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, April 16, 2005
MOULTING DAY
It's today: moulting day, when Montrealers shed their dull winter garb, the heavy layers, the scarves and hats and fleece and fur, and...get naked! It's the first weekend day of the warm weather, and the warmest day we've had yet. Like colorful butterflies, an entirely new flock seems to be passing by my window. They're on bikes, on roller blades, on skateboards, in baby carraiges; on running feet and slow old feet, on barely-able-to-walk-yet feet, and on four paws. It's fabulous, as if everyone has suddenly been set free, and they're celelebrating in motion, in color, in cafe-windows flung open, in an exuberance of winter-pale skin bared to the sunlight.
We're going to friends' tonight for the first barbeque of the season, and I offered to bring strawberry shortcake; the shortcake is baking in the oven right now, awaiting the basket of strawberries we brought home yesterday from the Jean Talon market. It's the first cake I've baked here; with boulangeries such as there are in this city, I'm afraid my Vermont country baking has seemed, well, superfluous. But the scent of butter, sugar, vanilla, ginger, and browned almonds is lovely in the house today; I'm going to play my flute a little, with the door open to the outside, where, above the happy people and happy dogs and children in their carriages, a light blue sky is crossed with a delicate tracing of tree branches, each dotted with swelling buds of almost-leaves.
5:36 PM
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Thursday, April 14, 2005
OF LOCKS AND KEYS
The other day I went to the local locksmith because we needed two keys copied. One was straightforward, and I was sure it wouldn’t be a problem, but the other was for a bicycle lock. The locksmith shop is on Papineau; I’ve been there several times and so I know that the proprietor doesn’t speak anything but French. On the way, I figured out how to ask for what I needed. Once inside the shop, we greeted each other, and I handed him the first key and asked for two copies. He nodded and asked if that was all. I said no, and handed him the other key, asking if he could make a copy of it. Suddenly, there was a torrent of French – an explanation, I assumed, of why he couldn’t copy the key – but I could hardly understand any of it. From his inflection, I realized he had ended with a question – which of course I couldn’t answer, so I stood there, staring at him dumbly, helplessly. He repeated the question – it seemed he was confirming whether or not it was a bicycle key. I said yes, it was a bicycle key. More incomprehensible French. I shook my head and said thank you. He handed me back the key, looked at me with a certain disdain, and set about making the first copy while I dropped the bicycle key into my purse feeling, well, vulnerable and not very happy. I didn’t blame him – he’s a nice enough man – after I paid him he started waiting on a French woman who had just come in, and he was smiling and making polite chatter. If I had been able to banter with him, he would have been just as pleasant to me.
So then I walked down Marie-Anne several long blocks to the bike shop where we bought our bikes last summer. The shop was bustling and packed to the handlebars with bikes and accessories. The young clerk I remembered from last year was there, waiting on someone at the counter, so I stood in line until he was free. He doesn’t speak anything but French either, but he’s a different sort of guy. I asked my question, told him I had lost one of the bicycle keys, was it possible to obtain a replacement? So far so good. “C’est perdu?” he confirmed. “Oui.” He looked at a loss, and asked if I had gone to a locksmith. I said I had, but now, two or three sentences deep into the subject, I was running out of explanatory words. He motioned to me to wait, and gestured toward the other clerk, who I gathered spoke English. He was busy, and a young Asian woman - another customer – who spoke flawless French and English kindly offered some suggestions about who might be able to replace the key for me. I thanked her and the clerk and then asked about a pannier, a basket for the back of my bike, trying to go back to French, and we concluded our discussion in the usual two-language back-and-forth I’ve come to expect in most places here.
But somehow, this experience, on that particular day, threw me. I left and started walking home, feeling like I might cry. “It doesn’t matter how long I live here or how hard I try,” I said to myself, miserably, “I’ll never master this language completely, and I will never, ever fit in. What are we doing, choosing to live in the Plateau where anglophones are already resented?” Luckily I saw that I was passing a favorite bakery, so I went in and bought a couple of cookies – a transaction for which I didn’t need any specialized language. But even chocolate didn’t lift my spirits quite enough, and the helpless, isolated feeling haunted me the rest of the day.
Yesterday, though, I found myself taking care of my former landlady’s little girl, as a favor while the mother did an emergency errand. Left alone with the daughter, and a menagerie of stuffed animals and plastic dinosaurs, I was able to think back to last May when we first lived here and I would try to play with M. and barely understand a single word she said, while she’d look at me like some strange dumb animal, screwing up her little face in puzzlement and frustration and demanding, “Quoi???” She’d never had to deal with non-French speakers in her short, highly animated and very verbal life. But there I was yesterday, able to talk to her, able to understand much of what she said, even able to concoct some games and comfort her when she decided her mother was never coming back.
“So, that’s it, I’m at a three-year-old level,” I thought, wryly, feeling a bit more able to laugh at myself. “Everyone who finds themselves in a foreign country must feel this, and yet they learn the language, they manage.” I told myself, “Come on, you’re doing your best, look at all you’ve learned.” Gradually I did feel better, and I was grateful to my little friend for giving me a yardstick for measuring some progress. Still, there is something about feeling cut off verbally that is deeply disturbing to me, and it obviously goes to the core of who I am.
As I thought about it more, I decided that it wasn’t so much an inability to make myself understood – for I’m pretty good at that, using language or not – as it was not being able to understand others, and how humiliated I feel when they instantly switch to English, or turn their backs – whether the gesture is real or only felt. The switching, I’ve found, is often Canadian politeness, and most people will continue in French if you tell them you’re trying to learn and improve. I recognized that discomfiture was also coming from a bruised ego. I am not only a word person, and someone who wants to communicate and know other people, but I’m an over-achiever, and I can’t stand feeling stupid or unaccomplished, especially in this sphere. That’s a hard thing to admit, and a deeper one to face squarely, but I’m sure it’s yet another lesson in humility that’s important for me to experience -- or it wouldn’t be happening in such a total and unavoidable way, with my own willing, if sometimes uncomfortable, participation.
9:03 PM
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Tuesday, April 12, 2005
NEWS BITS
A couple of items from today's Montreal Gazette:
Let's not Arm Border Guards
"Providing Canada’s border guards with sidearms would be a “dangerous move” and contribute little to improving national security, according to RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police)Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli. “I know being at the border can be risky and there are certain dangers,” he said yesterday. “But somebody who runs through the border and having a customs officer run out of his hut and shoot after them – I’m not sure we want to do that.” He said he’s against arming people “simply to create the notion that we are going to feel more secure.” Zaccardelli made the comments before a parliamentary committee reviewing Canada’s anti-terrorism legislation yesterday. "
Community Bands Together to Rehabilitate Youthful Mugger
Along with many others, we've been following the story of an 18-year-old young man who robbed a 90-year-old woman and shoved her down some stairs in the metro a while back. Apparently the young man, the son of a mentally-ill anglophone mother and Armenian father, had suffered such neglect and difficulties in his childhood that once his story came out, both this local community and the victim have pled for leniency and rehabilitation rather than punishment. The boy's mother committed suicide in 2003 after years of refusing to talk to her son. In January, his father "dropped him in Montreal with $100 in his pocket in order for him “to become a man,” one witness said. At the time of the mugging, he had been living with friends for a few weeks.
One thing we've noticed in reporting about the rare violent crimes that do occur here, is that the papers and community and justice system always seem to ask and report how the victims feel about the crime and the sentence. To us this seems old-fashioned, quaint, idealistic...and amazing, if it actually works. And it seems like although religion may not be expressed in the way it used to be, through church attendance, devotion, and loyalty to priestly authority, the values of forgiveness and reconciliation are still at work in this society. Read a couple of quotes from this article, entitled "Métro mugger needs love – not prison, supporters say."
Emrys Brooks Djierdjian made a terrible mistake when he robbed a 90-year-old woman and shoved her down some stairs, but he is a teen in need of love and support, not prison time, say friends and neighbours from his small village who have stepped forward to take him under their collective wing...
[people]... from the village of 2,000, 60 kilometres north of Montreal, said they decided as a group that instead of sitting back and watching bad news on television or reading about it in the paper, they would take some responsibility as members of society. They’ve raised money to pay for any therapy Brooks Djierdjian needs. One has offered him a job. Even the victim, Gemma Martel, who suffered a fractured pelvis, broken arm and bleeding in the brain, has written a letter of forgiveness to her aggressor, said supporter Catherine Ruiz-Gomar. “If this society believes in rehabilitation, then we need to give people the means to do it,” Lamarre [a neighbor] said.
The judge is scheduled to make a decision in the case tomorrow.
7:39 PM
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At the border, the douaniere asks us for our license plate number: “I’m afraid I can’t read it,” she says, smiling. We laugh and tell her the number, and she cheerfully waves us through. She’s right; the car is covered with road spray and salt – an indication both of this place and season, and a life that’s lately had few chinks in it for such things as washing one’s car.
It’s a beautiful day - cold, sunny and clear - and the wind buffets the small car from side to side as we cross into the flat plain where flocks of geese stand in the corn-stubble of the endless fields where clods of black earth plowed last fall lie thawing in the sunlight. Silvery pools shine in the curving furrows where the plow approached the road and made its wide turn back toward the east, and the long drainage trenches, stretching to the horizon as straight as a column of mercury, send a sudden reflective flash as we pass by.
I wondered, at first, if I’d become bored over time with this drive through so much apparent sameness; I grew up, after all, in a very different agricultural landscape that has always seemed to me the epitome of pastoral beauty with its varied fields of hay and corn and oats, its hedgerows and orchards; woods on the higher ground and blackbird-busy swamps in the lowlands; herds of black-and-white dairy cows in the pastures and sheep, goats, geese and chickens in mud-luscious farmyards. What was the appeal of acres upon flat acres of nothing but corn, on a land scoured flat by water and glacier and swept by a constant wind whose only positive purpose seemed to be keeping aloft the white fleur-de-lis on the blue fields of the Quebec flags fluttering in so many farmyards?
Perhaps it was that blue that gave me the clue yesterday, as I looked again at this land that, I realize, has stolen its way into my heart: it may look vast and all the same, but it’s a sameness like the ocean, a sameness that changes its face with the day and the season. One has to look harder, perhaps, to perceive it, but within the wheel of the seasons rolling over these raw and elemental fields, a smaller wheel turns by the day: the differences in the play of light depending on the clouds and the sun or lack thereof; the angle of the wind and its strength; the presence of birds and their tendency, depending on their own cycles, to lift off the ground in wide flocks or scatter individually; to stand, satiated, and observe, or to be on the move, as the geese were yesterday, flying in low purposeful lines above the waiting fields dotted, in the far distances, by a steeple, a cluster of houses, and the silos where the golden products of so much flatness are stored, for a time, in the sky.
9:39 AM
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Sunday, April 10, 2005
A long weekend of mostly work, and I'm not done yet. This morning I was the organizer and one of the presenters for a talk on the Windsor Report and the future of the Anglican Communion, and it took most of yesterday afternoon to prepare for that. Yesterday morning and this afternoon I've been preparing for a business meeting tomorrow. After that, in the afternoon, we're heading north, which I'm looking forward to very much indeed.
We've had a string of fabulous, unseasonably warm days in New England, and there was time to get outside and uncover the vegetable garden and most of the perennials, rake leaves, get a permit to burn some brush, and do a lot of our usual spring clean-up. And, oh, it felt glorious to be out there with the sun on my back and the smell of the earth coming up from the mud and the wakening grass! There's a patch of snowdrops from my late grandparents' garden in bloom, and another of delicate pale blue crocuses; during the past few days nearly all the snow and ice disappeared from its final banks on the north side of the house, leaving undulating frost heaves and squishy earth. How good it is to feel my hands in the soil again, pulling dry leaves from the base of the lavender and the peonies, discovering the pale red shoots of tulips, running my fingers over the soft green "fur" of the lambs' ears. And when the sun has set and I open the back door, it's a robin who scolds me from the apple tree, reclaiming her world.
8:32 PM
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