happy birthday Mum.

It's William Booth's 177th birthday today, and that makes it my mom's 73rd. Yesterday I took her out for dinner to her favourite restaurant — Steak and Stein. She was still in her Salvation Army soldier's uniform fresh out of Sunday morning service. An officer at her corps had been speaking about experiences in Papua New Guinea, it seemed, and this had Mom (or should I say, as she would prefer, when referring to herself in writing in the third person in her imported-English way, "Mum") reflecting on global cultures and her experiences of them.

"I'm so glad we live in Canada," she piped up suddenly, as we waited to order. She seemed filled with enthusiasm, once again, for the way that people from so many cultures may freely associate together. She began abruptly to reminisce about what it was like for a 23-year-old Moncton girl to find herself in Toronto, at Salvation Army officers' college, 50 (!) years ago, evangelizing immigrants with whom she could barely communicate, at a corps the Salvationists called "Toronto One," on Queen Street West, where services were held in many languages.

She told me that, as she did her visitation rounds, she'd take with her copies of the New Testament, or just the Gospel of John, in ten different major languages. She'd studied her literature enough to be able to show people where to find key verses like John 3:16, and as for people's reactions, she seems to remember nothing but enthusiasm and gratitude for the attempt to reach out in their own tongues.

She would study a lot, she told me, in her college days. She'd study on the bus, and be mocked for it by her classmates. "But I got the grades," she told me, with satisfaction.

It's been about 40 years, now, since Mom retired from being a captain in the Sally Ann, to come out of the Army, and marry Dad. I've never detected an ounce of bitterness in her about having left the officership. But nothing made her happier than when she was able to go back to the Army as a regular soldier, some 15 years ago or so.

The chef at Steak and Stein pre-cut Mom's steak for her so she wouldn't have to wrestle with a steak knife, with her Parkinson's-afflicted shaky hands.

Later, yesterday, when I went to the Dartmouth bridge bus terminal, someone was being taken off a bus by a crowd of cops and escorted into the back of a paddywagon. A young black man and his white girlfriend walked past me in the opposite direction. "Let's go," he said to her, "before they decide they wanna pick someone else up."