Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Saturday, July 24, 2004 LATE AFTERNOON SHOPPING SHADOW
Every time I go shopping here, I know I am letting myself in for feeling awkward. And it’s strange to feel awkward, because I’ve spent thirty years in exactly the same place, knowing what to do where, and my entire lifetime in a culture that is fairly homogenous, thanks to franchising and television and transient people. That’s what we want, isn’t it? Go into a McDonald’s anywhere in the U.S., and a predictable experience will be delivered up – you won’t even have to ask anyone where the bathrooms are. My father-in-law told me about a book, a privately published memoir written by one of his neighbors who had recently moved to the same retirement home. It tells of a trip around the world. “But,” my father-in-law confided, “they didn’t really see the world – not the way it really is. They were staying in grand hotels, eating familiar food.” He knows; all his traveling has been done the other way.
The last time I remember feeling this awkward was when I went away to college and didn’t know where anything was or how to do things so that I wouldn’t make mistakes. Back then, at eighteen, the last thing I wanted to do was have attention drawn to myself, so I remember cringing at every new, unfamiliar experience. I guess I’ve changed a bit since then. Now, each trip out my door is an adventure, and the awkwardness merely amuses me – in fact, I like it because it tells me to notice and think about all these differences that are tripping me up.
Doors, for instance. My shopping takes place mostly on rue Mont Royal, which, in addition to being considered one of the hip streets of this city, caters to the needs of the local residents of the Plateau Mont Royal, the area in which we are now living. For someone like me, setting up a new place to live, there are hardware stores, dollar stores, kitchen stores of the cheap or expensive varieties, pharmacies, supermarkets, laundries and dry cleaners, and many wonderful specialty stores selling meat, cheese, fish, coffee, chocolates, breads and pastries. Of course, there are also stores selling books, CDs, furniture, flowers, clothes, shoes, lingerie, fabric, gifts…you name it…as well as many, many restaurants of every possible ethnicity. By New York standards, none of this is "fancy"; Avenue Mont Royal is not SoHo, at least not Soho of the last twenty years. Some of what's here is trendy, to be sure. Mainly it's fun, and varied, and, like most of this city, casual. When I first started coming here, I thought rue Mont Royal was, well, touristy. What I didn’t see then, and am just starting to understand now, is how the tourist shops and restaurants co-exist with all the purveyors essential to a thriving local, neighborhood economy.
But back to doors. Lots of stores here have an entrance door, and an exit door. This is not the same where I come from: most of the time you go in and out the same door. Every single food store I’ve visited is set up differently, and now that I’ve finally figured out to look for the entrance door, I am beginning to avoid walking into the cashiers instead of the lane where I can pick up a basket or cart. Sometimes there is a turnstile, sometimes not. That gets me into the store. Now I have to find my way around it. Supermarkets are easy, because they are mostly self-serve, as in America. But this is neighborhood shopping, with real butchers and bakers and fish mongers who expect to wait on you, so you have to learn how to ask for what you want. Then you have to figure out how and where to pay. In some boutique-style stores, you pay at the department – meat, or cheese, for instance. In most you pay at the cashier up front, where they will invariable ask, in French, some question like “Do you want to pay for the exact amount or would you like cash?” or “Do you have a store charge card?” Everyone switches to English instantly when I look bewildered, but I want to learn the French phrases so sometimes I ask them to repeat what they said. It is all very friendly, and the people in line are patient with each other – I haven’t received one dirty look yet. The final task is to learn where to leave your basket, and where to exit the store. And then remember it all the next time you go there.
I mention this because it is so amazing to me to realize how much of daily life I have taken absolutely for granted, and how terribly difficult moving must be for people who immigrate from entirely different cultures, often without the benefit of local language skills. The disorientation must be staggering. Even for us, making all these small adjustments to a new place has a physical effect; we are both feeling clumsy, we drop things, bump into things, forget things because our bodies are not used to moving in this space and our minds have not yet learned new patterns. It’s an eerie feeling, difficult when you fight it, but fascinating when you just let go and ride along, watching your body and mind discover, adjust, learn.
Before we came up here with the van, we went shopping for a new vacuum cleaner. With the latest Consumer Reports ratings all printed out and in hand, we arrived at the correct aisle in the local Sears and were greeted by Stacey, a young, skinny, dark-haired, quite pregnant woman with sallow skin and a wry smile. Stacey, it turned out, knew her vacuum cleaners, and she was also ready for Consumer Reports types like us.
We hadn’t shopped for vacuum cleaners for at least twenty years, not unlike our recent forays into mattress-land, but vacuum cleaners had obviously changed a good deal more. First of all, they were huge, and second, they looked like spaceships. “Wow, this is really heavy!” I exclaimed, hefting a streamlined purple model onto the floor as Stacey stood by sympathetically.
“Yeah, they’ve gotten pretty fancy,” she commiserated. “But they kind of propel themselves. See, this is all plugged in, you can try it.”
Whoosh…the vacuum cleaner practically leapt into action. “What’s this?” I asked, pointing at a red light that flashed green as I guided the self-propelled vacuum across the floor.
“That’s your dirt sensor,” said Stacey, looking at me almost apologetically – she already has us pegged, I thought. “It senses where there’s dirt in the carpet, and changes to green when it’s clean.”
“Oh, really!” I said. “Honey, did you see this?” J. had been over in air conditioners, and he came to meet me.
“What have you found out?” he asked, and then, looking at the row of poised futuristic monsters in front of me, “What are these?”
“Vacuum cleaners. Look, this one is rated a Best Buy.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “Where are we going to keep it?”
“Beats me.”
“What does it eat?” he asked. Stacey looked on, pretty patiently I thought.
Finally we selected a cheap model that was lighter, smaller, and bagless. We also bought the least expensive microwave they had, for the close-out price of $26. None were in stock, but Stacey sold us the display model off the floor, assuring us that she’d have an instruction manual sent to our home. I hope she does, because it’s on the counter here in Montreal and I can’t figure out how to set the clock. We took the vacuum cleaner home and tried it out on our rugs and on the bare floor, and to our chagrin, it cleaned far better than the old one. The “turbo tool” did a fast job on upholstery, and having a hose and nozzle attached to the upright vacuum cleaner was a lot more convenient. What was gross though, was the see-through plastic container that replaces the bag – all the dirt, grime, dustballs, seeds, and pebbles in the carpet were now quickly accumulating. I thought it was funny; J. thought it was disgusting. He does the floors, though, and what really mattered to him was that they were cleaner.
The next day he went out and bought another one to replace our two old vacuum cleaners, one upright and one canister, which suddenly looked like relics from the dark ages. The lighter model from Sears came with us up here, and the other one – purple, with a real bag and a headlight, in case you’re vacuuming away your insomnia – awaits us back in earthy, futuristic Vermont.
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Last night we arrived late, unpacked the car, and slept on our new mattress instead of the sofa bed – on the floor, but hey, that’s fine – and woke up to a beautiful morning in the city. It’s been very hot, but not too oppressive, and we’ve been glad to find out that our apartment stays pretty cool if we keep a fan running.
This afternoon we had a long conversation with a native Frenchman who has lived here for thirty years. He works in a sales job in a service industry, and came to our apartment exactly on time for the appointment we had set up. As it turned out, he was not only competent and professional, but well educated, very informed and thoughtful about society, politic, and foreign affairs. In case I need to say it, we were taken by surprise: once again, a social encounter pointed out how quick we are to categorize people, how much this seems to be an American trait, and how wrong those categorizations tend to be here.
He wanted to talk, as several people have, about America post-9/11, and to find out whether his perception was really true that our society has become much more fearful and willing to trade illusions of security for civil rights and personal freedoms, something he felt very sad about. He also wanted to compare the two societies on values, especially attitudes toward gun control and materialism. Since his parents still live in France, he was able to speak about French attitudes too, and it was most interesting. “One thing we cannot understand here, and the French cannot either,” he said, “is how America reacted so dramatically to the horror of the deaths on 9/11, but every year there are – what, ten times that many? - people killed by guns in the United States. This doesn’t make any sense to us.” He looked closely to make sure he wasn’t offending us. “As you can see,” he said, ‘I feel comfortable with you, so I can talk like this.” He went on: “Sometimes, it seems to me, having personal freedom to that extent becomes not-freedom; it becomes like a prison. To be so afraid, to live with fear of violence, to not be able to walk on the streets at night – this would be intolerable to me.”
We had concluded our business forty-five minutes earlier, and now we sat and talked while the breeze blew in the window and bicyclists sped past on the street. Our guest kept apologizing for his English, which was accented but nearly perfect; in spite of the fact that he was expressing very abstract ideas he said he felt like he was speaking “as a child”. We talked about quality of life, and about food, and ethnicity, and tolerance and what it means, and then we spoke a little about the Iraq war and European and Canadian attitudes. “Here in Canada, we see ourselves as being in-between Europe and the U.S.; both are our friends, we have reasons to care about both. Some Canadians will say, ‘We don’t like the U.S.’ but it’s not really true. The same with the French. The French love America, and always have. That’s why Chirac was able to say what he did. This is how you are with a good and close friend. You can say, ‘I love you, but I disagree with the thing that you did, or the way you are behaving, and because we are good friends I feel I can tell you honestly.’ It’s true, though, that a lot of people don’t feel quite the same way about America as they did before 9/11, and those relationships will have to be rebuilt.” He insisted, even when we expressed some pessimism and frustration on the point, that Americans were unique in their ability to be self-critical and to change. “It’s one of the strongest things about your society,” he said, “and one that the rest of us admire very much.”
He was optimistic, forgiving, and philosophical. I said I thought perhaps America was like an adolescent, and that we didn’t have the maturity yet to make wise decisions. “I don’t think it is a question of maturity,” he said. “All great powers are tested this way, and they all make big mistakes. The question is whether we learn from them. And really, when you look at it, all our recent story – say, the past fifty years - all of this is just a blink of an eye. We can be very critical, but we also have to look at the things that have improved so much, like the advances in medicine. So science has progressed a lot, we have better health, now we need to take that to Africa. But we don’t – we’re not there yet. Hopefully we will be someday. This is how the world moves forward. I can envision a world that is full of peace where everyone is taken care of. I can see that in my mind. But we are not there yet. It’s a slow progression.”
I had told him earlier that I was a writer, and J. was a photographer. “What do you write about?” he asked. “I often write about religion,” I said, now looking closely at him to see his reaction, but there was none.
But after his comments about politics and society, he said, “I think God has given each one of us a candlelight that is burning inside.” He tapped his chest with two fingers, and his eyes became soft as he looked directly into mine. “Sometimes you lose the sense that it is still burning, but actually it is. Each of us has to guard that light, which is a gift to us; that is what I think.”
“That’s why I write about religion,” I said, smiling, and he smiled back while J. laughed in agreement.
“Yes! And I have stayed a long time.” He got up and shook both our hands, very formally. We thanked him and said how friendly and helpful nearly all of the Canadians have been that we’ve met.
“May I tell you something?” he said, and the question was a sincere request for permission. We nodded and said of course. “Many friends who have come from France to live here have told me this. They say that the Quebecois are very, very friendly, and warm, and helpful, and that they met many people like this. But it takes a long time to make deep, lasting friendships here. That is what they say, and I think it is true. Perhaps it will help you to know that.”
He walked toward the door and turned back. “It has been very good talking to you. If you need any information or help about things here, please call me.” The door shut behind him, and we sank onto our couch and looked at each other, once again astonished.
As soon as you get above Vermont's Green Mountains, the landscape flattens like a lump of butter melting onto a griddle, and it stays flat all the way to the St. Lawrence. It's hard to believe the degree of change, when you've just passed through pretty tall mountains. It's also hard to imagine the amount of corn that is being grown in these fields that stretch from horizon to horizon, and, in the warm summer, to remember the fierce and frigid wind that blows incessantly from the northwest all winter. But this is the season of mais sucre, sweet corn, and strawberries, whose images - with eyes, teeth, and legs - adorn signs all along the road. We stopped and bought four ears of corn, two cucumbers right off the vine, a little container of fresh red raspberries, and a handful of the biggest, meatiest cerises - cherries - I've ever seen or eaten - not grown there, I'm sure, but amazing.
We drove a rental van with some furniture and household items to Montreal on Saturday, and came back late Sunday night - a long, hot 36 hours with a lot of lifting and hauling, a morning trip to IKEA (had to take advantage of that van while we had it), and a long hike from the Plateau to downtown in the baking heat of yeserday afternoon to pick up our DSL modem (first things first, after all!) Then I came back and worked on the little garden on the terrace for the rest of the afternoon while J. got the DSL working - somewhat. Now we're back in Vermont.
It's funny - there were a lot of compliments on my garden pictures, but I was just as absorbed and interested trying to figure out what to do with the little shady terrace outside our city apartment. I think a garden is a state of mind: one can have a garden anywhere - even in a single pot outside a window, and that little place can transform one's approach to the world. My father-in-law now has two gardens. One is the orchid plant he rescued from a retirement-home cast-off bin, and is nursing back to health in his bedroom. The other is in an assortment of pots on his balcony: radishes, a cherry tomato plant, a pot of green onions, some zinnias, a rose-scented geranium, a window-box full of parsley. There is a hummingbird feeder, and everytime we visit him he insists on an inspection of his garden and tells us how he sits there in the evenings and watches the hummingbirds, and all is right with the world.
I'll post a picture of the Montreal "garden" soon: this time I moved the sun-loving plants to a better location, repotted the hibiscus trees, planted a pot of basil and parsley (known sometimes as the family vegetable), and put some coleus in the shadiest spots. Right now it's a learning time, to see how the sun moves and the rain falls, where the wind is damaging and where the plants are protected, how the plants could be arranged to make the nicest environment and "outdoor room" for people. But I've gone from feeling garden-bereft there to realizing it is mine for the making.
I'll also post, someday soon, a plan and picture of the whole garden here. When you see close-ups you will discover it isn't so glorious after all, and realize with me that it is too big and too much work for one small female with an achy back. One option is to stop growing all but a few vegetables. Another is to move toward more shrubs and fewer perennials in some of the difficult locations. More abstractly, this relocation and restructuring of our life is teaching me a lot about gardening: what it means to me, why I do it, which aspects are the most satisfying, when and how it becomes a burden. The city place is showing me that small can be good, too; re-assessing this country garden teaches me that much of what I call "home" is the instinct to care for something and to create a place that feels calm and beautiful, but that I tend to expand my ideas beyond reasonable bounds of what I can actually manage. Both gardens tell me that perfection is impossible when one is dealing with living things; letting go of that notion is essential to realizing the calmness the gardens were meant for in the first place.
