of plywood. For years we created and recreated our city, and along with the hot wheels and match box cars maintained a parallel world in our basement. To say we had ALOT of lego would be an understatement.
Mom worked at Samsonite when they were the licensed producer of the ubiquitous plastic bricks. Bags and bags and bags of lego were purchased and brought home over the years and both my brother and I build enormous cities of lego ... It took a few days, but the kids finally started to play with the boxes of lego I brough up stairs from the basement ... The result on the part of the girls was a shopping mall (shown below):
It was a mall with a subway station (to the left in the centre) a wheel museum and store (to the left below the subway car), a show store (just visible in the upper right hand corner) a church supply store (in the front right corner) complete with caskets, Bibles and other church wares, a security office, washrooms, and (for my fellow Rotarians - take note !!) a Rotary Play Area for kids when their parents are shopping (it's in the middle behind the BIG ROTARY Wheel !! Where else would it be !!)
Noahkila for his part made space ships, planes and other weapons ...
Together though, they had fun ... and in spite of the odd yelling bout, they enjoyed themselves immensely ...
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