What I saw in Tim Hortons today.

What would you have done at 10:57am on Remembrance Day if the location you were standing in refused to observe a moment of silence? This is the situation I faced this morning in the Tim Hortons just before the Kingston sign, ironically on the Highway of Heroes. I was on Hwy 401East to Ottawa and unable to make a Cenotaph ceremony, so I stopped at the Tim Hortons. I went in and looked around, noticing that nobody seemed to be preparing for the moment of silence, so I walked up to the counter and asked a blonde cashier if they would be turning off the radio so that we could observe the 2 minutes of silence. The response “We don’t do that here”. I immediately asked to speak to the manager; we still had two minutes to right this. The cashier went into the back room and emerged about a minute later with a message from the manager that “She is busy in a meeting with head office”. Apparently they would not be observing the moment of silence. The last minute before the moment drew down and I realized that I would be the only one in the restaurant to observe it. I became nervous, butterflies stirred in my stomach. At 11am I put my right hand over my heart, just under my poppy, and put my head down. A few moments later another person with a poppy realized the time and stopped to observe the moment, then another. I wish I could say that the movement spread like wildfire and everyone stopped, but unfortunately that is not what happened. The radio kept blaring, the people kept walking, the cashiers kept serving and the moment went by without any notice from the dozens of people in the restaurant. I’m sure that scenes like these played out across Canada today but I think Tim Hortons is worthy of being singled out, not because a single manager of a roadside stop refused to observe a moment of silence, but because the head office of a corporation that brands itself as the reflection of Canada chooses to do business instead of taking two minutes honouring our war dead and veterans. However, they are not the only ones to blame, remembrance begins in our hearts and from what I saw in that restaurant, we have forgotten.