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, January 15, 2005
ICE WORLD
This is an alley near our apartment. The sidewalks are mostly clear now, after warm weather and rain, but the alleys and the sidewalks that get flooded - like those in the park - are glare ice. Montreal streets are arranged with long, narrow, attached, multi-unit (usually brick) buildings running perpendicular to the streets. These back up on an alley that is parallel to the two streets. A lot goes on in the alleys: people have gardens in their backyards, and clotheslines, and sheds for tools and sometimes for parking; many of us use the alleys for walking and biking although, as you can see, that is a little difficult right now. I like them because I can often get a greater sense of people's lives from the back than from the street, and the alleys are quiet, with little traffic. And of course, there are always cats.
After sleeping late this morning (I could use three or four mornings like that right now) I made a simple potato soup - a creamy puree of potatoes and zucchini with diced carrots, onions, and celery based on a recipe in Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Italian Cooking - which we ate with the leftover baguette and some laham bi ajeen (a Lebanese pizza-relative, with a very thin crust and a thin layer of ground lamb, chopped tomatoes, onions, and spices) from Adonis, the Middle Eastern supermarket we visit about once a week. Then I buckled down and got some work done. In the late afternoon I went for a long walk in the bracing cold to "clear out the cobwebs", as my grandmother always said, ending up in Cafe Bicyclettadrinking a cappuchino and reading La Presse. This newspaper, for the francophone community, appeals to me both for language practice, since it is written at a pretty high level - no nod whatsoever to the anglophones - that is a challenge to me, and because it is beautifully designed. In fact I searched the net for the headline typeface it uses, because I like it so much and had never seen it before - unless I'm mistaken, it is Relay, designed by Cyrus Highsmith and available from FontBureau. (Unfortunately, you can't see the way the pages look on the La Presse website).
Le film "Les Invasions barbares": est-il exact? Last night we finally watched The Barbarian Invasions, a Quebec-made film and Oscar-nominee that was on my must-see list this year. Director Denys Arcand takes on a slew of controversial topics, from the Canadian health care system to euthanasia, in a beautifully-acted, ambitious, heartfelt film. I'd be very interested to hear from Canadian readers how accurate they feel his portrait - which sometimes felt like a caricature, to make various points - actually is. It's especially interesting in the light of the present debate about building a new 700-bed super-hospital in Montreal - possibly on the site of the Olympic Stadium.
Friday, January 14, 2005
After a day of phone conversations and e-mailing related to work, we took off in late afternoon for a walk in the neighborhood. It was cold, but not bitter, in spite of that familiar stiff wind, and we walked on Mont Royal as far as Premiere Moisson, stopping in to get a baguette. The fellow in front of us was buying about thirty, which had been packed on end into two large brown paper bags. They had all just come out of the oven, and they felt like feathers. J. put ours underneath his coat, and we headed back to our house, past a woman standing on her doorstep with hockey skates and a pair of cross-country skiis; a mother nonchalantly waiting outsdie a shop for her two kids who were rolling around on the sidewalk, laughing; past the totally frozen schoolyard where four boys played with a football, sliding and falling over each other every time they moved. As we walked up to our door, J. said, "it's still warm," and he handed me the baguette; he was right. I made a pot of tea, and we tore the baguette into pieces and ate nearly the entire thing with butter and jam.
On the way up to Montreal today, listening to old Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young CDs, we stopped at a new favorite Chinese take-out place in Burlington, Vermont, for a late lunch. It's a homespun sort of place, run by an affable young Chinese man with tattooed arms and a shaved head; he and his helper/girlfriend? were doing all the cooking today, and we stood by the counter and watched the steaming, sizzling woks as they prepared our meals to order. I was happy that they still had their Christmas decorations up: three sizes of take-out boxes folded from red and white holiday papers, hung thickly among icicle lights over the counter and along the windows. "We spent so much time making them," the proprietor told me, "we thought we'd leave them up a little while longer." I'd loved them when we stopped the last time, in a heavy snowstorm, and again today, when rain had melted all but a few piles of snow and the air was so balmy you didn't need a coat.
Montreal was beautiful and sparkling with light as we drove over the Pont Jacques Cartier after dark. "It's funny," J. remarked, "In the country you feel like you own a piece of it, somehow. You never feel like you own a city - but you feel like you're part of it."
We had stopped and bought vegetables and fruits at a fruiterie on Blvd. Taschereau (known to us now, thanks to Ed, as "the deplorable Blvd Taschereau", or "Trashy Boulevard") on the way in - it's merely a long strip mall, no worse than many on the outskirts of just about every American city, but not attractive to many city-center dwellers. There is also a boucherie, and there I bought two paupiettes de veau - little wrapped packages of veal stuffed with bread and herbs, surrounded with some fat, all tied carefully into small round individual morsels, about three and a half inches across. "Comment cuit-on les paupiettes?" I asked the butcher, a young fellow I've talked to before. "Ah!" he said, and proceeded to give me simple instructions in French, which amounted to "take an onion, slice it, put it in the bottom of the pan with some butter, put the veal packages on top, add dry white wine, cook until just done, then reduce the sauce and add a bit of cream." He rolled his eyes and grinned at me. "Tres, tres delicieuse," he said, as I paid him for the meat. We walked away, and J. said, "He's very nice."
"He's very cute," I said.
"I should have known," said J., in mock indignation. But he's the one who got to eat the veal, with the tiniest imaginable asparagus spears, some tagliatelle and the wine-cream-sauce, to which I'd added some sauteed mushrooms, and a perfect, heavy pomegranate for dessert.
CURIOUS (Black Angus in a central New York pasture)
I drove home yesterday, ahead of the freezing rain that was forecast for New York and western New England, and is now splatting against the windows here, further north in Vermont. It was very good to spend time with my parents, even briefly. I told my father-in-law today that said it was good for all of us to "see each other's faces," and he replied, "and it matters to parents that you made the effort to come all that way." His elder son had been here last weekend too. My father-in-law has been sick, and was briefly in the hospital; today he looked weak and fragile but he came down to the dining room to have lunch with us - his first "outing" in a week or so. There was chicken noodle soup, and custard, which he ate happily, and afterwards we went back to his room with him and repotted the orchid that had stopped blooming, and talked.
While I was with my parents, we had gone into town and I managed to find a remaindered pair of figure skates in my size - very good ones, too good for me - in a shop window for $10. We took them home, and my mother and I put in the long laces. I went down to the garage, pulled out a snow shovel, and headed down to the lake. After testing the ice with one foot, then two, I walked out a few feet and shoveled a long rectangle. There were several inches of very wet snow on the ice, and as I moved it aside an inch of water accumulated on the surface. But I was satisfied that the ice was good enough to test my balance - about thirty years after I had last been on skates.
I went back and got the skates (there was no way I was going to walk down the bank with them on). Mom, ever the good sport and always glad to be outside, accompanied me, handing me a dark red scarf I also hadn't seen since I knitted it for my father, many years before. "Your father says you need a scarf," she said. Dad had already apologized for not doing the shoveling for me; he tore his Achilles tendon when he landed wrong coming down a ladder from the roof, taking down Christmas decorations. (They are pretty amazing for 80-year-olds, especially considering that my mother has been ill.)
The skates were so stiff that my ankles felt blistered before I even got onto the ice, but they also weren't flopping around. I took a few tentative steps, then a glide, wobbled, turned around carefully. Another traverse the length of my short rectangle. Awkward. I started to turn, bobbled, leaned backwards, and in a split second was sitting in the frigid water on top of the ice. Mom and I both laughed, and she held out a hand to help me get up. She shoveled more snow. I went back at it, doing better although my ankles were starting to feel raw - these skates were much too stiff - but I could feel the balance and the hint of rhythm returning. "It's beginning to feel a bit more familiar," I said, grabbing my mother's shoulder as I teetered, coming faster to the end of the small space.
"Oh, you'll get it back," she said. "It's like riding a bicycle." She leaned on the shovel and said, "Look." For the first time that day, the setting sun had suddenly broken through a cloud, sending long yellow rays across the slate-blue snow covering the lake. The snow became whiter, the evergreens greener, the sky deeper blue. We stood and watched the light change, and felt time shift backwards and forwards, from the many days we had spent in that familiar, well-loved spot, skating and laughing and falling, to the reality and wonder of being there again now.
I took a few more glides, satisfied that with comfortable skates and some more practice, I could at least have some fun on the ice again without killing myself. "OK," I said. "Enough for today." I changed into my boots and we headed up the hill to the house. Dad opened the door for me. "I'm a little wet," I said. "I fell on my tail."
"Yep," he said, grinning. "I saw you."
In case anyone wonders why I blog...
In answer to the question "Is it possible to tell people that with your quietness, with your eyes, with your careful attention?" posed in my post of Wednesday, January 5th, Dale (of Mole) wrote this Recollection. In addition to the great discussion that has been happening in the comment threads on that post and the one of Friday, January 7, here is a stunning answer, concrete and poignant. I bow to him and to all my readers.
Yesterday I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to make a quick trip to see my parents. It was a clear, beautiful winter day and I drove into the setting sun across Vermont and New York, watching the sky change from blue to rose, and the snow from white to blue. I stopped in Saratoga for a cup of milky tea at 4:30, and then drove in the gathering darkness past the small houses on the edge of the Adirondacks, some still bright with Christmas lights, down into Johnstown and Fonda and onto the New York Thruway for the straight, fast trip across the state to Utica, where I made the left turn and dropped south into the farmland of central New York.
J. and I rarely travel separately; we're rarely apart anyway. When we talked this morning he said he hadn't slept well; I was tired enough to sleep soundly from 12:30 to 5:30, and then began to feel the unfamiliar bed and the coldness of the sheets next to me.
My parents have just run down to town in their little pick-up truck to get some meat for supper, some tea, some bread. I'm alone in their house - my old house - another rare occurance in the years since I've left. It's very nearly silent. The furnace comes on and off, my father's clocks tick and chime, the wind stirs the cedar and hemlock branches outside the window and above the trees, geese wheel on their way back to a new settling spot on the river. The sky and the snow-covered land are simply different values of the same color, broken by the brownish-grey tree trunks of the small woods across the road and the dark green of the conifers.
Everything is the same as it ever was - although of course it isn't. And I feel like the moving point, the colored dot traversing a landscape crossed with a thousand transparent lines I traced as a child, an adolescent, a young woman: running across the field that is now lawn, flip-flopping in plastic sandals down to the water edge to swim, ascending trees that are no longer there.
