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I know that this may sound very odd to you as a Canadian, but this drifting apart of our two counties breaks my heart.

I grew up in a military family, and we traveled around a lot. By the time I was 13, I had circumnavigated the globe with my family. All the friends I had ever known, I lost in time and travel.

When my father retired, our family settled down, and I made new friends. Many of them.

Of special note was one particular family tree, brothers and sisters, cousins, all of them related, their families coming from the Moncton area to America many years ago… where they became American citizens.

That extended family, so proud of their Acadian heritage, became my dearest, of friends. I became their brother. Not an “honorary” brother, but a real brother. We marched together in CYO Band, went camping together, drank together, chased the girls together, went to weddings, birthdays, and funerals together.

My most luminous memories are of visiting his grandmother’s farm on the Maine Seacoast, watching fireflies in a meadow, digging clams, and laying in the middle of a remote Maine road, oblivious to cars that might approach, looking at the brilliant stars. He was born six days after me, and we spent one memorable dark August night after our 18th birthdays, parked by the side of a remote road on the top of the rocky, hilly terrain in the middle of blueberry fields, fiddling with the antenna of a small black and white television to try to watch the Drum Corps International finals. It is a treasured memory.

Their parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles accepted me as part of their family. And of that grand extended family, one in particular became my closest brother, my most treasured friend. And my parents accepted him as their son, and my brother.

When I was 17, in the spring of my last year in high school, I decided to join the Navy. But I did not know what to say to my dear brother, to tell him I was going away. I was working on my parents van one night, and my Acadian brother was on my mind. As I fiddled with that cassette deck, I wondered, how could I tell him, at the end of the upcoming summer, I was leaving to join the Navy?

Suddenly, his face appeared in the open door of the van. As I looked at him, wondering how he had appeared there so suddenly, I realized his nose seemed to be flattened out over the side of his face. Before I could say anything, he told me he had been hit in the nose with a hockey puck, and he needed me to take him to the hospital to get his nose fixed. Before I could say yes, what instead came out of my mouth was “Dave...I’m joining the Navy.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, his broken nose forgotten, he blurted out: “F**k it! I’m going with you!”

That was over fifty years ago.

That fall, we went to Boot Camp in Great Lakes together, and both went to Jet School in Memphis together. They they split us up, he went to the West Coast and I went to the East Coast.

But we have spent the last fifty years laughing together, drinking together, meeting our wives and getting married together, taking road trips together, and...growing older together.

Because of this, I came to love Canada for giving me these people, thanking God for putting them into my life.

So you see-this chasm that has developed between our countries cuts me to the bone and saddens me. I wish it were not so. But I feel that even as much as this country of mine that I love so much has changed, I feel that Canada has changed even more dramatically, and that rift has spread and widened.