Monday, May 17, 2004
There are small-scale murals all over this neighborhood, and I’ve started to get interested in them. After a lunch of Asian noodles, I had stopped at a streetcorner to take a picture of this one, which is one of the more artistic and serious, and then continued walking past a man in a Hawaiian shirt who was digging at the small plot of earth around his street tree nearby. He’d shot a few glances at me while I was taking the pictures, and when we went past, he said ‘Bonjour” and then, when we replied, he said, in French, “I’ve taken hundreds of pictures of murals.” I stopped. “In Montreal?” I asked. “Some yes, but mostly in San Francisco.” “Oh, really,” I said, switching to English. He answered in English that sounded pretty American. “Yes…I can show you if you like. Do you have a minute?” We said sure, and he propped his shovel against the side of the building and headed into the leather shop on the corner. “Come on,” he said, gesturing with one arm.
He led us into his “office”, a backroom behind the trendy leather shop filled with one-of-a-kind shoes, sandals, slippers, boots and purses. There were hides of all sorts of animals and reptiles on the high-ceilinged walls, and a great many books, a Chinese tapestry, posters from Montreal music events, some Renaissance etchings, a print of a painting of Salome with St. John the Baptist’s head on the platter, a carved wooden candle stand, more books, a tape player, two low chairs covered in brown velveteen; it was all dusty and unkempt and looked like favorite stuff he had hauled around and had in every shop he’d ever run. An adjacent room – dark - held an old metal Singer and was clearly the place where the leatherwork was done. He got out a folder of color photographs, many taped together to form long panoramas, and proceeded to tell us about each one: it was an incredible tour of the work of mostly-Latino muralists in San Francisco. This man had made a project of photographing them as part of documenting the neighborhoods wherever he’s lived; I was stunned by some of what he showed us. He turned out to be an American who’s been in Montreal for four years (“How did I end up here? C’est un cas d’une femme.”)
A couple of hours later we walked out of the shop, a little dazed, knowing a good deal more about this particular neighborhood of Montreal than we had, a lot more about San Francisco, and a much better sense of the comparison between the two cities. All because I took this picture, I guess, on a good day for gardening.
4:22 PM
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Sunday, May 16, 2004
This morning we had a celebratory breakfast: J. has graduated to soft foods so he was able to eat French toast with buzzed strawberries on top! Fantastic! And for lunch, soup, and a tuna fish sandwich on soft bread – I think I got as much pleasure out of watching him eat as he did out of eating.
After breakfast we decided to go to church, and chose an Anglican parish whose website had resonated with us; they are very mission-oriented, described themselves as ethnically diverse, and have sponsored numerous refugee families over the years. The parish is called The Church of the Advent, and like many of the Anglican churches, it’s located in Westmount. So we left our French neighborhood at 9:30, got on the metro, changed to the green line at Berri/UQAM (that’s “University of Quebec at Montreal”) and headed west. About twenty-five minutes later we emerged into the very different world of Westmount, with its large lawns, flowering crabapples, sleek office buildings and residential towers. The Church of the Advent is located on a quiet street; we were a little late by the time we found it and tried to open the door quietly. Nevertheless, when we entered, just as the sermon was about to start, thirty heads turned round to see who had come in. And those thirty - grey- and brown-haired Caucasians, black women in African dress, Asians, Latin Americans – made up the entire congregation.
As we settled into a back pew and were handed hymnals and an order of service, the lilting, West-Indian voice of the rector began the sermon with the words, “By now, most of you have probably made a decision about where you will go when this church closes.” We were stunned; this wasn’t what we had expected, but as the sermon progressed it became clear that after a number of years of struggle and soul-searching, the congregation had decided to sell their buildings, which they could no longer support, and join another congregation. We found out more later. But we sat and listened to the sermon, which was about openness to learning about faith, even when we are old, and then at the Peace, we were greeted with smiles and warm handshakes by every single person in the sanctuary and by the rector, deacon, and acolyte - a tall adult man. At that point we moved up to sit further forward.
The service was fairly High Anglican, with Sanctus bells, but it was also extremely warm and relaxed. Four children, in the pew ahead of us, sprawled on their parents and quietly played with each other. People came and went, and came back in. Communion was given at the altar rail, kneeling, and there was no question of dipping one’s wafer in the wine; everybody drank from the chalice, carefully wiped each time by the deacon. After the service concluded, there were announcements, and an invitation to the coffee hour, and the clergy walked out in procession during the last hymn, with – to our astonishment – one little girl going up and clinging to the bottom of the processional cross while the acolyte, completely nonplussed, carried it out.
Of course we stayed for the coffee hour, which stretched past an hour, and had a fascinating discussion with the deacon – an American citizen who said he had “Landed Canadian Immigrant” status but had been ordained in California, moved to Canada thirty years ago, and “through inertia” had never left. It turned out that he was a medieval historian, by profession, and had written his dissertation, at Oxford, on the history of the medieval diaconate.
We also talked to the fellow in charge of the transition committee, who told us that they had visited and talked with all the Anglican parishes and only found one who was really sympathetic to their mission focus and willing to absorb both the parishioners and keep the mission going. “You Americans really got us going on that,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “The very first family of boat people to come to Canada, during Vietnam, came right here, to this parish, and we have helped refugee families ever since. Oh yes, we’ve supported them emotionally, physically – some have lived right here – we’ve gone to battle for them legally. It’s what we do.” Later one of the women, with a broad smile and a bright Latin American warmth, told me that the reason the decision to close had taken so long was that they were helping two Peruvian families, with fifteen children between them, and that everyone felt so responsible for them that they couldn’t bring themselves to close the church. Finally the families (I think one of them had been the family in the pew in front of us) had gotten stable enough to manage on their own, and the decision had been made to join with St. George’s parish, a much more affluent and larger congregation in the same area of the city. “Look for us there when you come back,” they said. ‘We’d love to have you worship with us.”
There was quite a bit of interest that we were from the infamous Diocese of New Hampshire and knew Gene Robinson, but the same fellow said, “Actually, this is all a much bigger deal to you in the States than it is to us up here. We’re really quite fine with it up here; somehow Canada doesn’t seem to have inherited the same puritanical streak when it comes to matters of sexuality.”
As we were talking, we heard chanting from the church; I thought it was a rehearsal for something, but when it came time to leave, we had to sneak out through another, ongoing church service – this time a much fuller congregation of Rumanian Orthodox. “They’d like to buy the building but probably can’t afford it,” the deacon told us. “In any case, we’ve been told we can keep our endowment, but the Diocese of Montreal owns the property, so they’ll sell it to the highest bidder – trying to keep it as a house of worship, one would hope.”
All the mainstream churches in Canada are struggling with declining memberships, apparently, and in Quebec the Anglos and Catholics often face off with their buildings as well. “Look downtown, on Sherbrooke,” the deacon told us. “There’s an Anglo-Catholic Church, and a Roman Catholic Church facing each other across the street. The French go to the Roman Catholic Church, and the Irish go to the Anglo-Catholic one, and they hate each other. But the Irish actually believe; a lot of the French hate the church.” We’ve heard quite a bit of that criticism here; our landlady told us, “Les eglises sont tres riches, mais ils sont vides.” (The churches are rich, but they’re empty.) “Still,” she said, “they don’t stop asking us for money. I went to Catholic school, I know about the Church – and I don’t want anything to do with it.”
But Anglicans are still the foreigners in Montreal. “We have a saying,” the deacon told us, as we parted. “There are three places a Montreal Anglican can go. To heaven, to hell, or to Toronto.”
9:36 PM
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Saturday, May 15, 2004
It’s hard to believe we’ve been here two weeks already, and that the month is half gone! Today was a little rainy but warm; we lazed around in the morning, grateful that both of us are feeling better, and then in the early afternoon went to the new Marche Centrale. Eventually, we think, this area will house a large fruit and vegetable market but for now all we found were flowers – but what flowers! Large open air stalls stretching on and on, from one grower to another, filled with annuals, perennials, vegetables, houseplants. It’s a good thing I don’t have a garden to fill. After that we went back to our usual produce shopping at the Jean Talon market, where in addition to strawberries we found luscious, ripe peaches today.
I forgot to tell a story from yesterday. In the late morning there was a knock at the door – it was our landlady, G. “I’ve found something good,” she said. “But…” slightly apologetic, pleading look, “it requires votre voiture” (your car). “Ok,” J. said, “let’s go.” I said I’d watch Marie, and the two of them took off in the car. When they returned, thirty minutes later, they were carrying a big, comfortable chair upholstered in green imitation leather, with one big tear in the seat. “For the terrace”, G. said, beaming. Later J. told me when they had arrived at the point where she said she had seen the chair on the sidewalk, nothing was there. “Oh, don't worry,” she said, jumping out of the car and running over to the side of a nearby building, and triumphantly pulling out the chair from where she had hidden it beneath the fire escape.
Tonight G. and our neighbor have gone to supper at a friend’s. To go there, G. picked up a little car form CommunAuto, a car rental service that seems wonderfully practical – does anyone know of a service like this in other cities? You pay a yearly or monthly membership fee, make a reservation over the internet when you want to use a car, and pick it up from one of many, many parking lots located all over the city. For those who don’t want to maintain a car here, it seems like a very efficient solution.
Many people also ride bikes. Last night J. went for a long ride. There are beautiful bike paths throughout the city, connecting all the parks. He rode for three hours, through various neighborhoods, past the huge soccer stadium, past community gardens and local basketball games, all the way to the river that forms the northern border of the island, La Riviere des Prairies (the St. Lawrence is below it.) He came back wet, muddy, and happy.
8:23 PM
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Friday, May 14, 2004
It’s raining: a thunderstorm that’s been gathering for the last few hours. J. is off on an adventure on our neighbor’s bicycle, and I’ve just come in from a marathon drawing session with Marie. Her favorite things to draw are monsters and dinosaurs, which she accompanies with a noisy soundtrack. I drew her a fly (mouche) and an ant (fourmi); she happily walks around the back porch now naming all the various creatures depicted in chalk.
I woke up feeling horrible, went back to sleep, and woke up again at about 9:30. J. read me the comments some of you had left here, and I was so touched that I cried. They also made me feel much better, and as the day has gone on, I’ve definitely improved, feeling almost normal by late afternoon. A sore throat, still, and a stuffy head, but the body aches are gone, thank God.
My mother, on the telephone, said “It’s hard to be sick away from home,” but I said, “Oh, no, this is fine, it feels like home” – and it does. Strange. But this sojourn is teaching me a lot about what makes home home. I think, actually, that the definition has changed quite a bit for me over time, mutating from a collection of external places and objects and possible activities to something that I carry with me.
The last time I was ill away from home we were in a hotel room in London. I had gotten violently sick on some Chinese pork, and was up all night long, and into the next morning, when a doctor-friend who we had met gave me his last packet of Smecta, a suspected opiate he’d been prescribed when the same thing happened to him in Lithuania. It worked immediately, and in a few hours I had recovered completely; to this day I have a special feeling of gratitude for that spontaneous generosity. Here there hasn’t been a quick cure, but there have been other kind strangers, and the ongoing pleasure of birds eating below someone else’s trees, squirrels traversing someone else’s wires, leaves unfurling and magnolias and tulips blooming. And most of all, my beloved is here with me.
We think of “home” so much as “place”, the most poignant and particular of all, but I am beginning to see it more as a state of mind. Certainly there are places where we “fit” and places that are too alien or too jarring to us to ever feel comfortable. But if I am not home in myself, I’ll never feel at home anywhere, and if I do feel at home in myself, anywhere I am will be home, and will have the possibility of becoming a hospitable place for others. It’s one more example, it seems, of a search that leads back to the source.
8:43 PM
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Thursday, May 13, 2004
Yesterday evening I went down with a slight fever. The infirmary is full. In the dormitory, there is a lot of noise, to which I contribute my unsuccessful efforts to breathe.
The terrible thing about sickness is that you tend to think you are sick. Your thoughts are narrowed down to your own little rag of a body. And you take care of her. My God, forgive me, I take care of myself too well to be a good Cisterian…
…This is a most peculiar disease. It pretends to leave you, but it only pretends. Actually it is only drawing back to take a good spring at you and claw you all over again…
This afternoon I finally stayed in bed for good. Why should it be a penance to stay in bed? I scarcely know. It is quiet, and pleasant, and you can pray. And yet it almost takes ropes to keep me there. For instance, I am not there now…
Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas, March 25-28, 1950
Today I gave up and didn’t go out at all, except to draw some pictures with fat chalk on the deck outside, where the little girl had been drawing. I wanted to surprise her, so tomorrow, if it doesn’t rain, she’ll find a robin pulling a worm, some fish in a pond, and a flower. She had drawn a long pink creature with spines, that her mother labeled “Dragon”, presumably for our benefit.
J. is mending, and I am languishing, but I thought maybe if I could manage to lay low I’d get better faster. This, too, is a peculiar bug – neither a straightforward cold nor the flu, but something in-between, with cold-like symptoms added to body and joint aches. Today my head felt like it was exploding, but now I’m better, and hoping the thing isn’t just “drawing back” to take another claw at me in the morning.
Considering the state of things in both the larger and the individual worlds, I shouldn’t be as calm as I’ve been ever since arriving here, and yet, that is how I’ve felt. The other night I was lying propped up in bed; J. had already gone to sleep. With my near-sighted eyes I looked across the room at the rather blurry yellow curtain. The lights of the apartments across the street illuminated the fabric, and the window frames and partly-open French shutters made a shadow-pattern on it. Against the deep darkness of the room, this was very pleasing, and I looked at it for a long time, listening to my husband’s breathing and to the silence, suspended in a state of non-thinking. What it was, was acceptance of the moment just as it was; of myself as I was; the place as it was; my body as it was; and time as an illusion. It’s been a long time since my mind was able to settle down that much, and I was grateful for it.
9:10 PM
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Very slow this morning, after a restless night. Our apartment is turning into a hospital ship: J. has a mouthful of sutures, some of which seem to be pulling out, and I have a cold/flu that is causing a stuffy head, sore throat, and persistent body aches. It’s better today, but still fighting for the upper hand. I’ve invited it quite plainly to leave.
Outside – a beautiful day. The leaves are almost fully out now; light green and fresh as lettuce. We found out yesterday that the “horticulture” trucks come by twice a year to trim the street trees. “They cut quite a lot,” I said to our landlady. “Trop!” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Too much!” Today another truck came through, watering all the trees.
So the news is full of more horrible pictures and revelations from Iraq. What gets me are the comments from America: “I don’t know how these people got into our military,” – this from a Congressman; and the inevitable “she seemed like such a nice girl” from the hometown folks. What the hell is the matter with these people? Are they blind? Or just moronic? We have a culture that glorifies violence and makes it available to our children, in all its perverse forms. The culture sends incredibly mixed messages about sex and sexuality, and yet, through its Puritanism, has never found a way to teach young people what constitutes healthy sexuality or healthy relationships. And we glorify “freedom” and “democracy” and “America” and send children off to fight in a culture they know nothing about, but which has been reduced to vilified stereotypes, put them into frightening and demanding situations for which they’ve had no training, and then expect them to know how to handle it – and are horrified when suddenly we’re forced to witness the pairing of sexuality and violence.
Frankly, I’m disgusted but not shocked by what I’ve seen and read so far, because I know that human beings are capable of unimaginable behavior, particularly during war. All you have to do is read history to know that. I know that power and sexuality and violence are a very volatile mix. What angers me the most is the righteous indignation among Americans at every level, and their apparent inability to understand the laws of cause and effect. And it also makes me crazy to come up again and again against this naivete: as if we are somehow morally superior to all other societies, and immune to deviant behavior. Who is kidding who? When are those puritanical scales going to fall from our eyes?
Here in Montreal, there is a sex industry, and it is far more out in the open than what we’re used to in America. I don’t know a great deal about how it works, or what the State’s involvement is, but there are sex clubs and sexual services intermixed with retail businesses on St. Catherine Street and in other places, and when you open any of the “what’s on” arts newspapers, there are ads in the back for just about anything a person might want, accompanied by nude pictures of beautiful young women with strategically-placed “stars”. This makes me sad – if I had a daughter I sure wouldn’t want to see her in those pages – but it doesn’t offend me, because I know that sex is a human need, and the idea that we can stop people from trying to get it, or sell it, is hopelessly naïve: again, look at history. And I also think honesty about human behavior is preferable to living in a bubble.
9:43 AM
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Tuesday, May 11, 2004
A day of lying low. J. has a swollen jaw but not much pain, and hasn’t complained, even about the thin, room-temperature chicken soup. His reward was a chocolate milk shake in the middle of the afternoon. I feel crummy but, all things considered, I’m not going to complain either – I didn’t have my jaw hammered, sawn and drilled, or whatever they did to him.
So it was a day of watching out the window, mostly; working on the computer, reading. Around noon we noticed “No Parking” signs – sandwich-board style – being put on the other side of the street. When we looked more closely, they read “Horticulture”. Hmm. Then a big City of Montreal truck with a lift and bucket came down our side; it was two men trimming the street trees. They carefully did their work, left the branches on the street for the garbage collectors tonight, and went on down the street. We’re amazed at what people leave out for the municipal garbage: mattresses, logs, rocks, chairs, lamps – today I even saw a bureau. Much of this gets set out a day before, and picked over by neighbors; it seems to be a system. Our landlady said a lot of the furniture in our apartment came from the street.
She got two deliveries: a pile of topsoil which was dumped against “garage” – a door leading to an unfinished space just big enough for a car, and a pile of rolled turf for a new lawn in her back garden. The latter came this morning and we worried all day that it would dry out before she got home, but with the help of friends, she got it laid before dinnertime while her daughter played in the mud with a toy wheelbarrow.
9:10 PM
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Monday, May 10, 2004
J.’s surgery took a little more than four hours and was tricky, but successful. He’s home, icepacks on both cheeks, beginning the recuperative process. When I went to pick him up, the doctor came out to greet me and give J. some final instructions, very polite, “Bonjour, Madame.” He has a round face and big, dark Eastern European eyes. “Try not to smile too much,” he said, and added apologetically, “and no red wine.”
I had my own adventures today: it was my first time driving alone in the city, and that was exciting. But it was nothing like New York, or Boston, or LA – people here are so polite and the pace is really pretty sedate; the main deviation from orderly traffic is the swerving to avoid potholes, which are an inevitability in this climate.
The other new experience was purchasing prescriptions at the local pharmacy. Like most things here, there is a “way” it’s done. In this case, you give the prescription in at one window, even though there were no other clients waiting, and pick it up at another. The pharmacist, a young woman, was extremely attentive as she filled out a file for my husband, and then told me I could wait and it would be ready in “five to seven minutes” – which it was. When I picked up the prescriptions, which had been placed in a small plastic bin, she first asked what other medications he was taking and checked each new drug against that one in the computer. Satisfied that there weren’t any adverse interactions, she then spent a long time going over each of the prescribed medications in detail; this “conseil”, or “advice” is apparently a major part of the pharmacist’s job, but this was more thorough and more attentive than I’ve ever received. While waiting, I browsed around the store; there are a lot more homeopathic and herbal remedies here, as well as the usual shampoos and deodorants, and over-the-counter medications. Make-up and skin care are also bigger and more extensive, with a number of different lines, even in a small local pharmacy, and many products for applying and taking off one’s cosmetics.
One of the most fascinating aspects of living in a different culture is trying to figure out things that are confusing and unexpected. The other night, as we were leaving the apartment, a square-shaped, orange-colored van came around the far corner of the block, ringing a bell. We looked at each other in astonishment – could it be a Good Humor truck, caught in some sort of time-warp from our childhoods? The sound was absolutely identical. But when it got close, we saw the hand-painted script on the door: “Aiguisage” – “Sharpening”. It was a sharpening service, which must visit the neighborhood periodically. “Just like Damascus,” said J., amazed.
Last night he called me over to the window around dinnertime: “There’s a cock outside,” he said, and sure enough, there was a small car with a cheerful-looking, lighted rooster on the roof and a sign “Au Coq”. We figured that it was take-out food delivery, but of what? Omelettes? Only the yellow pages yielded an answer: not even fried chicken, but rotisserie chicken from “Au Coq Roulant” (“Chicken on Wheels”, basically) billed as “le meilleur poulet” in Montreal.
People put out bread for the birds, and someone even leaves a saucer of cat food outside her door for a neighborhood cat – maybe the striped tabby that suddenly appeared in our apartment last night, having somehow gotten into the back garden and climbed up the stairs to the second floor.
I’ve come down with a cold, which I hope, hope, hope will stay small and not communicate itself to my husband, since he is supposed to avoid sneezing and coughing, as well as red wine, food, and smiling. The weather has been crazy: 80 degrees again yesterday, cold and rainy today. All of our friends back home as well as many people here have colds, so it’s no wonder but unexpected and annoying, all the same.
9:37 PM
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Sunday, May 09, 2004
Last night some of our friends from home came to visit – Shirin and her husband, her father-in-law, and his friend. Shirin loves Montreal because there is so much wonderful Middle Eastern and Persian food, and her husband was teasing her that they had made one stop after another just to pick up different food items for her. At our apartment, after dinner, we sat around and ate fruit: apricots, strawberries, and oranges and gave Shirin two sweet lemons that we’d bought at the market. I’d never had one before, but she peeled the slightly lumpy fruit that looks like a small orange-sized lime, salted the segments, and gave them to each of us. It is a strange taste – sour but sweet, and not very lemony but definitely citrus. Shirin says in Iran they are considered medicinal, particularly good for people who have colds.
Today we met them for lunch at an Iranian kebab place in the section of Montreal called NDG. It took me a long time before I learned that NDG stands for Notre-Dame-de-Grace. To get there, you drive west through the downtown city-center and then through Westmount, the ultra-Anglo area of Montreal. There has been animosity between the Anglo and French citizens of Montreal forever, and both groups have created “zones” which are particularly theirs. The city is divided east-west by a main street called St. Laurent. East of it, and essentially east of the “mountain” (Mont-Royal) itself, the city is French. To the west, it is Anglo. The most French section is the Plateau Mont-Royal, where we are living, typified by residential neighborhoods of lace-curtained, wrought-iron balconied two-and three-story attached buildings and French-speaking shops. The most English area is Westmount, which looks like an English boarding school – spacious lawns, Gothic architecture, a conservatory and even a bowling green prominently placed close to the main street. Signage in Quebec must be in French, so in Westmount everything is in two languages: “Books” and “Livres”, which must irk the ultra-Anglos no end.
But beyond Westmount is NDG, with a lot of ethnic color. We met our friends at Marche Norooz, run by an Iranian family where the kebabs of spiced meat are grilled to perfection and served on warm pita with grilled onion and tomato and fresh herbs, and there is a bottomless pot of self-serve tea. Some of us drank dukkh, a sour, fizzy yogurt drink that I can’t stand but many Middle Easterners love. After lunch we ate most of a tin of a sweet that is a specialty from the holy city of Qom; it’s a not-very-sweet confection, less crunchy than peanut brittle and more so than halvah, flavored with saffron and pistachios.
My French triumphs and defeats for the day? Asking for salt in the supermarket and having the entire conversation in French without the stockboy switching into English. Listening nearly blankly to a fifteen-minute monologue by our landlady’s three-year old daughter, whose rapid-fire French became more and more earnest as she gradually realized these big dumb adults weren’t responding according to plan. I understood, finally, that she was telling a story about the neighbor’s dog, when she held her hands in front of my face, made a fearsome grimace, and said “GRRRR!”
Tomorrow J. is having his dental surgery in the afternoon, and then, after a few days of ice-packs and painkillers, we hope to be on the road to recovery.
9:25 PM
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Saturday, May 08, 2004
MARKET DAY
Today, Saturday, we took our neighbor and went to Marche Jean Talon, where we like to shop, and which is pretty close to where we're living. Our neighbor works for Air Canada and is here form Calgary, spending four months in an immersion French program for her job. She is trying to speak only French, so that's good for us, and we did our best to continue that during our morning at the market. We began at Patisserie Moisson, bakers extraordinaire, who have a shop with breads, pastries, pates and gourmet items on the side of the produce market. We bought three fresh butter croissants, one piece of chocolate mousse cake to share (such restraint!), and three coffees, and sat at a little green marble-top table eating and talking happily for an hour. (At one point I looked up and realized that the two French guys at a neighboring table had been listening to our halting but sincere conversation, and were quite amused.) We spoke about how lovely the women look here - the French women have so much style, regardless of income, and are so effortlessly feminine. How I wish! Our neighbor, who comes from a family of cattle breeders in Calgary, seems like a Canadian version of a western American, and finds Montrealers as different, appealing, and enigmatic as we do; it's fun to compare our impressions.
The market today was bursting with color - the first vegetable, herb and flower plants are being offered for sale, along with all the produce imaginable. We bought strawberries, oranges, asparagus, tomatoes and beautiful fresh basil, tiny zucchini and red peppers, lettuce and cucumbers, and just-blushing pears, and barely resisted the grilled sausages and spice-encrusted chicken at the Moroccan shop where we puchased raisins.
J. is having fairly extensive dental surgery on Monday afternoon, so some of this food will be wishful thinking for a while, or made into purees. In spite of that - a kind of torture in this culinary Mecca - we are settling into a pleasant routine of morning work and afternoon prowling, and spend most evenings at home reading or writing. The close quarters don't seem to be a problem for us at all, perhaps because we have imposed a "no talking" rule during work time. I'm making gradual progress on the book - slower than I'd like, but I'm accepting it as the pace that nature intends for me at the moment.
3:10 PM
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Thursday, May 06, 2004
Slowly, slowly, I can feel myself quieting down and entering the pace of this life and this neighborhood. Today was a lovely day that warmed gradually, with large white clouds and a sun that shyly emerged and retreated. In the morning I made French toast which we ate with pears and coffee, then I took a bath and did the laundry before settling down to work. There is a clever drying rack on the back balcony; four “legs” fold out from a central support, and coated wire-rack shelves flip up to lock onto the outer edged of the supports. You can either hang clothes from the wires with clothespins (pince a ligne) or lay them flat. I washed our things by hand in the sink, wrung them out, and carried them outside, where I took up each one and hung it to dry. I think that was when the sense of contentment began to come over me, but it is always present here, too, in the kitchen.
Our life is very simple, so much simpler than at home, and already I find myself, as I expected, questioning why and how regular life has become so complicated. Here we have a little wooden table, two old wooden chairs, four plates, four glasses, two coffee cups, four sets of silverware, a bowl, two pots and one sauté pan, a hot plate, a toaster-oven, a French-press coffee maker and a microwave. That’s it! You shop every day, and the produce, fish, and meat are extremely fresh. I bought eggs at the market from a farmer who had come in from the countryside; they are brown and have deep yellow yolks, and are delicious. I can feel the simple pleasure, sitting here at the small wooden table, of looking over at three perfect tomatoes, a bottle of wine for dinner, the tile floor, the yellow curtain at the window and the balconies of the apartments across the street. This afternoon, when I returned from a walk around the neighboring residential streets, I made myself a cup of sweet Arab coffee and sat drinking it on the top step outside. Little sparrows played in the tree, dropping down every now and then to pick up some bread crumbs. A young couple went by with their baby in a carriage. The old Frenchman with the craggy face who lives down the street passed by with his shaggy lapdog on a leash, two blue bows in her hair, and smiled up at me.
Later I went out to buy a bottle of wine for dinner. We’re beginning to do our usual reconnaissance of the neighborhood: where is the post office, the bank, the favorite café, the used-book store, the dry cleaner; which is the most interesting way to the metro; who goes to the park and what do they do there? What can you put in the grass-green recycling bins for the truck that come on Wednesdays? How do people manage their cars for the street-cleaning on Mondays and Thursdays? I watched as mothers picked up their children from the local elementary school, pulling the boys away from their soccer games in the paved, fenced playground, and bending down to talk to the little girls, arm around a shoulder, to hear how the day went. Lots of people ride bicycles, but there’s little overt exercise, American-style - except for the occasional skin-tight-jerseyed cyclist who looks as if he's about to enter the Tour de France - and almost no bottle-toting or high-tech fitness clothing. The neighborhood feeling is congenial, and entremely laid-back. And at five pm, there’s nearly always a big black standard poodle tethered outside the local market. He looks up eagerly when you say, “Bonjour!”
6:50 PM
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Tuesday, May 04, 2004
Today J. and I went to meet the dentist and have a consultation. I waited in the reception area, and when I heard him laughing I knew he was happy for the first time in this sorry dental saga. We went for coffee afterwards and he told me the dentist, who is Romanian, knew exactly what he was looking at as soon as J. gave him the x-rays, and had explained everything in great detail and made a firm recommendation of what he would like to do for the restoration of the three teeth in question. It was a very professional clinic, and interesting to me to see how the office ran and what the patients were like – although, of course, most of the conversation was in French. Everyone who came in seemed calm – that was a good sign – and the staff was both professional and friendly, all attired in starched white medical garb.
We’ve been coming to Montreal since the mid-90s, but much more frequently in the last three years. It’s not a beautiful city, not at all; the interest and beauty have more to do with the people and the mix of cultures. Observations from today:
-Everybody reads. A fancy, scrolling digital sign on the metro car we were gave, among other notices, recommendations by Montreal librarians of good new books.
-My winter sloth is rapidly receding; with a goal of walking four miles a day, I am already getting into better shape.
-A feature film is being shot in the local park, complete with huge carbon-arc lights, Panavision camera on rails, cranes for overhead shots, and 50’s vintage cars and costumes. It was fascinating to watch.
-People here are thinner and seem to eat less, especially less meat and processed food, but what they eat is very high quality – especially the fruits and vegetables, bread, and cheese. I am a voyeur when shopping at the markets; it’s fascinating to see what people are putting in their baskets…ummm…panniers.
-People smoke a lot more.
-In the meat section of the supermarket, there was ground cheval next to the ground boeuf, and cut-up lapin next to the chicken.
-Diversity is everywhere, and people generally seem quite aware of each other. The crime rate is quite low. A group of four young guys, all clearly close friends, got onto the metro tonight: a black kid with braids wearing a hip white pile outfit with baggy pants and bomber jacket; a Muslim guy wearing lather jacket and a crocheted white kufi, a white kid wearing a Yankees cap and passing around an MP3 player to the others, and a jovial white French Canadian guy with a hockey bag. In New York I would have been cautious. But here the hip-hop guy looked around when he got on the train, immediately gave his seat to a well-dressed older man who was reading a book, and smiled at me.
-The postman wears a beret.
8:42 PM
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Monday, May 03, 2004
There’s a monthly gathering of Montreal bloggers tonight at a bar up on St. Laurent, but I’m getting cold feet thinking about going by myself, even though the organizer, Patrick, told me I’d be most welcome and that people there speak both French and English. I’m managing pretty well in the language, and find that people switch into English less immediately with me than they used to. Every day brings both a little success and a little confusion. I have trouble with spoken numbers, for one thing. Yesterday, at the local grocery store, I thought I gave the clerk, a young woman with black hair streaked with crimson, the correct change but she asked me for something that sounded like “penny”. (You have to understand, when the French speakers speak English, you are hearing it with a French accent, so there is a double chance for misunderstanding.) Assuming I must have made a mistake, I finally handed her a penny, with a quizzical look. She reached out her hand and said the same word again, but this time I finally got it – she was saying “pannier” and reaching for my plastic shopping basket. I tried not to blush.
Today I wrote in the morning, made lunch, and then took a long, mostly-brisk walk in the neighborhood. It’s cold today, about 50 degrees with a strong wind, down from over 80 degrees the day we arrived. On one street, I went into a dimly-lit shop selling Moroccan antiques. The owner was just setting up his wares, and a sign in the window announced that a Salon du The would be opening soon next door. I browsed quickly though a dark maze of mosaic tile tabletops, carved wooden mirrors, leather footstools, metal trays and hanging lamps - all the real thing, not tourist reproductions. The owner was a thin, handsome man with a polite, shy Muslim demeanor. As I was leaving, I quietly said, in English, that he had beautiful things and I would be back with my husband. He smiled, poising his towel on the mirror he had been polishing. “Quoi?” he said. I was surprised again; of course most North African speak French, but I've gotten used to immigrants here who speak English nearly as well.
“Ah!” I said. “Je reviendrai avec mon mari.”
“Ah, merci, Madame,” he said, understanding, and I went back out to resume my adventuresome walk.
Now I’m back home. The woman staying in the mirror-apartment to ours, next door, works for Air Canada and is from Saskatchewan. She’s taking a three-month immersion French course, and leaves early every morning. When she arrived, she said, four weeks ago, she didn’t know a word of French. For the first two weeks, she came home every night and cried, but now she is beginning to be able to speak and understand. The three of us will practice together.
Our young landlady, Genevieve, has just hung her laundry out on the clothesline in the back, so there are white sheets flapping in the wind. Everybody has clotheslines; in fact the fronts of the buildings give very little clue about the vibrant life that happens in the back gardens and alleys between rows of attached buildings on two parallel streets. There is a huge tree in back of this house. The leaves are just coming out; I think it may be a butternut. It’s inhabited by a large grey squirrel, and when I lie in the bathtub in our apartment, I can watch him deftly navigating his route through the branches and along a big telephone cable that runs the length of the alley. I learned the French word for “squirrel” today so I can ask Genevieve’s little daughter, Marie-Mousse, about him – it’s ecureuil.
5:43 PM
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CHEZ NOUS
This is our street in Montreal; the green house is where we're living, in the upstairs apartment on the right.
We're settling in, and it feels very good. We're going extremely slow, for us; didn't even leave the house until 3:00 pm yesterday, and until now I've barely written a word. I don't think either of us realized how tired we actually were.
After going up to the huge public market yesterday afternoon, we came back, had some tea, took a walk in the neighborhood, bought some fish and a couple of local beers, and then made dinner together (olives and marinated eggplant and French bread, then artichokes, broiled Atlantic salmon, and salad with delicious fresh tomatoes, avocado, and tiny Armenian cucumbers.) We’ve spent quite a while today just sitting quietly or lying on the bed, listening to the wind and the occasional gull, or flock of geese flying overhead. The apartment is generally quieter than our house at home (although there is a good party going on right now in an apartment across the back) and I can feel us unwinding for the first time in a long, long time.
I told J., as we were listening to the voices coming from the party, where there was a small grill set up on the balcony and people going in and out, that here home life seems much simpler, and lived on a smaller scale, because so much of life happens outside one’s apartment. At home in the country, because there are so few outside resources, one ends up expecting one’s own home to be a park and a laundry, a gourmet restaurant serving multi-ethnic cuisine, a spa, a movie theater… and being steeped in old, hippie self-sufficiency, we’ve always done or fixed most everything ourselves. “And we do a pretty good job of it,” I said, lying on the bed, listening to the wind in the big tree behind the apartment, “but, my God, it’s exhausting.”
10:42 AM
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Friday, April 30, 2004
GENEVA CONVENTION? WHATS THAT?
For more on civilian contractor involvement in the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal (see below), here is an article from The Guardian. We may not be reading these details in the domestic media anytime soon: after all, CBS sat on their photos for 2 weeks at the Pentagon's request. (Thanks, qB!)
3:10 PM
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The kitchen is clean, laundry done, computers backed up, oil changed, bags packed, plants arranged in one place to make it easy for my friend who offered to water them. So I must be ready, right? Actually, it feels that way. I am ready, and looking forward to both familiar and unexpected places and events. One of those will be our first experience with Canadian dental care. J. has decided to have his surgery and implant preparation done in Montreal, after receiving two totally conflicting opinions - I kid you not - from local endodontists. One sent a report to our regular dentist showing the tooth with a large "X" over it, and the abscess clearly marked, recommending surgical extraction as soon as possible. The other (who had done the original root canal) said he could see no sign of continued infection, and that he'd see J. in three months for a follow-up. The first said the root seemed fractured and the canals incompletely filled; the second said the tooth was intact. This would be funny if it weren't so painful, as they say.
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Susurra and others have been blogging about recent developments in Iraq and asking how people are dealing with their frustrations and anger. It is truly frustrating. I spent two years doing everything I could to try to prevent the war and the kind of atrocities we are seeing in Falluja and at the prison. I've spent another year using my blog to try to help myself and others live in a world where violence is committed in our name, and despair and hopelessness loom ever larger. Now I'm about ready to get back out onto the street corner with my sign: what shall it be this time? How about simply, "Enough is Enough". But instead I am leaving for Canada, and a different political climate. This is not an escape, but it always gives me a greater perspective. There will be different films shown, to audiences with a different political temperature; the headlines will be different, along with the comments and concerns of people we meet. I hope to talk to the group of fine people we met two years ago at the Montreal Women in Black demonstrations against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. And when I get back, I will again do something more tangible and public here.
Right now I think all of us are in different places on that line between self-preservation and public outrage. Some of us feel numb, some express a lack of surprise. As for me, I will never cease to be shocked by human capacity for violence and atrocity. Last week I saw not only the prison photos but a four-page series of eye-witness photos from the streets and make-shift hospitals and morgues in Falluja. I didn't make it through the second page. I'm not one who can live with phrases like "there will always be wars" or "it's nothing new". While I agree that both statements are true, without people who stand up and shriek with outrage, or quietly commit parts of their lives to waging peace, there would have been far more wars and a future without any hope at all. If we are not surprised, we still must be shocked, and allow that shock to motivate us into action. Are we going to be people who are "shocked" at Janet Jackson's tits, or at dead children and flagrant abuse of prisoners?
What does no good at all is preaching to the left. If you want to do something, talk to people who don't agree with you, write Congress to get off their fat, special-interest-rich tails, and pressure the American media to cover the deteriorating situation in Iraq as vividly and fully as it is being shown to the rest of the world. The media is key, and has been key all along, to whether this administration gets away with murder or not.
Today, the prison scandal is the lead story on the BBC. It was mentioned as an aside on CNN and CBS, and not on any of the other major online network news sites I checked this morning; the media pegs us as people who are far more interested in Michael Jackson's day in court. But you know what? I think they're wrong about that. There was no mention on The New York Times. They got a letter from me.
(Blogging may be spotty for the next few days as we get settled, then I?ll be back.)
1:50 PM
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Thursday, April 29, 2004
The fire department wouldn't let us have a bonfire today - "too windy" even though the air was absolutely still in the village - but we pulled all the silvery-grey, dried stalks of Jerusalem artichokes on the bank, and cleaned up the vegetable garden, and I held the extension ladder while J. cut a big, overhangng branch out of the apple tree. All day long the whir of the tape backup system ran in our ears, copying hundreds of gigabytes of data, while I attended to totally analog chores like cleaning out the refrigerator.
This evening after dinner we went over to our neighbors' for a goodbye glass of wine. It was the first day wam enough to sit outside at night, so we reclined on our elbows in their backyard, under the tall spruce trees, drinking one bottle of good wine, and then another, while the planets and stars made their appearance in the heavens. I hadn't watched the stars come out for a long while - not since last summer - and it was magical to see them materialize one by one, until they populated the sky, and then were gradually covered by thin high clouds. Our neighbors are from Iceland, and they said that Icelanders get into some sort of cocoon-like sleeping bag affair, lie in a snowbank, and drink beer while watching the stars in the middle of winter. Sounds good to me. City nights won't be like this, I reminded myself; we won't see these stars again until we return home in June.
10:33 PM
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Wednesday, April 28, 2004
My father-in-law was already exhausted when we arrived for lunch. I was carrying a vase full of yellow blossoms. “Forsythia!” he said, his face lighting up as he struggled out of his chair to go into the dining room “It must be spring.” He had told me last week that when he first came to America it was winter, and in the spring, in New York, after that first long lonely winter, the forsythia bushes suddenly bloomed and he couldn’t take his eyes off them. “They’ve always meant America to me,” he said, smiling to himself, remembering. “Beautiful!”
Today, though, all his ninety-five years were showing. His blood sugar, which has been high, had plummeted, and he said they had stopped hsi medication and told him to eat sweet things: he had lentil soup, and then a plate of mandarin orange sections and strawberries. “I don’t understand it,” he said, and when he got up to get some water we decided to talk to the nurse on our way out. We went up to his apartment but left pretty soon after searching through piles of magazines for the latest New York Review of Books, with an article he recommended to us. He had an Arabic lesson to give at 4:00 pm. “Sleep,” we said.
“I have to,” he replied.
Later I did errands: a new pair of jeans, some toiletries, socks, and a mini book-light for late night reading, since we won’t have a second room to go to. There’s a pile of carefully-folded clothes in the bedroom, awaiting my duffle bag, and a growing pile of books, some associated with my writing project, along with a French dictionary and phrase books in French, Arabic, Farsi and Chinese. I considered taking my neglected knitting project and haven’t decided: will it be a distraction, or will I be glad to have it? The knitting bag is definitely going: it was a present from a friend, bought for a few dollars in Cambodia from the woman who wove it, and it’s perfect for market shopping. I think of that woman every time I use the bag and her comment to my friend: “Thank you very much, that is my treasure for today.” One day’s income, greatly appreciated, about equal to what I’ll pay for a couple of avocados, or a mango.
Downstairs, dahlia roots are soaking in a bucket of water and will be potted tomorrow; I put out two other pots for sweet pea seedlings that a friend will tend for me. Leaving my garden at this time of the year is the only wrenching part of this trip. Everything is so fresh, new, eager to thrive. I’ve done what I could, knowing I’ll come home to chaos, and flowers overrun by goutweed, but the garden is always in my head and my heart, ever willing to be considered and walked-through, whether from the perspective of February, or a city apartment.
10:24 PM
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SPRING
 Poppy Frills
6:49 PM
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Tuesday, April 27, 2004
My restless sleep pattern is continuing. I fell asleep at 10:30 and was up at 12:30, went to the couch, and slept fitfully until 3:30, when I went back to bed. I’m worrying about several things, all of which loom larger in the middle of the night, like shadows cast by objects familiar during the day. At least, once I leave here, some of those things will recede because I won’t be able to do anything about them. But the dread I’ve felt all year about mortality is all too portable. All other fears seem manageable intellectually, but not that one, tied as it is to factors totally beyond my control and fueled not only by the turn into my fifties but by a spate of illnesses and deaths among family and friends. What have been underscored, and what I haven’t faced squarely, are the strength of my ego-attachments, and the weakness of my faith that this dread reveals. How interesting it is that I believe in judgment, but find it so difficult to believe in eternity. I do feel responsible for my actions, and even though I would live the same way, I think, and make similar choices, I know I have believed that I’d be held somehow accountable – whether by God or by the laws of karma - ever since I was a child. Judgment isn’t the problem, though. I don’t spend my nights wracked with guilt; I know I try very hard to do the right thing. It’s the possibility of extinguishment that haunts me, the loss of that most precious attachment to my consciousness, as well as the loss of all that is familiar and dear. And yet I would tell anyone else, with certainty, that death is not forever, that it is a transition – to something unknown, certainly - but to something. I believe so strongly in the power of love and in what we are called to do here on earth; I believe in grace and have felt it countless times in my own life. Yet I come face to face with this wall of my own doubts. I thought, naively, that I'd already dealt with this. But it seems this is what I’m being asked to confront: more deeply, and head-on.
In a few minutes I need to prepare the service leaflet for today’s interfaith prayers and figure out a reflection or a reading. I’m cleaning out the freezer and took out two big containers of soup for our communal lunch. Because some of us are Muslim, we always have vegetarian soup; one container is carrot/tomato, but the other is split pea with ham. Being very careful to use separate spoons as I heat the two pots, I’ve been mulling whether it is all right to take the split pea soup or not, and decided after three years we know and trust each other enough that the Muslims won’t be offended. If they are, I will have learned something else that I needed to know.
Yesterday I made a to-do list for the trip, including a long list of what to pack. “I’m going to have to take a box of books,” I told J. “Sorry.”
Later: As it turned out, I decided not to take the split pea, and instead made a quick pot of red lentil soup. We met, had our service, prayed for peace, ate a good, simple lunch of soup, bread, cheese and fruit. I did the dishes while J. dried plates and silverware and put things away in the church kitchen. A light rain began falling as we drove home, and I looked out the window at the budded crab apple trees and the New England houses with their daffodils and forsythia bushes. It was beautiful, quiet, idyllic. “I can’t wait to get out of here,” I said.
I’d be a terrible Muslim and a terrible monk; repetition eventually drives me nuts. Ever since I was small, I always had a hankering for the strange food, the different person, the odd color, and most especially something different to do: something that would shake things up in my predictable world. It never got out of hand; I wasn’t a rebel in the classic sense. But I find sameness, eventually, more stifling than comforting. Paradoxically, perhaps, my spiritual life has been a way of coping with the sameness and the constraints that life imposes. I’ve found that one good aspect of repetition is that it creates a framework against which you can see yourself change. A meditation practice can be boring, just as liturgy can be boring. Work can be boring, and so can a long-term marriage. There are some limitations I willingly accept – loyalty and faithfulness to my partner, for one. The need to work hard and steadily in order to have financial security, as well as some freedom. Responsibility and commitment to friends and family, and certain organizations and institutions. Discipline and practice moving along side-by-side with creativity. I know that sometimes these things will feel exciting and joyful, and sometimes they’ll feel dull and nearly lifeless; this is reality. I also know that sometimes it’s important to be jolted - to experience a seismic shift – in order to see life and self afresh.
The place I live now is one where many people come to retire, or to find a lifestyle that is predictable, clean, pleasant, ordered, safe, white, liberal, Christian and…”nice”. When I moved here, back in 1976, the place was a lot more raw around the edges. Now it is, as someone at our lunch remarked, “a nice small town in Connecticut”, except that it’s a couple hundred miles north. A while ago a journalist wrote a series of newspaper articles skewering life and attitudes in the flagship town in our region, which he never named except to call it “Nicetown”. People were outraged, but they could hardly argue; he had it absolutely pegged.
I’m tired, I guess, of niceness in a world which is anything but. It’s time for a jolt that lasts longer than a weekend in the pulse of Manhattan; it’s time to immerse myself in a totally different environment and see if I can adapt, and see what it teaches me about myself and about this place that I’ve called home for nearly thirty years. Like a turtle, I know I carry my most essential “homeness” on my back and can’t shed it, even if I should want to, but I want to know what it’s like to swim in salt water rather than fresh.
On the other hand, all the solitude I’ve ever found was right here, which tells me that it is something I carry with me, too. Solitude is more a potential than a place; I just think the press of patterned behaviors and the weight of responsibilities have shoved that potential somewhat into the background lately. And I am rarely alone. Being alone – alone in the house, alone in nature, alone in a cathedral or a café – is a prerequisite to contemplation for me, and those opportunities are exceptionally rare in my normal life. Because of the way I’ve lived, I’ve learned how to pull a cloak of solitude around myself, even when I am not physically alone, but I think I yearn for an easier time of it.
We’ll see: we’re about to live for a entire month in one room instead of nine, but in a large city where one can either lose oneself in the crowd or find intimate, anonymous places in which to be alone and undisturbed. The seismic jolt is coming.
3:20 PM
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Monday, April 26, 2004
RED AND BLUE AMERICA
Highly recommended: a three-part series from The Washington Post on the ideological and cultural polarization of America, and, by extension, the American electorate. The first installment is an overview. Today's article is a visit with a "red" (conservative Republican) family in Texas; tomorrow's will be with "blues" (liberal Democrats) in San Francisco.
8:24 PM
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In winter the stripped landscape of Nelson County looks terribly poor. We are the ones who are supposed to be poor; well, I am thinking of the people in a shanty next to the Brandeis plant, on Brook Street, Louisville. We had to wait there while Reverend Father was getting some tractor parts. The woman who lived in this place was standing out in front of it, shivering in some kind of rag, while a suspicious-looking anonymous truck unloaded some bootleg coal in her yard. I wondered if she had been warm yet this winter. And I thought of Gethsemani where we are all steamed up and get our meals, such as they are, when meal time comes around, and where I live locked up in that room with incunabula and manuscripts that you wouldn’t find in the home of a millionaire! Can’t I ever escape from being something comfortable and prosperous and smug? The world is terrible, people are starving to death and freezing and going to hell with despair and here I sit with a silver spoon in my mouth and write books and everybody sends me fan-mail telling me how wonderful I am for giving up so much. I’d like to ask them, what have I given up, anyway, except headaches and responsibilities?
Next time I am sulking because the chant is not so good in the choir I had better remember the people who live up the road. The funny thing is, though, they could all be monks if they wanted to. But they don’t. I suppose, somehow, even to them, the Trappist life looks hard!
Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas. An entry from January 8, 1949.
It’s a grey, dark day here, and when we woke there was rain pelting against the roof. It’s let up now, and in the bathroom the rainwater is slowing sliding down the incline of the skylight, blurring the silhouettes of the bare-branched treetops. This is the sort of weather that has been depressing me all through the late winter, but today it seems almost indescribably beautiful. It is practically the last day for bare trees; leaf buds are swelling on all the red maples and the honeysuckles are already covered with a cloud of pale green. On the apple tree outside the bedroom window, drops of water hang from the ends of each black twig, daring both gravity and time.
In less than a week, we’re heading to Montreal to live for a month. This will be the longest amount of time I’ve spent in a city in my half-century of life. We’re going as a change from the life we’ve led here, from the house we’ve inhabited for more than 25 years, from the rural countryside, from the particular web of responsibilities and patterns we’ve woven. Besides being urban, Montreal is an international city: proudly and gracefully maintaining its French heritage and a broad ethnic and cultural diversity despite its proximity to the United States and the English-speaking provinces of Canada. It is a mere three-and a half-hours from here, and a world apart.
We’ve been thinking of this month as an experiment. After several years of weekend trips and the occasional week-long stay we want to find out what our commitment to this city really is: how much do we really like living there, and what might that mean for our future? This is what I thought the month was going to be about: practical matters, finding out how we felt, considering some changes and potential investments at this gently teetering point of midlife.
Strange, then, that on this wet dark morning I felt, for the first time in several years, a strong call to contemplation. Could it be that part of this journey might be a sort of retreat, bizarre though it seems to retreat to a city? And yet I feel the call so clearly, bidding me to use the coming time and change of place not for distraction and escape, or merely for outward life decisions, but to learn something inner and as yet unrevealed.
For those who believe in God and believe, further, that She has a sense of humor, consider the idea of moving a writer - especially one steeped in the ultimate contemplativeness of rural Vermont life, complete with clapboard-clad house and vegetable garden, and a pervasive silence punctuated only by bird and cricket - to the bustle and endless distraction of a city of three million souls for the purpose of contemplation. Funny, even preposterous. But that’s what may be happening. I’ve been on this winding, unpredictable, and largely dusty spiritual path for long enough now to recognize the changes and imperatives when they come - and for the most part, they have come like this, of the blue.
What immediately fits is the fact that contemplative solitude, for me, is actually easier to find in the city. Having lived my entire life in the fishbowls of small towns, where I cannot step outside my door or buy a bag of carrots without running into someone who knows me, the anonymity of the city is a huge relief. It creates a sense of freedom that is impossible for me here. Perhaps because of living so many years in the country and close to nature, solitude, for me, is not dependent on silence, but on being removed from the obligation to talk, interact, and plan. And yet, being a social creature and a moderate extrovert, and knowing that my husband – the opposite - likes to take off for long periods of photographic exploration on his own, I’ve been a little worried about having to deal with too much solitude during an entire month of urban living. “Use it,” I hear now. “It’s a gift.”
This morning there’s much that I don’t understand. Is this simply an emotional reaction to the Merton I’ve been reading – the kind of excited, creative impulse I often feel when reading or seeing something that inspires me, but which afterwards reveals itself as just that – a kind of steamed-up excitement that quickly evaporates when I steps out into the daily reality of life? Or is it the real thing, which, if I follow it out, will lead me somewhere I’m meant to go? And in that case, what was that decision to pick up Merton during Holy Week? How do we ever know these things? All I know is that certain books have leapt off shelves into my hands for years, and changed me, and changed the course of my life and my thinking. What I suspect is that in this case, choosing to read this particular volume of Merton again was a sign that I was entering into a psychological place that was receptive to contemplation. What I didn’t do was connect it to the upcoming travel. And whether that happens or not depends on my assent to the invitation.
(I'm planning to keep a journal over the next five weeks and to blog pieces of it; this is the first installment. Please don't stop talking to me, though!)
8:14 PM
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Sunday, April 25, 2004
My parents came to visit this weekend, and we had a good time. In addition to the usual conversation, cooking, eating, and a little shopping, we had a Ukrainian egg-decorating session, and watched two movies in the evenings: Master and Commander, and the new Jack Nicholson/Diane Keaton romantic comedy for the reading-glasses generation, Something's Got to Give. Enjoyed both, although I had to shut my eyes during the shipboard surgery scenes in Master and Commander. I've never read the O'Brian books, having gotten a bit turned off by some over-enthusiastic Anglophile fan-friends of mine, but the movie piqued my interest through the terrific characters and by bringing up a lot of esoteric sailing questions (how many replacement sails did those boats carry, anyway?) Any of you read them? Comments? My favorite part was, of course, the Galapagos sequence. Chris, wouldn't a nice, big, gentle tortoise be a great addition to your growing menagerie?
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On Saturday, Denny wrote about hearing a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at St. Paul's Cathedral in London one July Fourth, and today he wrote some thoughts about our military personnel. These posts jogged a couple of memories for me. First, I know exactly why Denny got disoriented getting off the Tube at the stop for St. Paul's because the same thing happened to me the first time - you'd think the cathedral would be right in front of you, and it is, sort of, but you can't see it. He said he asked directions from an old man selling newspapers, and when the man asked him if he was American, he said yes, and the man said, "Happy Birthday."
I've had similar experiences in London with older people for whom WWII was still the defining event of their lives. What I heard in their voices and saw in their faces was totally undeserved gratitude to me for being American. The memorials to Allied servicepeople killed in that war are in many places in London, but nowhere so poignantly as in the chapel behind the high altar at St. Paul's, which was rebuilt after German bombing.
My father was a tank driver in WWII, and he crossed the Channel to land at Normandy the day after D-Day. He had been in London briefly, and then was in engagements in France, Belgium, Germany and Poland, including the Battle of the Bulge. He was eighteen years old, the son of a small-town Methodist minister. Like Denny, he came home. A number of his friends didn't. If he hadn't, obviously I wouldn't be here.
Anyone who reads these pages regularly knows my feelings about war, but I want to make clear that one reason I hate it so much is the price that young people are asked to pay by serving in the world's armies. I know a little bit about this because of growing up in a houseful of adults who had all been profoundly affected by WWII. I couldn't agree more with most of Denny's reflections about the sacrifice these young people are being asked to make; and frankly, if the leaders who've sent their nations' youth into battle throughout history had had to make those sacrifices alongside them, we would have had a lot fewer wars. We talk about governments going to war because they can rely on stockpiles of armaments, but less is said about the way they have always relied on the supply of young human beings, without whom armies would be impossible.
In that back chapel in St. Paul's, there are stained glass windows honoring the Americans who served and helped save Britain. There is also a huge book in which are written the names of the 28,000 identified American soldiers who were stationed in the United Kingdom for a time and died in its defense. You can ask to be shown any name. I looked at that book, and I wept for a long time.
There was a lot more to that old man's "Happy Birthday" than mere hospitality; I'm not sure it's something that we can even comprehend from this distance of time and experience.
3:55 PM
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Saturday, April 24, 2004
MERTON ON ELIOT
"For the first time it has been warm enough to sit outside. After dinner I sat in the sun and read T.S. Eliot's 'East Coker' and part of 'The Dry Salvages' from Four Quartets. Eight years ago when we were at the cottage at Olean, Nancy Flagg had 'East Coker' in manuscript, for it was still not published. We all said we didn't like it, but today I like it quite a lot...I was surpsied to find him drawing so heavily on St. John of the Cross; I do not see immediately how it fits in...but the beginning is fine and the rhymed sections are very beautiful - as beautiful as anything that has been written in English for fifty years or more.
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.
I think this book is the best of Eliot. Also, I admire Eliot's literary chastity. he is not afraid to be prosaic, rather than write bad verse. but when he is very prosaic he is weak...
...As a poet, I have got to be sharp and precise like Eliot - or else quit.
Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas, an entry from March 14, 1948
4:01 AM
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Thursday, April 22, 2004
Thomas Merton was always struggling to find a balance between action and contemplation, mostly complaining that he couldn't get enough quiet or contemplative time in the "busyness" of the monastery, despite the vows of silence and the goal of contemplation. He tells the following story, at his own expense, about a fellow monk who had recently died. I guess I could imagine myself getting the same kind of comeuppance.
I asked Reverend Father what made Brother [Gregory] so saintly. I don't know what kind of answer I was hoping to get. It would have made me happy to hear something about a deep and simple spirit of prayer, something about unexpected heights of faith, purity of heart, interior silence, solitude, love for God. Perhaps he had spoken with the birds, like Saint Francis.
Reverend Father answered very promptly: "Brother was always working," he said. "Brother did not even know how to be idle. If you sent him out to take care of the cows in the pasture, he still found plenty to do. He brought in buckets of blackberries. He did not know how to be idle."
I came out of Reverend Father's room feeling like a man who has missed his train.
(The Sign of Jonas)
11:03 PM
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Wednesday, April 21, 2004
I was stunned yesterday when I visited CommonBeauty and saw that he is probably giving up his blog, and today I've felt really sad about it. A loss for all of us who have been privileged to read his fine writing, glimpse his thoughtful mind and sensitive heart, feel his generous spirit, and see his drawings. He's busy with so many wonderful things in actual life, though, I can hardly blame him, just wish him the very best.
Usually I think of myself as dealing with change pretty well, or at least being philosophical about it, but this sudden potential departure made the ground quake under my feet a bit. A while back some of us - led by Butuki, I think - were speculating about whether web friendships are real or not. They feel real to me, but we are not responsible to each other in the same way; it is as easy to pull the plug and disappear as it is to one day stop clicking on a link we've clicked on for months. Gone!
I realize, thinking about this, that I'm not very good at protecting myself from disappointment and loss. I tend to engage and pick up the pieces if they fall later on, and I doubt that characteristic will change. It's like the students who I come into contact with through church and the college: you can either engage and be fully present, knowing it's temporary, or not. I suppose all relationships are like that, really, aren't they?
9:30 PM
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Tuesday, April 20, 2004
"According to the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, spirituality is not for people who are trying to avoid hell; it is for people who have been through hell. In many ways, spirituality is about what we do with our pain. And the truth is, if we don't transform it, we will transmit it."
- Al Gustafson
via whiskey river
10:14 PM
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Kurt is blogging today, with his usual perceptiveness, about that recurrent subject of whether to write about politics or not, and how to deal personally with the anger he feels about current events. We've talked about that here but it's one of those bottomless subjects, always with room for another take.
One of the great hungers I sense is how to observe and absorb the horrors of today's world, and yet remain open to its beauty and functional as a human being. And many of us want to make a difference. I've been very engaged politically and as an activist for big chunks of my life, and there have been other times, like the present, when I've stepped back. Usually that's because the protest has run its course or lost effectiveness, or because I've come close to burning out, or because other priorities in my life came to the fore. Sometimes I've stopped reading or listening to the news very much, as self-preservation. So I think the first requirement is to listen to your emotional and physical self and try to see what you have strength for, remembering that sometimes it takes more strength to disengage than to engage. Right now I'm not standing on street corners holding signs. Last year I was. This fall I may do it again, or be more involved in the campaign; I'm not sure. I've wanted to sponsor a Palestinian child; maybe the current situation will make that decision finally happen.
But I try to never stop being a witness. Wherever I am, if talk turns to politics or ethics, I speak up for what I think is right. Often a dinner party or even some chance encounter is a time when a few well-chosen, calmly-spoken words can help somebody move in a more constructive direction. I've kept up leading the monthly interfaith gatherings because I think it's important and because that community of cross-cultural people needs each other. When I'm asked to speak about interfaith issues, or being motivated to social justice by my faith, I nearly always say yes.
The other thing is that I think we can try very hard to "be" peace, and to find the beauty and joy around us. Our attitude toward each day is really a choice that is ours to make; people who live with adversity every day show us that way. I am most inspired by those, like Desmond Tutu, who fully know what is going on, never ignore it, and are full of joy and hope anyway. It's become clear to me that these people are the real saints, not the ones who preach gloom and doom; it is, frankly, a much harder path to get onto than the one of despair and cynicism, but once you're on it, the light you need becomes available and your eyes - even with tears in them - become much more open and receptive to the good and the beautiful.
3:07 PM
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Monday, April 19, 2004
Last night, late, a thunderstorm came through from the west. My mother, in New York State, had told me they'd had a big storm with lots of rain, wind, and enough hail to whiten the lawn.
We were in bed, reading, when we heard the first distant drum-rolls of thunder, but they advanced quickly, louder and louder, and pretty soon the first fat drops were hitting the windows on the west side of the house, and then cascading onto the skylight. It rained hard for an hour or so, and then let up, and this morning we woke to clear skies and 55 degrees. By 2:00 pm the thermometer said 88 degrees, and when we went out to see if that could possibly be true - it was - J. flopped down on the grass and announcd that summer had come. It was very windy: kite weather, I thought to myself.
I got a towel - the ground is only recently thawed and still pretty damp - and laid down beside him, my dark clothing instantly soaking up the heat. Little goldfinches, newly yellow, chirped at us from the thistle feeder, and on the neighbor's bank, above us, the tall Norway spruce trees swayed and tossed in the stiff wind, while our own maples scraped against each other and complained.
When I finally opened my eyes I saw a scene that I exists in the far recesses of childhood: my own hair, blonde and back-lit by the sun, a few inches from my eye, forming a golden, slightly-out-of-focus curtain beyond which, without moving, I could watch the drama of life that moved on the blades of grass and along the moist earth. The first open daffodil swayed, at eye-level, in the perennial bed. The sun warmed my hair and gave it that special hot, organic scent, and I lay there, quiet, for a quarter of an hour, knowing it might snow tomorrow but sure that spring had arrived.
4:53 PM
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Sunday, April 18, 2004
We spent some very happy, meditative, and fun time yesterday afternoon learning how to make Ukrainian Easter eggs. A good friend of ours, who happens to be an Episcopal priest, is an expert at this craft, which is practiced by Ukrainians especially during Holy Week, almost like icon-writing. I've always wanted to learn how to do the technique, which is a sort of batik/wax resist/dye process, but it seemed enormously complicated until the process was carefully explained and de-mystified by our friend. Sitting around a kitchen table with burning candles, cubes of beeswax, stacks of paper towels, white eggs, and the special wax-melting-writing tools with which you "draw" on the eggs was a wonderful way to spend an afternoon. J. and I made several eggs which had a naive, beginner's charm, compared to our friend's professionalism (that's her hand in J.'s picture above), and I liked the process so much I ordered some supplies. My mother and I have made dozens and dozens of Easter eggs over the years, so this is a new technique to add to many others.
7:55 PM
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READ AT YOUR OWN RISK
WildfireJo is an English activist who writes a blog from Iraq. Her most recent post (April 12) tells of working with an ambulance crew under fire in Falluja. It's difficult and heartwrenching reading, but anyone who has any illusions about what's going on over there ought to read this, and then consider the story we're getting on our news.
2:28 PM
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