It's all about me and language. Not even sure
what to say about that.
I left out the lovely park on Rue Beaubien Est
across from the cinema, I left out the birreria where Mike
lounged two nights of our stay after Leo went to bed. I left out the Basilica
of Notre Dame and the view of the city we glimpsed from the island park where
we had our picnic (and visited a science museum that was not the science museum
we thought we were visiting).
I also said very little (in the entries below)
about the market, which is such a key part of any vacation we take. The Marche
Jean Talon (see the picture above -- we had the most delightful Quebecois
tomatoes there).
And Little Italy! Just a quick mention. Three
days, as you will see from my gush of emotion, are not enough to explore
Montreal. Not by a long shot. Just enough to give you heartache.
June 27, 2016
3:30 p.m.
On the highway, the signs as we near Canada
say “hebergement” – lodging! I'm giddy with excitement!
Later
It’s dangerous for a writer to go to a foreign
city….and by dangerous I mean, there’s a very real peril of the writer going
insane from a linguistic orgasm…especially if the writer knows even just a
little of the country’s native language.
I’m here in Montreal dumbfounded and ecstatic
about being surrounded by French and I think, almost instantly, what would it
take to become fluent? Or semi-fluent? Without having spoken French since
visiting Luxembourg in 1997, I’m able to tell the waiter that I do want to
speak French but I’ve just arrived and need a moment to get myself acclimated.
Then I order my dinner at La Boulette, a nice neighborhood restaurant in Rosemount-La
Petite Patrie ('Rosemount, the little country'). Later, I order ice
cream.
And I soak in the surprisingly foreign vibe of
Montreal (surprising to moi). A city surrounded by the English language
and its serpent-like hold on communications world-wide. And yet I feel as
though I am in a French version of London. Every sign is in French and French
only. Every transaction is presumed to be in French until you signal you’re an
idiotic American who can’t step up.
And the architecture of this neighborhood (which,
again, is called 'Rosemount-La Petite Patrie') – a bit off the beaten path in
Montreal, I would say – is just delightful: duplex apartments with second floor
balconies and front stoops overflowing with flowers and bikes and the odd pair
of running shoes oh and personality.
It would take nothing to be sucked into the
allure of French-speaking Canada.
June 28, 2016
8:41 a.m.
Montreal absolutely deserves a week of our time.
The people are lovely, the city – especially this neighborhood with its
rowhouse duplexes – is a place to settle into, the food a dieter’s nightmare,
which is so good for a foodie vacation spot. I listen now as a typical Tuesday
night plays out for the family below us – the family renting us our apartment.
Dinner, familiar yelling between the main house and an out-building where they
appear to hole up when this apartment where we are is occupied. My view from
the kitchen: a cozy, leafy enclave framed by back veranda. It gives onto the
bowels of a residential neighborhood where 'bowels' means how we live and love
and cook and vent.
My Montreal Journal. Here it is. In dribs and drabs. So
overwhelmed, so caught off guard, so trying to hold it together so I'm not
submerged into another intellectual obsession.
5:03 p.m.
On trips like these, I see everything through
the prism of whether I understand the language or not, whether I make myself
understood or not.
Yes, like I said, it’s dangerous to drop an
aspiring writer, such as myself, with an incurable addiction to Romance
languages, into a proud Francophone city like Montreal. Within hours, I’ve
hatched half a dozen projects in my mind, including translating a French-Canadian
book that would illustrate the culture’s fight against English-language
hegemony.
All because I was able to say
"Bonjour" and "je voudrais" and "comme ca" a few
times.
June 29
6:20 a.m.
A word about the houses: They are mainly
two-story apartment buildings that sort of look like homes you’d expect to see
in New Orleans perhaps because they have prominent outdoor stairs linking the
upper unit to the sidewalk. Stairs that people sometimes paint pretty colors or
adorn with plants. Bikes grip the railings of every other bottom unit’s front
gate. Touches of home, touches of personality, the sense of home pride … everywhere,
everywhere on the facades of these apartment homes.
8:20 a.m.
Update: I’ve learned to say "bonne
journée" as opposed to “bonjour” at the end of
transactions (as I’m saying goodbye to merchants), and given the hum in my
step, you’d think I’d discovered the cure for cancer.
Really: big whoop since it’s the same in
Italian. Buona giornata or buona serata (note the suffix ‘ata’) when you’re
taking your leave. But whatevs. I’m re-learning French! Bonne journée!
8:45 p.m.
A walk after dinner as the sun prepares to set,
casting my new neighborhood in a golden glow, as if anything more were needed
to render these days in sepia tones. The sunset’s palette adds texture to this
urban French neighborhood. The duplexes, each different, each an opportunity
for human contact – not that I would necessarily be talking to anyone -- but
for research purposes. I try to divine something or instill some sense of
kinship because I see a flower pot, a bike chained to a railing, a wreath on a
door. As if the eye were begging for variation. Even when the nuance or
variation is a vacant storefront (rare) or a cluttered porch. Somehow these
somewhat unpleasant variations set the stage even better for tender displays of
picture-perfect flower boxes, a family of cats supping on a patio, an aged but
stately stained-glass window in a home.
The sky becomes purple as I walk and I crane my
neck to see more of the sunset. I even cross the street to improve my vantage
point. I know this moment, occasioned by the decision on a whim to take a walk
when otherwise I would be reading or working, is special. I was meant to fall
in love just a little more with Montreal, and the sunset’s colorful blanket
thrown so perfectly over the neighborhood is doing the trick.
I catch a glimpse of soccer players on a sliver
of parkland I spy between duplexes. I’m writing an ode to something simple, yet
lived-in, loved-in. Ode to the basic architecture of a neighborhood that has a
bit of everything – as good city nabes do – a church, a corner store, a grocer,
an off-license, a hair salon, a book shop, a toy emporium, a real estate
office, the tax attorney, the plumber, the driving school (automatique
et manuelle). Plus, a glance down an alley is repaid as if it were a
glimpse into a diary: those back decks stuffed with people’s lives that one
spies between duplexes and humble neighborhood businesses.
Once again, a five-minute walk is a passage into
the sublime because I can observe. Nothing wrong with the suburbs or the
countryside. But the myriad impressions of the human stamp in the city become a
feast of plenty. One more pang for someone who’s always searching for the
perfect city and who knows it’s stitched together with a 1,000 imperfect but
highly imaginative, highly personal strands (no cookie-cutter cul de sacs
here).
Ah Montreal, after all these years (~three
decades), oui oui je t’aime.
June 30, 2016
9:03 a.m.
This is a city … that I’d like to call my own, in
the way, as a traveler, I collect cities around the world.
1 p.m.
Visits today to the Marche Jean Talon and Petite
Italie.
We are skimming the surface. A relatively quick,
disorganized, disjointed shopping excursion followed by the pedestrian
equivalent of a driveby to Little Italy. A cultural fusion that even just
briefly left me sbalordita.
An American Italophile visits an Italian bastion
within a French-speaking city of a largely Anglophone country.
Whoa! Any way you sliced it – Bonjour madame or
buongiorno, I was good!
All of these glancing encounters temporarily
fire up my brain and lead to brief intellectual explorations that must be
aborted. To wit:
*What’s Quebecois culture all about?
*How to understand the fight for instilling the
French language as the dominant form of communication in Montreal
*How does Quebecois Italian culture fit in?
*What can the U.S. learn about relations with
indigenous people?
When we visited Little Italy – ‘Petite Italie’
en francais -- I wandered into a bookstore (its name, 'Librarie Italienne,'
look like magical words to me), and the proprietor said, "Buongiorno.
Cerchi qualcosa di particolare?" You know, as if the shop were in Rome.
Another shop sold the Italian newspaper and a
recent copy of L'Espresso (which I bought because Matteo Renzi
was on the cover with a very clever hashtag headline).
This morning when we woke up, the kittens
belonging to the duplex next door were lined up on the patio, suckling milk
from the Mommy cat.
6 p.m.
Out in our neighborhood in Montreal and from
across the street I peer into a salon where a small boy is squirming in the
arms of his father, crying, scared, as a hairdresser hovers about his head,
trying gamely to snip a few locks. A scene of uncommon yet everyday tenderness
that draws me into Montreal and a mere 36 hours into my stay convinces me I’m a
part of the city and it is a part of me.
Quotes for the Leo journal:
“Rain is like a shower for animals,” and “It could be funny if chickens knowed
how to drive!” Oh, dude it already is funny!
