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At The Memory Project: Stories of the Second World War, we interview veterans both in person and over the phone. While the phone seems less desirable than a face-to-face interview, I very much enjoy it: the phone assures near-perfect sound quality and allows us to include veterans whose health is too fragile to attend an interviewing event, or who live in remote areas of the country.

One of the most interesting aspects for me throughout the process of interviewing such veterans over the phone is my mental image of these veterans. We usually speak to the veterans to collect service-related details, to interview them and to discuss their World War Two-era artefacts. This process can take days or even weeks, depending on the availability of the veteran. Throughout the interview process, I imagine these veterans as young servicemen and women. After months with the The Memory Project, it still takes me by surprise to see contemporary photographs of the veterans, as almost all of them are octogenarians. As I interview the veterans over the phone and discuss their wartime experiences, I envision them as teenagers, or in their early twenties, landing on the beaches of Normandy, sailing the Triangle Run in the Atlantic Ocean or working in an office in Calgary. When I receive contemporary photographs of these veterans, I am somehow surprised that they have not remained eternally youthful. I suppose that one is only as old as one feels, and judging by the spirit, sharp memory and humour of many of our veteran volunteers, they have attained eternal youth in my eyes.