the cassandra pages

2005-05-11T19:44:00.000-04:00

THE CASSANDRA PAGES HAVE MOVED

Tired of the unreliability and slow loading times at Blogger, and wanting to make some changes and add some new functionality, I'm jumping ship to TypePad. The new address is:

www.cassandrapages.com

I'm not entirely happy with the TypePad solution, because ultimately I want to incorporate my blog into a larger website and to have complete control over all of it. In the next few months I'm going to be investigating WordPress as another option, but the new address will stay the same. Please update your blogrolls, and please let me know how the new site works for you. I'm also anxious to hear of other readers' experiences with WordPress and other open source solutions.

A link to all the CassandraPages archives will also remain available via the new site.

Thank you to all my wonderful readers! I look forward to welcoming you at my new home.

2005-05-09T22:06:00.000-04:00

It's almost hot in Vermont this evening, after days and days of raw rainy weather. This afternoon I took a break from computer work to go outside and work in the garden, raking leaves off the perennials, inspecting plants, and then standing, hands on hips, considering possibilites for the coming growing season. Compared to last year, when we were a week into that fateful month of renting a Montreal apartment, I haven't abandoned my garden, nor do I have the same illusions about what I can handle. This current week here/week there schedule does allow for some maintenance, but I'm much more realistic now, and I know I can't keep up the way I used to with perennials, a few roses, a vegetable and herb garden, planters full of foliage and flowering annuals, and a couple of shrub borders. So today I made a decision - most of the vegetable garden is going to get mown. And that's surprisingly OK with me.

Like the decision to get rid of a lot of our books, I find the relinquishment of this once-important part of my life to be something long in coming, but fine once it actually happens. And of course it's not necessarily permanent. I've always grown some of our food, as much out of principle as pleasure. But if it's too much - and it is right now - then it's time to let go.

Tonight we had some friends over for dinner, a couple who are twelve or fourteen years younger than we are. They're recently married, and they're nesting: working hard on their old house, making a garden, making plans. It was fun to listen to their excitement - I remember feeling exactly the same way - and it was also interesting to note how much I don't feel like that now.

We've been replacing the bathroom floor during this stay in Vermont, and it's the second time around - we're taking up a floor we ourselves installed a long time ago. When we paint, it will be the second time over the surfaces. We like doing this kind of work, but it's lost the excitement it once had. At this point in my life I'm simply not into settling down, putting my imprint on things and tucking the corners around me. I'm after lightness of being, freedom of movement, a loosening of weighty responsibility so that the things that are the real priorities have more space.

Flowers, though...flowers need to stay.

2005-05-06T12:54:00.000-04:00

This afternoon we're heading down to Boston, through the tremulous barely-green hills, to rendezvous with some blogger friends and pay a visit to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Sounds like we're also heading toward a nor-easter, coming up the coast bringing gale-force winds, rain, and possibly sleet - times when one is glad for the metro). Right now, though, it's a beautiful spring day in Vermont, the trees poised on that chartreuse cusp between bud and leaf.

"TOUS CES LIVRES SONT A TOI!"

I've been thinking a lot this week about the Bibliotheque Nationale, the new national library of Quebec, which opened last weekend and is located just a short bike ride from our apartment. Over 18,000 people visited the library during its two-day, grand opening weekend; we were two of them and to say that we were thrilled would be putting it mildly. Not only is the building an architectural marvel - beautiful, original, light-filled, huge and yet intimate - it is up-to-the moment technologically, and houses a vast collection of books, journals, music, films, nearly all of which are availble for circulation. There's a language lab, a software-tryout lab, a whole floor for children, exhibition spaces, an auditorium, a cafe, and innumerable different places for reading, studying, using the library's terminals or your own, listening to music or watching films and videos, or even creating music in the innovative electronic music studio. In our brief initial tour of the building we couldn't begin to see everything, but along with the thousands of other wide-eyed, delighted visitors of every possible ethnicity, we cannot wait to return.

It's funny - I had sort of given up on libraries. Well, not given up, but resigned them to a place in the past. That's mostly because the libraries I know - even ones tat are supposedly state-of-the-art - still seem like they dont' get it, either in terms of the ambience that will draw readers to use them as destinations and refuges, or in terms of service and integration with new realities fo information-gatheirng. But here, as I walked from space to space, I saw so many people...like me. Book lovers, curled in the deep black armchairs,;bent over the honey-colored yellow-birch reading desks; deep in study at ergonomically-designed computer stations; sprawed in sofa-like chairs, eyes shut, listening to music; wrapped in afternoon sunlight in a western window, slowly turning the pages of an artbook. It was a brand-new building, and it felt like home.

A line of people waiting to sign up for their free library subscription stretched from the front door to the back wall. People walked wonderingly up and down the wide stairs in the central atrium, and spilled out of the glass elevators onto different floors: a punk couple, studded and tatooed; an African family; a distinguished set of octagenarians; even an Orthodox bishop in his black robes and silver cross, came sweeping out of the subway. And from the fourth floor balcony, I watched a young Asian mother, all in white, running back and forth below me, carrying her baby, stopping now and then to excitedly show and tell him everything she was seeing, everything he might find in his future - a future sure to be filled with many many books.

2005-05-05T17:04:00.000-04:00

HIGH (part 3 of 3)

Well, they said that fraternity stuff was pretty revolting, but they didn’t really know anything about it. Neither one of them had ever been a drinker. B. started grinning and said his mother had been a teetotaler, but his father had drunk just a little now and then, which drove his mother crazy. If she found a bottle, she’d make a big show out of pouring it out. Toward the end of her life she had loosened up a bit, and at a party for his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary he remembered her drinking a little glass of wine. “I only got drunk once,” he said. “I hadn’t drunk at all in high school, and not even when I was in the Navy, which was…well…let’s just say it wasn’t the usual thing!” But on V-J Day, the navy guys had a huge celebration, and he decided he could have one drink, and after that he thought he’d have another…

“I got really drunk and really sick, of course,” he said. “And apparently I made quite a fool of myself – or so they told me. I don’t’ remember any of it. But I decided I didn’t like that feeling, so I’ve never drunk much at all since.”

He sat back and shrugged. “It all depends on how you get your jollies, and that’s different for different people. I get my jollies from up here…” – he tapped the side of his head – “from using the brain…well, the brain God gave me. Why should I want to mess that up with drugs or alcohol, when I have a perfectly good time without them? But that’s me. Other people feel differently, don’t they?”

He turned to his friend, my father-in-law, who nodded solemnly. Both of my in-laws disapproved of alcohol and the people who drank it; so far as I know there was rarely any in their house, although my mother-in-law occasionally offered a tiny glass of sherry if there were “cocktail drinkers” coming for dinner, making sure we knew it was with disdain. My father-in-law would occasionally accept a drink at a wedding reception or some other formal event, and then brag that he had poured it out in a plant pot. I always thought this was a superiority thing – drinkers were weak people who lacked self-control, or something like that – but when I finally became friends with Muslims I realized that my in-laws’ attitudes were cultural; that being Christian had far less to do with it than the fact that they had grown up in conservative Muslim/Arab culture and had absorbed the prevailing values (alcohol is forbidden in the Qu'ran). Upstanding people simply didn’t drink – - and that was the end of it.

So when my father-in-law said he’d gotten drunk once, we both raised our eyebrows. “Oh, I never told you that story?” he said. We shook our heads. “Oh yes. It was in Nabataea. Three people, himself included, were scheduled to present remarks after a dinner. He had decided, on the spur of the moment, to have some wine. “I liked it,” he admitted. ‘And then I got up to talk, and realized I’d lost my cool.” He glanced at B., who nodded solemnly, and looked affectionately and knowingly at his friend.

“Yep,” he said. “That’s it. You'd lost your cool.”

“I was really worried! So I persuaded the others to go first, and by the time they were done I managed to give my remarks. It was the first and only time in my life that happened to me, and I decided I couldn’t afford to have it happen again. I didn’t want to lose my cool.”

2005-05-04T15:56:00.000-04:00

Tulips in a Westmount garden

HIGH, part 2

Somehow, talking about prep schools and colleges in the 1960s, we got onto the subject of drugs. B. turned to my father-in-law, and asked him if he’d ever smoked dope…

-----

“No, never. But I used to smoke corn – what do you call it?”

“Corn silk. Oh yes. Out in the field. Oh, you did that too?”

“Oh yes.” My father-in-law laughed.

“Did you ever make a corncob pipe? You know, where you hollow-out a piece of corncob and stick a hollow straw in there?”

M. raised his eyebrows in surprise. “No, I wasn’t that sophisticated.”

“What did you use to roll up the corn silk in?” B. asked.

“Toilet paper!”

“Did you ever smoke tobacco?”

“No! But I’ve got a story about tobacco. There was a playing field at the university in Beirut that the soldiers used to use for their practices, and we discovered that my older son, who was maybe six or seven, had been going around picking up the butts of their cigarettes and smoking them. So we confronted him and my wife said, “Those are dirty! If you want to smoke so much, we’ll do it at home.” So we took him home and had him sit down , and we gave him a cigarette – and he smoked the whole thing!”

The two old men laughed and laughed. By this time, J. and I were wide-eyed and pretty much speechless.

Unlike my father-in-law, who moves slowly, never fidgets, and, once settled, seems like a large heavy object that would just as soon stay in place calmly and indefinitely, B. is a wiry little man with twinkling eyes and is, in spite of countless physical difficulties, still bursting with energy. He’s animated and observant, and has an eager way of leaning forward toward you with interest, even mischievousness. My father-in-law still has a luxuriant head of flowing white hair, few wrinkles, and a calm, untroubled face; B. has only wisps of white hair on a nearly bald head and looks older than his years, but the two of them have similarly active minds.

B. went on to say that while he was a professor in California all the kids were trying dope, and he understood that, that was just the way kids are; what bothered him was the way some people got “hooked on it” and became lost, or got into harder drugs. He was a scientist, and he said he still felt there was some evidence that pot was just as bad for you as tobacco. It certainly distorted one’s sense of reality, he said, glancing across the table at the dubious looks on our faces.

He grinned: his son had been into pot for quite a while when he was young, he said, and the young man had been completely convinced that when he was high he had brilliant insights. So one day B. told him, “OK, I’ll smoke dope with you, and we’ll tape record our conversation.” His son said fine, so the two of them smoked – this was the one and only time B. had done it – and he made a tape, which he played back for his son the next day.

“When my son heard his ‘brilliant insights’ he was shocked, and he quit smoking then and there.”

M. shook his head, and said drugs had nearly ruined the prep school system in those days. “They’d send busloads of kids to a rock concert without any adult supervision at all!” he said, shaking his head. “I told the administration I felt this was totally irresponsible, but they didn’t pay any attention to me. I had one student, back then, who came to class the day of an exam totally stoned. He asked me for six of the examination booklets. When he turned in his exam he told me, “This is the best exam I have ever written! Please grade it right away!” When I got home I looked, and saw that he had filled all six of the books with ‘tra-la-tra-la-tra-la!’ That was it! Nothing but ‘tra-la’! All six! And when I told the headmaster about it, all he’d say was “what grade are you going to give him?” –meaning, ‘I don’t want to hear what you’re telling me so I am going to ignore it.’” He shook his head in disgust.

As former members of the generation they were discussing, with our own versions of those years, J. and I had been silent so far, listening to these unselfconscious recollections with a certain amount of amazement. It was like a time warp, listening to these familiar arguments, except that now there was no anger between us, and no need for either the old or the young to assert control; that felt strange but open, free, equal.

Now J. said, “Well, is it any different from the fraternity system and alcohol now? Are the colleges acting any more responsibily? A lot of students are alcoholics when they leave college, and that system has a great deal to do with it.”

(to be continued)

2005-05-01T18:32:00.000-04:00

CASSANDRA INTERVIEWED at Chandrasutra

Recently, I was honored to be asked by Melanie of Chandrasutra to be interviewed as a part of her 'Blogger's Blogger" series. The interview is up today and I hope you'll not only read it, but check out the entire series. Among the esteemed company are Natalie d'Arbeloff of Blaugustine, certainly a person on my "blogger's bloggers" list, and James Luckett of consumptive.org, whose blog was one of the first to attract me to the medium, and who was kind and encouraging to me when I was starting out, as well as a number of other bloggers whose work is new to me.

Mel is trying to give voice to vital but less-recognized parts of the blogosphere, especially women, and bloggers who are writing in different veins from those that seem to get featured (again and again) in Big Media stories. I'm appreciative of what she's doing; it's very much needed, and a gift to our whole medium. Thanks, Mel!

2005-04-29T18:04:00.000-04:00

COLOR

I don't know if I've linked before to the blog of Karl Dubost, but if not, it's my sin of omission..mea culpa. The blog itself is in French, but, English readers, please don't let that deter you: Karl is a photographer and a traveler who goes often to Asia, and he has an extraordinary eye, especially for color. Visiting his often ravishing, always surprising site is a delight and almost a meditation in my day: here I encounter a world drenched in color, now pulsating with life, now quiet in the repose of objects and persons, populated with juxtapositions one senses only this camera has seen. There is usually a short poem, in French or English, at the beginning of the day's entry, usually well worth figuring out even if it is not in your usual language.

2005-04-29T15:33:00.000-04:00

Just Spring...Vermont

HIGH

On Wednesday, we had our usual lunch with my father-in-law, and toward the end of the meal we were joined by his friend B., another resident of the retirement home. B., a former professor, was in Beirut at the American University for a time with his wife, and they’re both very appreciative of the Middle East – his wife now takes Arabic lessons once a week from my father-in-law. We had gotten to know them prior to the whole retirement home deal, through Middle East peace work, and when they moved there we were pretty sure that they and J.’s father would become friends.

When he first moved in, my father-in-law had said all he wanted was to be left alone; he reluctantly went down to the dining room for meals and ate alone when he could. The other residents were “boring”, or they were “only interested in sports” or they “didn’t care about foreign affairs”. And besides, he said, he couldn’t hear anything. As had been usual throughout the time I’ve known him, he’d say so-and-so was “very decent” – which was a polite put-down, translated within the family as “they’re nice but not intellectual”. But gradually he began to make friends – or, more accurately, people began to make friends with him, despite his former intentions. Now, several years down the road, as we walk down the hall or go through the dining room, the affection and respect the other residents and staff have for him is very obvious, and his caring for them is genuine.

Not long ago he told me he had at least a dozen very good friends there, and admitted, without a single qualifier, that that was more than he’d ever had before in his life. His best friends are probably B. and his wife, and N., a woman who is a writer, an avid reader, and, God forbid, an Episcopalian. In fact, all three of these friends are pretty devout, practicing, liberal Christians – a humorous irony that isn’t lost on my "humanist" father-in-law.

After he retired, my father-in-law wrote three full-length books. They are fictional biographies of religious figures, set in the Middle East that he knows so well, but too creatively non-traditional to suit a religious market, and too religious to suit a publisher of fiction. They’re written in a flowery story-telling style, often veering off into the poetic and philosophical, that I’ve come to recognize as typically Arab, and although the English is grammatically perfect, the style seems very strange to a westerner. To my father-in-law, though, they are brilliant, and the greatest disappointment of his life has been his inability to find someone to publish them.

That is, until B. came along and decided to start a publishing company and bring out one of these books. This has been quite a saga, with some family involvement and help with the intricacies of digital on-demand publishing, but it’s happening, and both B. and my father-in-law are all excited, and hanging on to their own precarious health in order to see the project to completion. They were already good friends before this project, but they’ve gotten a lot closer, and on Wednesday it was great fun to see the two of them teasing each other and talking naturally together, almost as if “the children” weren’t listening.

Somehow, talking about prep schools and colleges in the 1960s, we got onto the subject of drugs. B. turned to my father-in-law, and asked him if he’d ever smoked dope…

(to be continued)

2005-04-26T22:46:00.000-04:00

If all goes as planned, we'll have lunch with my father-in-law tomorrow noon and then head north for a week. This has been another intense week of work, culminating with a presentation this afternoon; all that went pretty well and if the boss doesn't do something unpredictable tomorrow, we might actually have a few days to regroup and relax. I wonder, especially in exhausted and frustrated moments, why I still do this - and the answer is that it's fun, on certain levels. Today we met some new people, consultants from D.C., and they were smart, interesting, engaged, very likeable, and impressed with what we showed them. It's that stuff - the chemistry, the creation of teams trying to fulfil a challenging and worthwhile goal, the figuring out how to do something new from scratch - that makes communications work fun and interesting, even when it's also maddening.

On the other hand, there are limits.

2005-04-25T18:56:00.000-04:00

INCIDENTS

1. Early morning; a black beetle is on its back in the shiny white free-standing bathtub. I offer it the pad of my index finger; after nervous faltering it climbs on board. I give it a ride up to the pot of grape ivy, near the skylight; it disappears over the rim.

2. The rain has stopped but the day is still blustery and cold. Walking to the post office, I notice drowned worms on the sidewalk - one of the more unfortunate signs of spring. In front of me, a larger worm, covered with grit, is trying to head across the sidewalk and into the road. I go past, turn around, pick it up and set it down in the wet grass. This action is immediately followed by a memory of how many worms I put on fishhooks as a child.

3. I notice that the river is very high.

4. Across the bank, sirens. An white ambulance with red lights flashing heads across the bridge, toward the village.

5. Three sleek crows land, cawing, in the bare sycamore saplings on the river's edge. One crow has a beakful of leaves. All around the birds hang last fall's sycamore fruits on their long stems, like Christmas balls, or dangly earrings from the 60s.

6. When I come out of the post office, the ambulance is above me on a dead-end street. I used to know the people who lived in that house. The village is silent now: no siren, no crows.

7. In front of the tenement on the corner, the green leaves of the young maple trees are curled in swollen buds, like fists.

2005-04-23T14:26:00.000-04:00

GOTTA LOVE THOSE MOUNTIES

Royal Canadian Mounted Police to escort gay married couple to "40 Heroes" Celebration in Philadelphia on May 1.

Kevin Bourassa and Joe Varnell will be honored at a GLBT civil rights event in Philadelphia on Sunday, May 1. Bourassa and Varnell were the first gay couple to be legally married in North America. Two RCMP officers will accompany them to symbolize Canada's commitment to same-sex couples.

The trip will be a far cry from one Bourassa and Varnell attempted to make shortly after their marriage in 2003. The couple was turned back by US Customs and Immigration officers when they attempted to board a flight from Toronto to Georgia. US Customs and Immigration pre-check people traveling to the US at most major Canadian airports. They couple was rejected after filling out a form identifying themselves as a family.

Other recipients of the "40 Heroes" awards are Martina Navratilova, Melissa Etheridge, Barney Frank, Gene Robinson, and Ellen DeGeneres.

AND A MORE POIGNANT NOTE:

This anonymous letter at Planet Out! from a gay Catholic priest describes his reaction to the election of the new pope, and is a poignant commentary on what "keeping the faith" means for someone in his situation. I was interested, and glad, to see that he mentions Bishop Gene Robinson as someone whose witness has helped him continue under very difficult circumstances.

2005-04-22T16:07:00.000-04:00

HOLDING THE LINE

“I had a very good day yesterday,” announces my father-in-law, as he settles into his chair. From the buffet, he’s brought back a plate of salad greens topped with baby carrots and ringed with six big strawberries, and another plate with a grilled hamburger from the buffet. He peers under the bun, and starts carefully spreading the hamburger with ketchup, mustard, and relish that he’s arranged in layers in one of those tiny folded paper cups that mints or condiments are served in.

“What was especially good about it?” we ask.

“Well, for one thing I was pleased with the new pope. And I wrote a few letters, which was something I haven’t been able to do at all lately.”

“You were pleased with the pope?” I’m astounded that he’d say this; a few weeks ago he made it clear he was completely disgusted with the entire thing.

“Oh yes,” he says, nonchalantly, and goes on preparing his hamburger. J. looks at him, hard, shakes his head, and goes off to get something he’s forgotten in the buffet line.

I'm somewhat at a loss. “You are kidding about the pope, aren’t you?”

“No! I think he’s an excellent choice.”

“You don’t think he’s too conservative?”

“Someone has to hold the line.”

“What? So you really think it’s good to have someone in there who, let’s see, forbids contraception?” Now I'm getting suspicious; it looks like he’s enjoying this; his eyes are half serious, half mischievous, and he knows I can’t tell exactly where he’s going to land today.

“Sure. Someone needs to be against contraception…and that other thing…” he makes vague gestures in the direction of his abdomen.

“Abortion.”

“Yes. And no…”

“No women priests.”

“Exactly.” He crunches decisively on a baby carrot.

“Come on,” I say.

“No, I mean it,” he says. “Somebody needs to counteract my liberalism, you see. I worry that there is too much liberalism like mine and unless it’s opposed…”

“People will go wild.”

He nods, and takes an appreciative bite of his hamburger. “I’ve put on weight in the last two weeks,” he says. “I need to watch it. But you should eat more. Go gets some cake.”

“I’ll get something else later,” I tell him. “Now, do you really think that?"

“Yes! Did I ever tell you – once the prep school where I was teaching sent me as a ‘delegate’ to a Catholic prep school conference, so I went, and there was a theological discussion in which everybody seemed to be taking a very liberal point of view. So I decided, for the fun of it, to take the opposite view, and I argued the strictest, most conservative Catholic position. Afterwards one of the priests came up to me and whispered, ‘That was very impressive – may I ask, what Order are you a member of?’”

"Maybe you should go to Africa," I tell him. "You might fit right in with those conservative bishops."

He looks up in mock horror. "I don't think so!"

I look at him, grinning, and shake my head. He seems very pleased by the memory. "You see," he says, "if no one takes the traditional view, there's no one for me to push against."

And I still don't know what he really thinks.

2005-04-20T18:49:00.000-04:00

GRIMALDI'S

At Idle Words, a commentary on New York-style pizza, a subject dear to my heart. J., who is at this very moment making pizza crust in the kitchen, has been a pizza aficionado since long before we met; it was clear to me at the start that loving pizza was going to be synonymous with loving him. In his post, Maciej describes several pizza places we also count among the very top - Pepe's in New Haven, is our #1 - their white pizza, a blend of garlic, clams, parmesan, and olive oil on the best crust you have ever eaten, served unpretentiously on a rectangular tray, is well worth the drive off the highway into the city, and the potential wait to get served. And Grimaldi's, at the end of the Brooklyn Bridge, also makes our top five. What about John's, in the Village? We've never, however, eaten Staten Island pizza, and it sounds like we've missed the best of the best.

Grimaldi's made it into a poem I wrote a long while back - and it's as good a time as any to post it. That was another early spring day, much like this one. The "Kim" in question is now a late-teenager, with bright red-dyed hair; she is escaping as best she can.

Two Dollars a Day

After pizza at Patsy Grimaldi’s
we walked past tulip gardens and pear trees
and then across the Brooklyn Bridge
at sunset
with the skylight still glowing
and the riches of Manhattan sparkling blue and gold and silver.

Liberty beckoned from the harbor;
the Verrazzano, a diamond necklace in the distance.
Lacework cables above us,
bicyclists rattling the wooden decking;
a big black jogger,
woman in a suit and Nikes,
other lovers.

Beneath city hall and its gilded dome
down to the trains
where a Frenchwoman read philosphy
and a black couple leaned against each other
uptown to 32nd Street and out
into the city night
small again on the fast streets full
of yellow taxis and hot smells
and people intent
on their destination.

----

“Where did you go?” said Kimmy,
who had fed the cat and brought in the papers.

“New York,” we said. “Have you ever been there?”
and she said no,
she had never been anywhere except
California once and it was wonderful,
there was so much happening! And here
nothing ever, ever happened, except they had
a new puppy, which liked to bite her.

So she took her dollars and went back home,
and later in the day
I saw her riding her bicycle up and down the street,
the way she’s always liked,
and she smiled brightly
and pedalled furiously
as if she had somewhere important to go.

4/27/97

2005-04-19T17:32:00.000-04:00

Last night was too warm and too lovely to spend inside. We walked in the park, along the serpentine lake, and then, reluctant to go in, got our bikes and rode up absolutely quiet, nearly deserted streets, past cars parked along the sides shining like dark green and black carapaces under the indefinite streetlights; the sound of a piano or a violin drifting from a window, yellow light behind lace; an occasional rustle revealing a mother coming home with a child; someone bringing in a folding chair; a cat; a woman with a cigarette gazing at the street from the shadows on a third-floor balcony.

I caught up with J. and we rode side-by-side on the dreamy street, saying nothing, reaching out once to touch hands.

Across on St. Gregoire, at the top of the Plateau -- and then coasted back home.

2005-04-18T19:59:00.000-04:00

A COUPLE OF LINKS

There's a wonderful story at FunnyAccent which gives a different take on running in Boston, and on the difference we can make without even knowing it.

Thanks to Language Hat, who linked to my post on language-learning, I found a new blog, amusingly named "La Coquette / Don't Hate Me Because I Live in Paris". She too is learning French, and since I had had a similar experience getting new contact lenses, I related to her story of a French eye exam.

And then there's, well, this bit of stranger-than-fiction, from the oddball humorists at the BBC.

2005-04-17T16:03:00.000-04:00

We rode our bikes through nearly-empty streets this morning for the 10:00 church service at the cathedral; it was the first time we've been able to do that this spring, and it felt great. Our usual route takes us down the Av. Berri bike path past the new and about-to-open Bibliotheque Nationale with its pale aqua louvered glass facades, and then along Maisonneuve past Place des Arts into downtown. This morning as we waited for the light near Jeanne Mance, a woman rode by wearing a retro black-and-white checked coat-dress with a tight waist, 3/4 length sleeves and flared skirt, black fishnet stockings, black flats, and oval black movie-star sunglasses; she had a bright pink milk crate on the back of her bike. She looked like she had walked out of Lauren Bacall/Humphry Bogart movie - it was a great outfit, and she had the attitude to go with it - some study had definitely gone into that one.

I just washed down the planters and bench out on the terrace; the sliding doors are open and every now and then the sound of the traffic and bicycle wheels is broken by the voices of a passing group, talking happily in French. I want to thank everyone who commented on my post about language frustrations; I'm sorry I couldn't write back personally to everybody because I really appreciated what you said. Hearing your experiences not only encouraged me but reinforced the fact that this is a universal feeling that one simply has to go through on the way to becoming more fluent and more comfortable. Most days I just enjoy the bilingualism of the city and go with the flow of it; it's easy to see that I've made a lot of progress just from noticing how much more easily I understand whatever spoken French I hear and how much more comfortable I am in various situation than I was when I first came. Along with humility, I think another lesson to be learned is patience!

This morning quietness, combined with the beautiful music and sense of peace, shared commitment, and community I've come to find at the Cathedral, have helped me rejuvenate after many days of very intense work. I could feel myself fraying on Friday and Saturday: very much in need of a break and some extra rest, if not sleep. I still feel tired but much better than I did. I like the work I'm doing a lot, and feel grateful for it - as usual, the question is balance and taking care of myself, something I've come to accept as a continual task and responsibility, not a place I'm going to arrive at and stay without readjustment.

2005-04-16T17:36:00.000-04:00

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.

2005-04-14T21:03:00.000-04:00

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.

2005-04-12T19:39:00.000-04:00

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.

2005-04-12T09:39:00.000-04:00

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.

2005-04-10T20:32:00.000-04:00

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.

2005-04-08T15:22:00.000-04:00

NOTE TO READERS

Like many Blogger users, apparently, I've been having trouble accessing my account and posting. This shouldn't affect readers who try to view the blog, but if it looks like I'm not posting regularly, that's the reason. I've taken steps to do what I can to fix the problem from this end in the short term (clearing cookies, basically); in the longer term it's likely that I'll be moving this site to our own server and different blog software. Stay tuned. And apologies for the interruptions and inconvenience.

2005-04-08T13:16:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I told my father-in-law about the book-weeding. He looked nervously at his own shelves. “There are books here I couldn’t imagine parting with,” he said, and then grinned. “But obviously I can’t take them with me! Where are you taking them, is someone buying them?”

No, I tell him, we’re donating them to a charity sale.

“That’s the thing,” he says. “No one will give you anything for used books. David” (his other son) “tells me that after I am gone…dead, that is…probably my library will be given to a small college, where they’d be glad to have them.”

“That’s a good idea.”He looks around again, and back at us. “But there are some I wish would stay in the family. David took one whole shelf.”

I don’t know whether to tell him there are books here I’d love to have, or whether it’s not the time, or my place to say that. I figure there will be other chances. And if he starts telling me to take books, I’ll probably get tearful and embarrass and upset him, so I stay silent. Instead I tell him about the book meme.“There’s been a thing going around the internet, asking people if they were going to be marooned on a desert island, what five books they’d take with them. What do you think? What would you choose?”He looks at me skeptically – he dislikes all games and quizzes, but I can tell he is either somewhat intrigued, or willing to humor me. He thinks for a minute, and doesn't say anything.

“The Qu’ran,” J. suggests.

“No, it’s a very disappointing book,” he says. I raise my eyebrows in surprise.

“No, it really is,” he insists. “It has no narrative. It’s a collection of Mohammad’s sayings, his revelations, over five periods of his life – he’d say something, and someone wrote it down on a palm leaf, and after he died, they collected all the palm leaves…”

“or backs of envelopes, or paper napkins…” said J.

“Exactly. They collected them all and wrote them down. It’s a book of utterances.” He frowns, and then gets a beatific look on his face. "But the recitations, the chanting of the Qu’ran! That is something else entirely. I was listening the other day to Iraqi radio, and there was someone chanting the Qu’ran with such a pure voice, so beautifully! Oh, it’s something when they can do that!”

His eyes are closed; my husband and we exchange the look that means “this man will never cease to amaze me.” “OK,” I say., when he opens his eyes. “Come on. Pick five books.” He looks at the shelves, looks back at me.

“What did you pick?” he asks, finally.

“The Iliad.” He nods in approval.

“Complete Works of Shakespeare.”

“That’s not a book, that’s a library!” he says.

“Well, yes, but we need volume. Collected Poems of Czeslaw Milosz – he’s a Polish poet.”

“Never heard of him.”

“The Oxford Book of American Verse.”

“Hmm, that’s interesting, I don’t know it either.”

"And maybe a Bible?”

“BAH!” he exclaims. “Another disappointing book.”

This man just loves to be perverse, I think to myself.

“I also thought maybe I’d just take five blank books,” I tell him.

“Not a bad idea,” he says, and then goes back to the Bible. “It’s too long, and very repetitious. I prefer the Reader’s Digest Bible.”

“WHAT?”we both say simultaneously. “What is that?”

“I have it right in my study, go look. They’ve done a marvelous job, they’ve cut out all the repetition, and added a lot of excellent pictures.”

J. goes and brings back a thick dark blue book, and begins thumbing through it. He’s right, the illustrations are pretty good. I find the concept a little weird, but, hey, that’s what Reader’s Digest is famous for – condensing books. This is also one of those cultural things: I grew up thinking that the Reader's Digest was beyond the pale, but my father-in-law always thought it was a very legitimate, important, and impressive publisher, largely because he missed the cultural clues, and because he knew someone who was an editor there, and this man showed an interest in his work.

Meanwhile, J. is looking through a central section called “great paintings of Biblical scenes.” He holds up a Victorian painting of a bloated fish-like whale, out of whose mouth the figure of Jonah is being ejected. We all look at it, speechless for a few moments.

“The printing is really excellent, don’t you think?” my father-in-law says.

In his study there must be twenty Bibles, including all the best-known English translations as well as Bibles in various other languages. He’s such a BS-er, hauling out this one today.

‘Well,” I say, trying to lubricate the conversation, “I suppose if it gets more people to read books…”

“I knew a woman who was a condenser for the Reader’s Digest – that’s what she did. Very brilliant woman. She had a method; she’d hold a pen in her hand and mark as she read, cutting all the superfluous parts. She was very good at it.”

‘Very brilliant,” says J. under his breath.

‘I don’t suppose Tolstoy would have thought too highly of it,” I remark.

He shrugs, and grins devilishly: “I know one thing - you won’t get any money for any Reader’s Digest Condensed Books at any booksale.” Then he settles back in his chair contentedly. “And as for the desert island - I think I prefer the five blank books.”

2005-04-06T09:52:00.000-04:00

GOODBYE BOOKS

One of our agreed tasks this week has been to do what we've been talking about for a long while - go through the books and actually get rid of those that no longer mean anything to us. Note that I didn't say "those we'll never read again" - because there are books on our shelves that I doubt either of us will re-read but we wouldn't part with for anything. No, this is a purge of dead weight, of books that are pointless taking up shelf space in this particular house. Some would see this is a wrenching, even devastating process -- when one of my friends moved into a retirement home it was the dismantling of his library that affected him the most: "like having my limbs amputated," he said. I'd probably say that too, if I had to give up my shelf of Russian literature, or choose between keeping poetry books or art books. Maybe someday it will come to that - I hope not - but the books on the floor are more of the how-to variety - I don't need my cold-climate gardening book anymore, and cookbooks I haven't used in two decades are not likely to enhance our cuisine around here anytime soon. What surprised both of us is that, once we also take away computer software documentation and old magazines, the volume is reduced by 1/3 to 1/2: leaving the literature and essays, religion and history, sociology and cultural studies, poetry, art and photography books that really do matter to us, as well as some sentimental volumes that remind us of the original owner or the giver.

All of this book-weeding brings me back to the desert-island book meme, and all the lists I've read on various blogs. (We may complain, but wasn't it pretty interesting to see what everyone chose?) If I had it to do over, this week, I wonder if I might simply take five of the fattest blank books I could find. On a desert island, or in solitary confinement, would it be worse not to be able to read, or not to be able to write?

2005-04-05T14:18:00.000-04:00

MORE ON THE POPE

Lorianne at Hoarded Ordinaries has written a thoughtful, personal, and ususual reflection on the death and life of the Pope.

2005-04-04T17:04:00.000-04:00

The geraniums think it's spring...

PURPLE CROSS

This is a scene we're missing, not being in Montreal during the time of the Pope's death and funeral. And we're sorry, because it would be interesting, and no doubt moving, to see the reaction and observance of his life and passing in this very Catholic city. According to articles in the Montreal papers, Mary Queen of the World Cathedral was packed with mourners. That's unusual: the huge Catholic churches in every neighborhood, including ours, are virtually empty on Sundays - cavernous, ornate monuments to the past grip that the Catholic Church used to have over nearly every French-Canadian living in Quebec. La Presse recently ran a series of articles on religion, noting that among Catholics and Protestants religious practice and attendance continues to be in a steep decline - it's a very noticeable difference to us, as Americans - but belief and acceptance of institutional authority are two different things. the Pope's death brought the people out, and their sincere grief was expressed openly in what they said he had meant to them. John Paul II had visited Canada, and this was also well remembered. It's a tradition that the lights on the cross on the top of Mont Royal, overlooking the city are turned purple in the event of the death of the Pope -- and purple they apparently are right now, glowing rather eerily through the fog.

My Muslim friend Shirin came over last night and asked if she should offer her condolences. I thanked her and smiled, saying "He's not my Pope." I've never been a fan of the papacy, seeing it as a symbol of the institutional church writ large; of politics, wealth and intrigue; a bastion of traditionalism and conservative values; an obstacle to modernity that had a particularly deleterious effect on the lives of women. Thinking about it recently, I realize that my positive feelings had mostly to do with the art that the Vatican owns, although I haven't seen much of it, never having been to Rome - a show of da Vinci drawings, and my memorable look at Michaelangelo's Pieta in the Vatican Pavilion at the New York World's Fair. I had hopes for the Catholic Church after Vatican II, hopes that were dashed by the conservative clamp-down that came afterward.

Yesterday, though, I read the long special section on John Paul II in the Montreal Gazette, including an excellent biographical article picked up from the Los Angeles Times, and looked at a photo gallery of the Pope's long life - and I found that my attitude softened. John Paul was more complex than I had realized. His conservatism on personal matters, and his opposition to the ordination of women and to liberation theology in South America were certainly as strict and uncompromising as I had always thought. But he had also been a consistent voice for peace and for interfaith respect and dialogue, two issues that are closest to my heart. He added a strong voice to the liberation of his Polish homeland and undoubtedly helped the fall of communism. He apologized for the church's role in anti-Semitism, while being steadfast in his support for the rights of the Palestinian people to have their own homeland and to live in peace. He continually opposed war, genocide, torture, and capital punishment. And in the photographs one saw a man willing to meet people of every religion and every race, willing to use his own body and the power, such as it is, of his office, to show respect and to encourage dialogue and peaceful communication rather than violence.

I looked at photographs of the Pope with Castro and with Reagan, with Hindu leaders and Muslims, with Anglican and Orthodox Christian leaders, with whom he tried to heal very very old rifts. And since the photographs were chronological, I watched him get older and more frail, but the accompanying stories showed his intense determination and awareness of the symbol he was to so many people - so he finished speeches even when he was very ill, he walked when it was difficult for him, he kept traveling almost to the end. I couldn't help but admire that.

My feelings about the institutional church and the Papacy are colored by my enormous resistance to clerical authority, and my abhorence of masses of people accepting anyone's word for what they should think and do, especially in the most personal areas of their lives. Knowing the extent of human frailty and self-deception, I cannot accept that any human being, by virtue of their high priestly office, is God's anointed representative, empowered with special knowledge or the ability to pardon sins. I am more than ready to humbly listen to and learn from the immense knowledge and experience of certain religious people - both ordained and non-ordained. But I cannot, and never have, accepted someone's authority to interpret scripture or tell me what to do or think simply because they were "my priest" or "my bishop". Religious fundamentalism and conservatism, in all faiths and in cults as well, have shown us where that road can lead. But even in my church, there are many well-educated people who will not question the authority of the priest, don't trust their own ability to read and grapple with scripture or church history, or who can't seem to take on their own ministries, in or out of the church, without the priest's "approval". I sometimes think that one reason I have so many close friends among the clergy is precisely because I don't think that way. But my clerical friends, not surprisingly, tend to be of the progressive ilk, and are going about their ministries with eyes wide open to a changing world and an awareness that the Church, too, must change to meet it. They also tend to be people who realize that true authority is earned, not conferred along with a degree or a title.

Two photographs of the Pope have stayed in my mind especially. One is a black-and-white shot of the white-robed Pope, small and seen from the back, talking in a high-ceilinged jail cell to the man who tried to assassinate him. The other is of him as a very old man, in the same familiar white robes and skullcap, sitting at a small desk set on a large grassy lawn surrounded by trees, somewhere in Italy. He's bent over, he's all alone except for a few books, and he looks up as if to say, yes, I'm still here, I can't get up, take the picture. It's a bizarre photograph, of what must be one of the strangest jobs in the world.

2005-04-02T16:47:00.000-05:00

SMRREBRD

The other night, our wonderful Icelandic neighbors, happy to see the lights on again in our house, invited us for dinner. H. had just returned from Iceland, laden with foodstuffs. On the phone he told us he was cooking fish, but when we arrived he said, no, it was going to be smrrebrd.

“Sit!” he commanded, filling small glasses with ice-cold akvavit and larger ones with our choice of beer or white wine. And out of the kitchen, with a flourish, came two platters of the most beautiful composed sandwiches I have ever seen, of a special, dense, Danish rye bread spread with butter, and then topped with veritable sculptures of appropriately combined shrimp, hard-boiled eggs, an Icelandic liver pate topped with slices of port-wine aspic, marinated herring, salami, onions, and Icelandic caviar, garnished with sprigs of fresh dill. I especially love herring, and the caraway-flavored aquavit was the perfect accompaniment. It was, in a word, a feast.

Smrrebrd is the Icelandic word for smorgasbord. Looking up “smorgasbord” to make sure I was spelling it correctly, the dictionary confirmed H. and E.’s explanation that the word means bread (brd) and butter (smrre). The word smorgasbord is Swedish; the origin of its first half is the Old Norse word smör or smjör , meaning fat or butter. (It’s no leap to realize that’s the source of our English word “smear”.) But it’s interesting that smorgasbord -- originally a selection of these beautifully composed sandwiches -- has come to mean a buffet, with a large selection of unrelated dishes –anything from cold lobster to baked beans. More generically, we've come to use the word to mean a mixture or even a “hodgepodge” -- which is not at all a description of the culinary artworks we ate that night.

2005-04-01T17:08:00.000-05:00

BUSY, BUSY

As I guess is fairly obvious, I've been pretty occupied this week without much time for writing (well, I've been writing, as part of a big project I'm in charge of, but that's rather different.) I feel like I've hardly looked around myself since coming back down here, although for the first time since winter began I was able to take a walk around my garden and check on the plants - always a happy occasion. I found two roses that I'm worried about (standard for northern New England - you just take your chances with roses unless you are willing to bury them each fall, even the rugosas sometimes succumb), and the crack in the trunk of the weeping Siberian peaberry seems larger, but other than that everybody looks like they made it through the winter - reddish-brown tulip shoots are up, the Oriental poppies are growing little soft tufts of leaves, and the daylilies are poking green leaf-tips through the thawing snow and mud. It's too early to rake the leaves off the perennial beds - we had sleet last night - but it won't be long now. On the drive down here we saw many flocks of migrating geese, including one group of snow geese over a Canadian cornfield. Now I can hear redwing blackbirds calling in the trees outside, and the robins are bouncing around in back of the house, looking for worms. Q.E.D.

One of my top priorities, besides the ruthless purge of our bookshelves we've vowed to do this spring and the replacement of the curling linoleum floor tiles in our bathroom, is to move my blog and finally get off Blogger. I'm really distressed about the slow loading times and the ridiculous problems accessing the Blogger site and then losing posts during publication (which of course wouldn't be so bad if I remembered to copy them first, or write them in a word processor). I've started a non-public shadow-blog on Typepad to see how I like it, but I'd be grateful for your suggestions about various weblog software and hosting services. I'd especially like to hear from Typepad users about your experiences with managing comment spam, which (knock on the old maple chair) has not been a problem for me so far.

2005-03-30T17:21:00.000-05:00

EASTER BREAD FOLLOW-UP

Here is a Portugese recipe that sounds like the same thing as the basket-shaped, egg-bearing breads I photographed at Easter. In this case, uncooked eggs are pressed int the dough and baked just like that, along with the bread. I also looked through some Greek recipes for traditional Easter bread, and those use red-dyed, hardboiled eggs that are also placed on top of the dough prior to baking.

I'm dubious but I guess I'll just have to try it, and hope I don't end up with exploded egg all over my oven! Not one of these recipes talked about piercing the eggshell first.

2005-03-30T15:43:00.000-05:00

BOOK MEME

A week or more ago, my friend Marja-Leena asked me to contribute to this meme, and I got all consumed with work and travel and forgot to even write back. So here is my apology (sorry, M-L, and thank you for asking me!) and an attempt at a response:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Sorry, I've never read it.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Yes. Laurie in Little Women/Little Men. Rennie in the Jalna series (we’re really getting back there in time now.) Dr. Zhivago (which had more to do with Omar Sharif than the actual book, I’m afraid).

The last book you bought is?
Le Premier Siecle après Beatrice, by Amin Maalouf

What are you currently reading?
The Maalouf. Confessions of an Igloo Dweller by John Houston. Two Solitudes by Hugh MacLennan.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:
1. The Iliad
2. Collected Poems, Czeslaw Milosz
3. Oxford Book of American Verse
4. Collected Works of William Shakespeare (we’re going for length and re-readability here)
5. A Bible (maybe) or The Book of Common Prayer (although I probably have much of the latter memorized – I’d take it as a hedge against going completely insane). Or maybe Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier or a book of Beethoven sonatas, for playing air piano. (This is a rough choice.)

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
Maria, poet and writer, of eclectic tastes, who will make wonderful choices
qB, because I'm guessing she’ll choose some quirky things far less boring than my "classics"
Language Hat, who reads more than any of us but rarely reveals anything very personal. I'm not sure if he'll respond but I'm hoping he will.

2005-03-27T09:11:00.000-05:00

HAPPY EASTER

Happy Easter, happy spring to everyone. These beautiful breads were in the window of a Portugese bakery on St. Laurent - they represent the cross, obviously, but the cross with resurrection in the form of colored eggs that are baked, whole in their shells, into the basket-form of the bread. Sorry the photo isn't better - there were too many reflections in the the window.

We're off to church; after digging through my closet I finally found a pink sweater to wear instead of my winter wardrobe of mostly black and grey wooly things. More later. But I hope the sun shines on you today.

2005-03-25T20:44:00.000-05:00

GOOD FRIDAY

This is the first Good Friday in a decade that I've neither attended church nor sung in a choir. It feels strange not to spend Holy Week as an active liturgical participant in the progression of services that retrace the steps of the Passion narrative. It also feels – I must admit – liberating to do something different, and to be able to step outside of patterns and expectations, and observe how I feel.

I’ve sometimes tried to fast on Good Friday, and even when I was a college student and feeling perhaps the furthest away from religion and the church, I still observed the day in some way, consuming less, working less, spending time in reflection on the story and what it had to say to me, thinking about human beings and their tendency toward violence and the silencing of those who upset the status quo. The day has often been a time of thinking about my own “big issues”, which I’ve tried to identify during Lent, before letting them go after the season is over. It’s interesting that I find myself casting back now to Good Fridays during those college years, when war, governmental excess, and an uncertain world were so much on my mind: probably I surprised myself then by observing the day, so much so that I’ve always remembered it. We don’t really change that much, in our core.

But today I haven’t been especially reflective, and certainly not sad. In fact, it was another beautiful early spring day here, and I spent the morning working by e-mail and telephone with a colleague, finishing the first part of a big two-part project, and then, in the afternoon, went for a long walk, stopping in at some of the Portuguese bakeries I’ve never visited to see what traditional things they had prepared for Easter. I stopped in the North African “souk” on Duluth and bought a tile to try in our Vermont kitchen, where we’ve decided to finally finish the décor, and I bought a small solid brass camel for my father-in-law: something I had seen months ago and have thought about as a gift for him ever since. I was, in a word, happy.

Later I did a search for Good Friday poetry, and came up with the following poem by John Donne. I got fascinated in the excellent commentary by Ian Lancashire on the website of the University of Toronto English Library – a resource I’m looking forward to exploring.
These are lines 29-42 of a 42-line poem, written by Donne, who was a Church of England preacher, in April 1613. (I’ve put the lines into modern English.) The whole poem is very rich, both in its language and its content, which says a lot about English thought at the time – it contains a continual play on the word Sunne, for both “Son” and “Sun”, talks about astrological ideas like the harmony of the spheres, and uses the metaphor of Donne’s journey westward, toward the setting sun, as a way of talking about moving toward death – and the soul’s relationship to God as that approaches. The west, from London, also meant Tyndale – the place here criminals were hanged – and it implied going west to America, a symbol for seeking wealth.
In the England of his day, everyone was expected to spend Good Friday in reflection and fasting. Donne, who had been a lawyer, a member of Parliament, and was jailed for marrying against his father-in-law's wishes, was ordained in 1615. On this Good Friday, though, he was not in church but on the road, riding west; the poem is about his somewhat reluctant guilt for being where he was, and unreadiness to face his creator. So, like me, he spent an unconventional Good Friday in unconventional observance, and today the years between us collapsed.

I learned another thing about Donne today: other than two poems which were published, his poetry circulated only in manuscript during his lifetime.

Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward (last section)
John Donne

If on these things I dare not look, dare I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was God’s partner here, and furnished thus
Half of that Sacrifice, which ransomed us?
Though these things, as I ride, be [far] from mine eye,
They're present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and thou looks towards me,
O Saviour, as thou hangs upon the tree;
I turn my back to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O think me worth thine anger, punish me,
Burn off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may know me, and
I'll turn my face.

2005-03-24T20:17:00.000-05:00

Les pompiers do some spring cleaning

You know you're not living in a completely secular city when you download the bus schedules and find there is a special schedule (of greatly reduced numbers of buses) for Good Friday, and that everything in the city is closed on Easter Monday.

I've also never seen so much chocolate in my life, or so many variations on the theme of Easter basket: chocolate rabbits, trucks, footballs...I even saw chocolate beavers. And huge! Nearly lifesize! For the upscale shopper, the fancy boulangeries have cellophane-wrapped, ribbon-tied special rabbits and eggs in white and dark chocolate, or egg-shaped, foil-wrapped baskets that seem to be filled with fancy candies. I've seen little of the tacky Wal-Mart variety of purple shredded fake grass with plastic-wrapped standard candy and plastic and stuffed toys, although I'm sure those exist here too.

It's not making me particularly hungry, although maybe before the weekend is over I'll succumb.

Meanwhile, the snow is melting in the park, and the seagulls are starting to screech and fight as they pick through leftovers, emerging from a winter under the snow. The city doesn't look beautiful right now, but I don't care - to me it is glorious to feel the sun and ride a bus past people gliding joyously on roller blades; to pass the neighborhood cafe and smile at the proprietor, out sweeping the sidewalk for the first time in months, getting ready for the first day he can set tables on the sidewalk; to see bright pink and yellow and red tulips in galvanized buckets outside the florist's window. I left my bus at Champs-des-Mars and walked from the Old City toward downtown, keeping on the sunny side of the street where water ran down the sides of the old stone buildings and sparrows sang on the doorsills. In front of Notre Dame basilica, the horse-drawn carriages waited for tourists, while the horses in their flower-decorated harnesses patiently gazed down the street and the drivers talked animatedly with one another in their Quebecois accents. The sky was brilliantly blue, and the light shone on the ships in the port and the water beyond. Everyone was out, bareheaded, coats flapping open, and even in the business district where the usual casual Montreal dress gives way to dark suits and ties, there was an animated excitement at noon as people tumbled out of their glass-and steel buildings and winter underground existence, into spring.

2005-03-23T20:43:00.000-05:00

Sa’di, a great poet of Persia (c. 1213-1293, Shiraz) wrote:

"Every leaf of the tree becomes a page of the Book when once the heart is opened and it has learnt to read."

2005-03-22T20:59:00.000-05:00

THANK YOU...

to everyone who wrote with blogday wishes yesterday. I appreciate your ongoing presence and your kind words more than I can possibly say.

2005-03-22T20:57:00.000-05:00

TECHNOLOGY

The family got together and gave my father-in-law a computer after he retired from teaching and full-time ministry. He hoped to devote himself to writing. That was perhaps twenty years ago, and despite being a disaster when it came to anything mechnical, he learned to use the computer for word processing by memorizing rote pathways for saving files and doing basic formatting – when he got stuck or lost things, he’d call and someone would bail him out. The computer, or “my machine”, as he called it, was a Big Mystery; he had no desire to know how it worked, he just wanted to do what he needed to do: write, save, edit, and print – and for the most part, it helped him do those things pretty reliably.

When the internet arrived, he was curious but even more mystified. His computer didn’t have internet capability, so my husband showed him on ours what you could do. He was baffled, but mainly because he couldn’t comprehend either the economics or the altruism. It wasn’t compelling enough for him to justify the cost of a new machine. When he moved to the retirement home, there was internet access for residents in the library, and for a while he had a password and an e-mail account. For the first time he had to learn to use a mouse, and navigate a graphical interface; he was always getting mixed up or losing his place on the screen, which scrolled unpredictably or zoomed in or out when he clicked in the wrong place, but he stuck with it for quite a while, always amazed to find mail. That ended about a year ago when he simply stopped checking his mail. He never learned how to do research on the web: he didn’t have to. There were always obliging young female librarians at the public library who were happy to fulfill his requests, and lately, now that he doesn’t go out, his neighbor across the hallway is glad to do the searching.

“I ask him for something, and he comes back in half an hour with the whole thing printed out on a sheet of paper. Incredible!” he says. “But what I want to know is, who pays for it?”

“What do you mean, Dad?” J. asks.

“Do you have to pay to use it?”

“Yes, you usually pay a yearly fee.”

“Oh.” He thinks for a minute. “But how does the material get there? For example, someone wrote a book about the school I used to teach in, and it mentions me, and it’s all there on the internet. Did he have to pay to put it there?”

“Well, sort of. When you set up a website you pay something, but it’s not that much.”

“I see. But why would he do it? Why would the person who wrote it want to put it there, if he’s not making any money on it? And all these other things that you can find out. Why are they there? Who puts them there? And you can read them for free! I don’t understand.”

“There are a lot of people who just want to share information, they know something or they love some area of inquiry and they just want to write about it or make a site where people can come to learn, so they do it as a labor of love.”

“Incredible. It’s beyond me. I was born at the wrong time.” He shakes his head, grins, and adds: “The century after Aristotle would have been about right.”

2005-03-20T20:20:00.000-05:00

...back in the saddle again

Today is Cassandra's 2nd blogiversary, and she seems to have celebrated all weekend...

The party began with the early arrival (well, maybe "premature" would be a better word, I'm sure winter isn't done with us) of le printemps to Montreal and an excursion yesterday on my bike, with a long stop at Archambault where I searched for flute music in the extensive classical sheet music collection, then stopped for a cappuchino at my favorite cafe, where J. also arrived on his bike and looked in through the window to see me totally concentrated playing air piano over the score of a Bach flute sonata, while McGill students studied at the nearby tables.

The two of us took off for Cinema du Parc, up the street, and saw a new Chinese film called The World - about which more will be written later. After the movie we cycled home, had a fast dinner, and walked back to St. Laurent to attend the YULblog party at Zeke's Gallery, celebrating the fifth anniversary party of Montreal blogging (just to keep a measly two-year blog anniversary well in perspective). It was a loud, fun, rollicking party in a fairly small space; Cassandra was happy to see Mikel, Martine and Ed, Karl, Steph, and Helen again, and to meet Zeke, Andre and his wife, Chris, and Kate, aka la Blogeuse, for the first time. In this picture you can sort of see me and J., way in the back - J. is in a blue shirt, under the microphone hanging from the ceiling, and I'm to his right in the picture, smiling. (What this picture doesn't show is the saturation of the room with smoke - one thing I really don't like about Montreal is how many people smoke, and how it's allowed in certain areas of many public places. Afterwards I had to wash all my clothes and my hair, and this morning we both still had sore throats from the smoke and the shouting everyone was doing to carry on converstions over the din in the room. Which is all OK - it was a great party.)

Today we crawled out of bed rather reluctantly, and went to church for the Palm Sunday liturgy, which was very beautiful; then had lunch with a friend, came back and worked a bit, and in the late afternoon went to an organ and choir concert at Eglise St. Jean-Baptiste. The concert was disappointing; I had heard a fantastic concert of 19th century French organ music there earlier this month, but today's offering was a combination of well-performed but very contained and expressionless Renaissance music, sung by an a capella choir, and modern improvisations of his own composition played by Gabriel Marghieri, a decorated European organist who teaches improvisation at the University of Lyon. I was unfortunately left cold by the organ music, in particular, and was not alone in that reaction among the audience.

Maybe I should write something about two years of blogging, but nothing particularly new has come to mind, although I've thought about it a good deal this weekend. It's simply a part of my life now; as Andre and I were admitting last night, while our spouses pointed out observed symptoms and commiserated with each other.

As Paula wrote today, two years ago was the start of the Iraq war. I began my blog then to try to give myself an excuse to write about something other than the political issues that had been consuming me for the previous two years, and to lift myself out of the despair I felt. The same longing for peace and sanity exists in me today, maybe even more so, but I'm much happier and my life has literally changed, both because of the creative expression I've found here, and for having met all of you. Onward, with gratitude! Year Three!

2005-03-19T12:49:00.000-05:00

Woman Leads Mixed-Gender Muslim Prayers

A BBC article reports on the controversial and potentially ground-breaking Friday prayer service which took place yesterday at facilities of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York City, after local mosques refused to host it. Amina Wadud, a professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, led the Friday prayers, which were attended by 80-100 Islamic men and women.

Another article, from the Chicago Sun-Times, is here, and includes this quote:

Some Islamic scholars have said they were aware of a few other mixed-gender prayer meetings led by women, mostly in the West, but they are rare.

''The issue of gender equality is a very important one in Islam, and Muslims have unfortunately used highly restrictive interpretations of history to move backward,'' Wadud said before the service. ''With this prayer service we are moving forward. This single act is symbolic of the possibilities within Islam.''

There was immediate criticism from Muslims who felt this was unacceptable; before westerners jump to conclusions, it's important to understand some of the reasons on both sides, which are covered somewhat in the articles.

2005-03-18T17:24:00.000-05:00

Getting warmer...

IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

Just three of many recent stories that show Toto this definitely isn’t Kansas. All of these news bits are gleaned from accounts in the Montreal Gazette, which unfortunately is not available free online in its entirety, or I'd give you the direct links.

Huge Student Strikes Protest Provincial Cuts in Education Aid

230,000 students went on strike, and nearly 100,000 of them marched this Wednesday in the biggest student protest in Quebec since the 1960s. The protests were in response to the Quebec government’s recent announcement of $103-million cut in student scholarships. I wish I could link to the electronic edition of yesterday’s Gazette and show you the photograph of the huge demonstration stretching as far up a Montreal street as you can see.

But get this: following in the footsteps of their elders, high school students have also been striking. 150 students from four high schools showed up as early as 6 a.m. on Wednesday to form a human chain surrounding their school building in Villeray. Unlike university and CEGEP (basically like a U.S. two-year college or technical school) students, Quebec law says that high school students are required to attend class. But their teachers refused to cross the picket line. Here’s the quote that really got me:

“On the other hand, teachers and administrators don’t want to discourage the students from being politically active,” said Claudette Lechasseur, a spokesperson for the Commission scolaire de Montréal. “The students are required to attend their courses,” Lechasseur said. “Except we realize these are important issues that will one day affect them directly. They’re learning an important lesson in citizenship.”

Big Business Loses in Court

The Supreme Court of Canada unanimously refused to overturn the Quebec government’s ban on butter-colored margarine. The suit had been brought by the international giant Unilever, saying that it costs the company $100,000 a month to have separate manufacturing and distribution processes for margarine designated for Quebec, which is the only place in the world still to have such a restriction.

“Quebec margarine, made in Toronto from Western-grown canola and Ontario soybean oil, is usually a lardish, pale cream colour because of a regulation that aims to protect Quebec’s huge dairy industry by eliminating potential confusion with butter.”

The Supreme Court ruled that the province did indeed have the right to protect its dairy industry.

Gay Activists Also Stage Protest

About 40 members of the Montreal queer activist group “the Pink Panthers” demonstrated in front of a conference center where Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper – an opponent of gay marriage and abortion - was appearing. They arrived in a vehicle topped with a papier-mache likeness of Stephen Harper in a, umm, homosexually compromising position with a pink panther. Some of the other protesters came dressed as bishops and pink pigs – the latter a comment on police brutality.

“His discourse is very homophobic, very anti-abortion, very pro-criminalization of sex work and pro-militarization. We’re sure he’s put on his best makeup for Quebec, and we want to strip him naked,” said Pantoufle, 28 (one of the organizers). The aim of the protest was to show delegates that the Québécois do not support Harper or his party’s policies, protesters said.

The demonstration seems to have been taken with good humor and it later disbanded peacefully, without incident or interference by police.

2005-03-17T18:41:00.000-05:00

We're back in Montreal, as of yesterday evening. Life feels so much more tranquil here. I know - it's a city, what am I talking about? But it's true. And that's one of the impressions whose longevity I wonder about: will we always feel this way? Part of it is that this apartment feels like such a cozy nest, compared to our drafty, much larger wooden-frame Vermont house. Right now, there is jazz on the radio; J. is lighting a fire in the fireplace; the rice is cooking on the stove and the broiler is heating in preparation for a chicken breast glazed with apricot, dijon mustard and tamari. Cars go by, but I barely hear them; the streetlights reflect a pink glow off the snow.

This has been a demanding stretch of time, both workwise and personally. Basically things are fine, but there have been important meetings and potentially stressful discussions, all now in the past. As the one who had had the most sleep in the past few days, I drove yesterday, and arrived here with knots across my shoulders and a headache, both of which have eased away during the day today. Watching the fire reflect in the side of an old, carved wooden chest, I feel grateful for many simple things.

Readers interested in Thomas Merton might enjoy the post and subsequent discussion going on at The Vernacular Body (where yours truly has been hogging a good deal of airtime). For me, the discussion feels like it's resonating in the light of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, recently re-read, which is ostensibly about an Italian monastery during the Inquisition, but is actually about lust of all kinds - including lust for power between competing institutions, and lust for knowledge contained in books. The comments, however, are about Merton's choice to remain in the monastery, bound by his bows of obedience - and how we might conceptualize that in terms of our own lives.

The music on the radio, post-dinner, has changed to a live recording from the Fribourg Festival of Sacred Music of medieval chant and chanson, with lute, drums, bells, and women's voices, and it is very wonderful; instrumental interludes interwoven with the sung portions. The fire dies down. And for some reason, I keep thinking of a blue bird I saw hopping happily in a cage in a neighbor's window today, high above the street.

2005-03-15T13:09:00.000-05:00

Montréal, ville plutôt sécuritaire
Montreal and the other major Canadian cities have recently been rated the safest North America cities. Montreal ranks further down, at 22nd place, for quality of life in this rating of the world's cities (but what do they know - and we probably got minus points for the weather!)The top cities in both categories were in Switzerland. (Article from Radio Canada, via Montreal City Weblog. In French)

Orchestra on Ice
Since I like classical music and am very happy to be in a city with so much excellent live music of all kinds, I've been following the stories about the engagement of Kent Nagano to be the next conductor of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, beginning in 2006. But now there's drama, as always seem to be the case these days with major orchestras, opera, and dance companies - apparently the management of the orchestra and the musicians cannot arrive at a contract, and there is a possibility of a lock-out, right before Nagano is scheduled to conduct several concerts at the end of March and early April. Le Devoir has the story (also in French). (By contrast, I hope many of you read the fairly recent article about the Cleveland Orchestra and their new, young conductor Franz Welser-Möstin in The New Yorker; unfortunately it's not available online, but here's a review from the New York Times of their New York concert engagements last month, which included pianist Radu Lupu playing the five Beethoven piano concertos.)

2005-03-14T15:14:00.000-05:00

TWO SOLITUDES

Quebec Literature is a large and growing genre, and one that the province is justifiably proud of. But I'm just getting my feet wet, both in Canadian literature, and that of Quebec specifically. I've got several lists that bloggers and newspapers have published, and I noticed in La Presse that someone has just come out with a book about the 100 best Quebecois novels. But I want to ask for suggestions from you who know this literature very well - I'm trying to get a better picture, especially, of Quebec and Canadian history, both past and recent. For now, I'm probably better off with books that are in English translation but I'm gearing up to tackle more and more French. (And of course there are English-language originals on the list too.) Favorites, please?

Hugh MacLennan, born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in 1907, studied classics (like me); he did his undergraudate work at Dalhousie University, then went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and got his PhD at Princeton in 1935. He then taught at Lower Canada College in Montreal (does this still exist?), moving to McGill in 1951, where he taught for 30 more years; he died in 1990, probably wondering what on earth was going to happen to his city and to Quebec.

I didn't know about his teaching; just that he is an important Canadian writer. I read his first book, Barometer Rising, about the arms ship explosion in Halifax, a few years ago, and liked it very much. J. is halfway through Two Solitudes, MacLennan's classic book about rural French and Anglo Quebec in the first half of the 20th century, and I'm already stealing snatches of it when he's not reading. Mordecai Richler said that the book's title "entered into our language" as an expression for the Anglo/French cultural divide - he wrote that around 1990, when uncertainty about the province's future was very great and many English-heritage and English-speaking residents had fled to Ontario. The title actually comes from Rilke, and has a much more positive spin than Richler was able to read into it at the time. Although tensions between Anglo- and French culture still exist and can be felt even by newcomers like myself, I hope the Rilke fragment feels more plausible than it did fifteen years ago:

Love consists in this,
that two solitudes protect
and touch, and greet each other.

What I'm most looking forward to, in addition to the insights provided by MacLennan's narrative, is his prose. He's a really excellent descriptive writer; here's one of the opening paragraphs of the book, which begins in 1917:

Nowhere has nature wasted herself as she has here. There is enough water in the Saint Lawrence alone to irrigate half of Europe, but the river pours right out of the continent into the sea. No amount of water can irrigate stones, and most of Quebec is solid rock. It is as though millions of years back in geologic time a sword had been plunged through the rock from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes and savagely wrenched out again, and the pure water of the continental reservoir, unmuddied and almost useless to farmers, drains untouchably away. In summer the cloud packs pass over it in soft, cumulus, pacific towers, endlessly forming and dissolving to make a welter of movement about the sun. In winter when there is no storm the sky is generally empty, blue and glittering over the ice and snow, and the sun stares out of it like a cyclop's eye.

All the narrow plain between the St. Lawrence and the hills is worked hard. From the Ontario border down to the beginning of the estuary, the farmland runs in two delicate bands along the shores, with roads like a pair of village main streets a thousand miles long, each parallel to the river. All the good land was broken long ago, occupied and divided among seigneurs and their sons, and then among tenants and their sons. Bleak wooden fences separate each strip of farm form its neighbor, running straight as rulers set at right angles to the river to form long narrow rectangles pointing inland. The ploughed land looks like the course of a gigantic and empty steeplechase where all motion has been frozen. Every inch of it is measured, and brooded over by notaries, and blessed by priests.

Knowing how difficult it is to write that well, I look forward to reading 475 pages more.

2005-03-12T21:44:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow I'll try to take some pictures that show the incredibleness that's outside right now: at least a foot of new snow, so wet that it clings in great clumps to the tiniest twigs, forms great gravity-defying white tophats on every fencepost, every hosta-pod and dried black-eyed susan; and adorns the telephone wire with a repeated symphony of mounded crescents, waiting for a running squirrel or landing blue jay to knock them all off with one flick of a flailing high-wire tail.

It's as if our whole world were inside an owl's wing: muffled, soft, white, and - while the snow fell, which is did most of the day - slightly blurred. I watch from an upstairs window, my form a flash of bright color in a monochromatic world, if anyone were looking. But they are not; no one moves on days like this, not on a weekend, save for the occasional snowplow or someone heading out for a prescription, or the milk the baby can't do without.

I stay inside with my computer, my tea, my flute; we remove the old wax from the kitchen floor, do the laundry, make French toast, speak on the telephone. There's no point being miserable about it: warmth will come when it's ready, and we'll all get what we've been waiting for - even the male cardinal, chipping impatiently below the window, refusing to let up on his spring song.

2005-03-10T20:54:00.000-05:00

Spring Dresses, Montreal. I wish. We all wish.

READING

A book order arrived from Powell's today, adding to the bedside stack of reading material. For pleasure, and in addition to the Amin Maalouf novel, which I'm chipping away at, a few pages a day (the protagonist is currently at an entomology seminar in Cairo, talking about scarab beetles), I'm re-reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

In our quest to better understand our second homeland, J. is reading Two Solitudes, by Hugh MacLennan, a novel set northwest of Montreal, starting in 1917, and A Solitary Pillar, a history of the Anglican church in Montreal and the Quiet Revolution - the enormous socio-political change that took place in Quebec when the population shook off the domination of society and personal life by the Roman Catholic church.

From Powell's I received another Canadian book, Mordecai Richler's Oh Canada, Oh Quebec, written in 1991, and subtitled "Requiem for a Divided Country".

The other book is Arabic poetry; I'm trying to learn a little more about it and hoping I might be able to share some of it with my father-in-law, since reading is becoming very hard for him now.

2005-03-09T20:59:00.000-05:00

Mes ami(e)s! YulBlog, the oldest known gathering of bloggers in the world, celebrates five years of blogging and camaraderie in Montreal. (article from La Presse, via Montreal City Weblog)

2005-03-09T20:26:00.000-05:00

PROTESTANTS

Lately my father-in-law has been feeling much better; his new doctor has changed his medications and given him something for his persistent indigestion, and for the first time in years, his prodigious appetite seems to be returning. He came to the lunch table with a plate loaded with toast points and creamed chipped beef. “I know,” he said, grinning and setting to work with his fork. “I shouldn’t. But I love it, it’s one of the best things they make here.” He ate the entire plateful, and a big bowl of chicken soup, and drank a glass of sugar-free ginger-ale.

“What else can I get you?” I asked.

“Maybe something for dessert…my sugar is normal now! Hurray! The last time they tested it the woman said, ‘Go ahead and eat some dessert!’ So I’ve been indulging a bit. What do they have today…something other than cake?”

“Do you want some fruit? No? Do you like pudding?” I’d never seen him eat regular pudding, which is always served at there – vanilla or chocolate in sundae glasses with cool-whip on top, or in layers in parfait glasses.

“What’s the kind I like?” he asked.

“Rice? Tapioca?”

“Rice is all right, but no, I mean that kind made with eggs and milk that gets baked…”

“Custard. Or crème caramel.”

“Yes! Delicious!” he said, rolling his eyes heavenward.

“They don’t have that today, I’m afraid.”

“I know! Just get something else.”

We were at the end of the lunch hour and the pickings were slim; I brought him some red jello with cool whip and an orange slice on the top; he made a face. “I’ll take it back,” I told him. “There wasn’t much else.”

“No, since you’ve brought it I’ll eat it,” he said, taking the orange slice out of the cream and popping it in his mouth. He ate a spoonful of the wriggling jello, grinning as he guided the fork precariously into his mouth. "Was it you who told me this stuff is full of sugar?"

"No," J. said.

"Why not, if you know it is?"

"Because I think you deserve to have some pleasure in your life once in a while."

We began talking about a friend who was going back to Damascus soon to settle an estate; my father-in-law said how much he wished someone had been able to buy back the family home there. It had been a lovely home when they lived there, he said, before it was sold when his parents died, and changed into a multi-family house. He and J. had visited the old family house when they were in Damascus five years ago, and the pictures bore out his story; it must have been lovely, with a traditional central courtyard and a rooftop garden and grape arbor. “I still can’t understand why we never really knew our neighbors,” he said. “We lived right on the edge of the Christian section; the people next to us were Muslim but I never ever saw them.”

“Couldn’t you see them from your roof?”

“Oh no!” he said. “There was one room you could have seen into, but they had hung a curtain or something there so you couldn’t see anything. And several of the other families near us were Catholic, and we didn’t really mingle with them because we were Protestant. It wasn’t because there was any problem, that’s just the way it was. There were some Orthodox families who we did know; that’s because we had been Orthodox, before, of course.”

I was always amazed by those “of courses” that peppered his speech, just as they had the comments of my mother-in-law; implied in them was a whole world of knowledge we were supposed to have but didn’t. “Of course.” Of course – what?

“How did the break happen in your family – how did you become Protestant?” I asked.

“Oh you don’t know that story?” he said. “It goes back to my paternal grandfather. He was a rich man. In those days the Ottomans collected tax from every village, and they would go around and visit the villages and decide about how much they thought that village should pay. Then they asked people from the village to come forward and say how much they’d promise to collect, and the person who promised the most got appointed and paid to be the tax collector. And my grandfather was one of those people.”

“Weren’t they hated by the people?”

“Well, the Ottomans knew the people wanted to be able to go back to their villages, so they weren’t exorbitant about what they tried to collect. Anyway, my grandfather had gone on a journey to one of those villages, and on the way, he got typhus and died. They brought his body back, and my grandmother was in trouble – the boys were all small; she was pregnant with my father at the time and he was born after my grandfather died. So she went to the Orthodox Church for help managing things, and turned over the family’s finances to them to take care of. When it eventually came time for my father to go away to school, she asked for the funds, and the Church said, ‘Sorry, there isn’t any money.’ But there had been plenty of money. My grandmother was very angry and complained and said the money hadn’t been managed properly, and the Church fathers just threw up their hands and said, ‘Sorry,’ and she came back to the house and from that day forward we were Protestants.”

He shrugged and smiled, a little mischievously. “I always was very fond of the Patriarch though.”

2005-03-07T21:08:00.000-05:00

I'm back in Vermont; there was another snowstorm today that we drove through, thinking it was going to be a not-fun ride, but suddenly, just after the border, we came out of it and there was sun and a beautiful late winter day. From what I heard during a phone call I made later in the afternoon, it seems the snow headed right up to Montreal.

I forgot to mention that yesterday in church the Prayers of the People were led by a native French-speaker whose voice I could listen to all day. (For you non-Anglicans, this is just about the closest we come to extemporaneous prayer - it's a section of the service where various people, usually grouped into categories (clergy, government, the sick, the needy, those who have died, and so on) are prayed for by name, and these prayers are led by a member of the congregation). One thing I especially like about the Cathedral is that the leader of these prayers each week seems to have considerable discretion about what he or she says; there's a wonderful Anglican informality - if that's not an oxymoron - about the variations in voices and personalities each week, while keeping to a fairly set pattern. Anyway, yesterday the leader reminded us that it was International Women's Week, and she invited us to remember especially the strong and important women in each of our lives. (Hearing something unexpected like this during the service has a way of undoing me; I was immediately moved just by the fact that women specifically were being singled out as worthy of prayer and recognition, since it is the first time in fifty years of church attendance that I ever remember this happening.) The leader went on to name some women who had "opened doors for all of us" - and it was a good list, ending with Rosa Parks - and there was time for all of us to think on our own lists. Mine is a pretty long and wonderful one.

When we went up for communion later on, something else extraordinary happened. The assistant priest, who is a woman, was giving out the bread. As she pressed the wafer into each person's hand, she began with the person's first name, if she knew it, and then said the traditional words "the body of our Lord Jesus Christ, given for thee" in the person's own language - I heard English, French and Spanish while I was up there, maybe she knows some others. It was special enough to be addressed by my own name, but the languages left me dumbfounded. She was so warm and so direct that even visitors who weren't known by name must have felt particularly welcomed. Now this, it seemed to me, was radical hospitality.

Liturgy can be used - and certainly has been used - to create distance and keep people squarely in their own little place; with some thought it can also be used to create a feeling of intimacy, acceptance, and community. How interesting it is that liturgy itself has been blamed and rejected for turning people off and away from the "traditional" church, with everything from folk masses to video screens and evangelical praise as substitutes, when actually the distance is created by people who want to maintain authority and power, or find it easier to hide behind "form" rather than letting their own humanity come through.

I've always liked the Anglican liturgy because to me it is poetic, beautiful, and comforting. Although we don't like to talk about it as "theater", much of it is theatrical. It also contains much that is symbolic: not just words and objects, but actions, movements, the management of participants and the way they are positioned in relationship to the congregation. Having watched this very closely for many years (being up on the altar, or "on stage", as a member of a choir gives you a good chance to observe and think about what's going on), it's clear to me that liturgy, in different hands and voices, behaves differently, and that people react to it differently too. And much is revealed.

2005-03-06T20:54:00.000-05:00

YEP.

This evening the radio announcer on Espace Musique tried very hard to explain in French that the next song she was playing was "Londonderry Air" - not "London Derriere".

2005-03-06T15:25:00.000-05:00

I'm trying, but it's very hard for me to take a day off, even on Sunday: to turn off my more-or-less constant internal voice (which I can call my Yankee work ethic, or just plain old guilt, or, in my less charitable moments, determination heading in the direction of ambition) which tells me to be productive. Most days, from the moment I wake up to the time I go to bed, I am doing something: making food, writing, working, practicing an instrument or a language, helping out, listening, reading, getting some exercise. Even meditation can quite easily be fit into a category of "accomplishment": Excellent! I accomplished my goal of doing nothing! Ah, there are minefields everywhere. I used to be pretty hard on myself about this. Now, I try to notice, be gentle to myself about what I've noticed, and move on.

Lately - maybe for Lent? - I've been more intentional about trying to observe a time of rest on Sundays: deliberately not working, not pushing myself to use that day for formal work even though it's so good, because there won't be telephone interruptions. It's difficult, which tells me it's probably a good idea. As I watch myself struggle, I see things about myself that I didn't see as clearly before. I didn't realize how much my self-identity, and also my ability to let go at the end of a day, was wrapped up in being able to tell myself, "OK, you've done x,y,z." This doesn't mean I've been unable to see what's around me, or that I've descended into workaholism at the expense of caring for myself or others. It's more that, for the past year, because of life changes, I've just had so much to do, and so many different demands coming from so many sources, including myself, that the idea of consciously taking a day totally off from -- let's call it "accomplishment" - has seemed impossible. And of course, it's not.

I'm not at a place yet that feels like it's opening up into spaciousness, but I am beginning to sense some change.

---

FREE TO READ

Today, after church downtown, I wandered around with my camera, and did a little bookshopping. For the first time, I went into the French language section of the bookstore and browsed around with intent to buy, and picked out a novel by a favorite author, Amin Maalouf: La Premier Siecle apres Beatrice. Maalouf is Lebanese, but he has lived in France a good deal and writes (I believe) in French as well as in Arabic. There is a great deal of Middle Eastern writing that has been translated into French and not English; one reason I'm excited about finally beginning to feel more confident in the language is that it opens up some of this work to me.

So I took the book to the cash register and the woman there (who looked as if she could be Middle Eastern in origin herself) took it and, opening up the book to the list of titles inside, said, in French, how much she liked Maalouf and pointed to another of his books - a volume of essays - that she had especially liked. She went on, and I didn't understand everything she said, so we switched back and forth between English and French while she rang up my purchase, and then smilingly said goodbye.

This small exchange is an example of what I find so amazing and so different about being here, compared to where I have lived before: 1) no one says or implies "why do you want to read a book in a foreign language?" 2) no one thinks "why do you want to read something written by an Arab?" 3) even though I have some difficulty speaking the language, no one thinks it's weird or inappropriate for me to buy a book in French; on the contrary, everyone here seems to be in some stage of learning other languages; 4) this society is openly pro-intellectual, not anti-intellectual. Reading literature is not frowned upon; on the contrary, you see people reading everywhere in this city, and it seems to me that they are very often reading literature or non-fiction. People walk down the alleys reading books. They walk between metro stations and up and down stairs reading books. They sit in the park reading books. I can't get over it.

Some of you, who have had to endure "what do you want to do that for?" comments from others throughout your lives, especially about your choice to be a person who reads and thinks, will understand why these differences matter so much to me.

2005-03-04T21:27:00.000-05:00

DE-NEIGEMENT: a postscript

A fellow Montreal blogger told me this bit of additional information about snow removal in Montreal:

A bit of trivia: The little signs that are put up prior to snow removal (thin wooden sticks with a paper sign) are made this way because they are biodegradable and they can be pulverized by the huge snow blowers, along with the snow that is gathered.

Imagine that!

YULBLOG TURNS 5

Montreal has one of the oldest, if not THE oldest, loosely organized blogger communities in the world. I've been lucky enough to meet some of these great people. This week marked the 5th aniversary of their monthly 1st Wednesday meetings for drinks and lively conversation; I missed it but hope to celebrate with them later this month. What's especially great is that they got some publicity for blogging and a chance to talk it up in front of the media. Way to go, Blork and Co.!

2005-03-03T17:10:00.000-05:00

ICE-O-WAY

In Vermont they use road salt. The large crystals of salt are piled into town storage sheds, and loaded into huge sanding/salting trucks which spread the salt on the interstates and secondary roads through a spinner mounted below a big hopper - much like a giant version of a lawn seeder. This tidy yellow Ice-O-Way is a smaller version of the same thing, mounted on the back of a Vermont pickup truck.

In Montreal they do spread salt on the roads and sidewalks, but a bigger problem is clearing snow from the streets where residents have parked their cars. We've tried to fgure out the system, and it seems that special signs get put up prior to snow removal warning people they'd better move their cars.

This morning, still in bed, we heard an approaching sound that was completely unfamiliar - it sounded like a cross between a car alarm and a siren, but it moved down the street toward us very slowly, and, though penetrating and distinctive, never got very loud. Finally curiosity got the better of us, and J. jumped out of bed - but too late. What was it? He put on his clothes, boots and coat, and went out. In a little while he came back, Cheshire cat grin on his face, and quizzed me - "OK, what was it? Have you figured it out?"

The sound came from a tow truck. What they do, apparently, is to drive slowly around a neighborhood blowing this special siren to give people a half-hour or so warning before they start towing cars prior to clearing the snow from the streets. It seemed so...polite. So...Canadian.We tried to imagine a system like this in New York City: umm, I don't think so. But I'm curious - is this as benign as it seems? Where do the cars go when they do get towed? How do you get yours back and how much does it cost? It seems to us like snow removal here is pretty good - but in the paper we've seen continual complaints about les cols bleus and how crummy a job the current city management is doing. So...enlighten me, s.v.p., I'm new here!

2005-03-01T19:17:00.001-05:00

We spent today at a seminar given by the government for people who are considering starting businesses in the Quebec. It was one of the more fascinating days of my life.

It was snowing when we walked to the metro station this morning; we emerged at Square Victoria and searched for the right building among the tall offices of that complex. The woman who greeted us at the reception desk on the third floor looked at me and said "Elisabeth?" I was startled, smiled back at her and said, "How do you know?" "Oh, I just thought so," she said. When we entered the room of other attendees and looked around I immediately figured it out: there were only two other women, and, more than that, I was the only blonde, blue-eyed person in the room, and thus a good bet for being named "Elisabeth" (I'm always amused how the French automatically spell my name the way my French teacher did, with an "s" instead of a "z"; it was that way on my nametag today.)

The programme was very interesting - full of information about how to do business here - the legal system, the banking system, how to get financing, the necessity for a detailed business plan, where to get help, the services offered by the government and the strange (to Americans) entities known as para-givernmental (?) organizations - funded by the government to do work that the government considers important, but operating somewhat independently - a sort of middle ground between private enterprise and government which attempts to limit political/corporate influence and corruption.

In the middle of the day, we were all given a three-course lunch, with wine, by the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, along with members fo the business community, from many different sectors, who came to talk with us, offer some networking and friendship, and answer questions. One person from each table of eight was able to get up and give a short presentation on our work and what we hoped to do; J. spoke and was very amusing and well-received.

We were the only Americans there. Among the other seminar attendees we met a man from Iran who hoped to import construction materials that he already sells in Europe; an Argentinian who will be representing food exporters; an Indian man in the jewelry business; a Pakistani real estate entrepreneur; a Belgian who seemed to be considering buying a franchise business but was happy to talk about Flemish art; a Lebanese woman who lives in Nigeria and has an import/export gift business and another Lebanese woman who will be opening a restaurant when her husband joins her later this year; a Korean computer programmer who is looking for investors for his software company; a Frenchman in the film industry. It was completely fascinating to talk to these intelligent, ambitious, curious people and discover why they had chosen this city, what their families were like, what their dreams were for the future...and how they felt about the snow.

At the end of the day, we got off the metro one stop early and walked home through the slippery, white streets, talking about what we had heard and experienced. The night fell, and the lights came on above the new snow. In the park, a few families were sledding on the hill beneath the trees, and a lone figure walked across the frozen lake. The featherweight, pristine snow sparkled, and in spite of the traffic, the city took on the same magical hush that is found in the country after a snowfall: a wide enveloping quiet, grand enough to be enhanced by the cry of a happy child rushing down the hill on a sled, the hushed voices of lovers under a streetlight, the delighted short bark of a dog cavorting in the powdery snow. I felt the delicious coldness of my cheeks, and pressed my elbow against J.'s side as we walked silently, arm in arm, amazed at the twists and turns of my life that had contributed to putting me in this particular place, and then..stopped thinking very much at all.

2005-02-28T20:39:00.000-05:00

If you didn't know it already, Cassandra is a WILD THINKER...thanks to Hank Green at Wild Thoughts for publishing one of my essays today. I'm honored to be in such fine company.

Kurt has written a fine post on sex and American society, and it looks like there will be a very good discussion (especially if you all go over there and comment!)

My most beautiful experience today was visiting the vernacular body and listening to elck reading an essay by dale. (Scroll down to the end of the entry for the audio link.) Nothing I could offer here this evening would come close; please go there and enjoy.

2005-02-27T21:14:00.000-05:00

Back in Montreal. It was a beautiful clear day, and we ran up quickly on the interstate, with the sun setting over our left shoulders, turning the Adirondacks blue and the long sliver of lake Champlain into silver, while the pink light shone through J.s white beard. The fields below St. Albans were a perfection of untracked snow, bearing long dark blue shadows from the hedgerows, and after we crossed the border, onto the flat flat plains, the sun set for real in a blaze of gold and rose behind the rows of poplars and silhouetted silos full of their winter hoard of dried corn.

From the Pont Jacques-Cartier, the city was like a starfield. Onto Lorimer, past the hydroponic gardening store, the little depanneurs, the still-bustling traffic: the relentless and incredible reality of the city, going on and on in spite of our absence. Into our cold apartment; a drink of water for the plants, spaghetti sauce into the microwave; a little pot of Arabic coffee, two clementines. A sigh.

2005-02-25T19:36:00.000-05:00

FLUTE

My parents sent me a package recently; I was in Montreal when it arrived here in Vermont and my neighbor kindly brought it in from the porch. Mom and Dad had said it wasn't perishable, but maybe wouldn't like sitting out in the freezing cold. I wondered what it could be.

When I opened the cardboard packing box, I thought I saw wood, but then I realized what I was seeing was a wooden-colored plastic box, about 18 inches long. I knew immediately what it was, and was completely surprised. Opening the latches on the case, lined inside with dark red velvet, I saw the shine of bright silver. My eyes filled with tears. Then I shook off the emotion and quickly pulled out the three parts and put them together. A flute!

My own old flute, that I played just about every day from fourth grade through high school, was an Armstrong - a sturdy student flute that had a good tone and a pleasing weight in my hands. My parents had bought it and a stack of music for $90 from my piano teacher; it had been her daughter's. I played it in my school's excellent band for many years, took it to college and played it occasionally, although by then I was starting to go back to the piano. After college I rarely picked up the flute, although I brought it with me when I moved to New England.

When my cousin's daughter decided she wanted to learn an instrument, her father asked me if she could borrow my flute; their family was short on funds for the instrument rental. I was a bit reluctant but said yes; music had been so important to me that I wanted to make sure E. could have the same chance. I sent my flute back home. Within a month I got a phone call - something had happened, the flute was gone, it had been "stolen" or "lost" from the band room. E., who was painfully shy, didn't make the call herself; as usual, her father covered for her. He was sorry, but there was no offer of replacing it, and my insurance didn't cover that situation. I felt pretty bad about it, but reconciled myself - I hadn't been playing, it was gone, that was that. It was just "a thing", I told myself, like the many other things I had lost in my divorce a few years before, and the best way to deal with its loss was to let it go and concentrate on non-attachment.

When I lifted this flute, a Gemeinhardt, from its velvet case and put it together, it had been at least twenty-five years since I'd played. I tried a few notes, a scale - it was pretty bad. But after fifteen minutes of fooling around, I was less appalled and more amused - the fingerings were still automatic, the breathing familiar, and there was even an occasional beautiful note. I was very touched that my parents had found this in an auction and bought it for me, and I was pleased to think I could take an instrument with me to Montreal; even if I wasn't playing seriously, it could be a meditative and happy break in my day.

What surprised me the most was the feeling of having the flute in my hands. It felt so - natural. I suppose when you've held and used something so much - especially something delicate and fragile, but that's also by definition an extension of your body - you develop a hand-object relationship that becomes instinctive. I hadn't held or played a flute for all those years, and yet my body knew just what to do with it. How strange, and how wonderful.

In the back of my music closet, behind the vinyl, I found a stack of old music: Handel sonatas, Bach, Faure. I play the piano much better now, and I recorded a few accompaniments to play along with. I've no illusions of playing the flute especially well again, and I don't have the time or energy to devote to it, but it's making me happy, and bringing back a rush of memories of a much-younger self; compressing time, and erasing years.

2005-02-24T19:42:00.000-05:00

BAD NEWS, GOOD NEWS

I was very disappointed, but not surprised, to see tonight that the Anglican primates (38 archbishops from the world's provinces) meeting this week in Northern Ireland have issued a communique asking for the American and Canadian churches to "voluntarily withdraw" from a major joint body, the Anglican Consultative Council, between now and 2008, the next scheduled meeting of the Anglican church at large (the Lambeth Conference.)

What does that mean? It means that those two institutions are, in effect, no longer full members of the Anglican Communion. It means that the work of the Eames Commission (the Windsor Report) was largely wasted. It means that the traditionalists, led by the ultra-conservative African bishops, have basically prevailed. It means that Archbishop Rowan Williams has failed to provide the strong forward leadership many of us had hoped he would, caving in instead to the numerical majority, rather than following his own already-stated moral principles of inclusion. And it means that the Anglican Communion will probably split, and as far as I'm concerned now, that's fine.

There is no reconciliation possible when one party obviously has never had any intention of allowing anything other than its own position to prevail. The North American churches said clearly, "We are at a different place culturally; all we ask is that your respect us as we respect you; let's work together on the concerns that we share, which are so much more important for all of humanity." We have agreed for years to ignore African cultural practices, such as polygamy, which are not approved by the Church at large but continue to be practiced within African Anglicanism. But none of that mattered; tonight Primate Peter Akinola of Nigeria, the leader of the opposion, reportedly held a victory celebration. So perhaps it's time to walk our own path. I am only sorry that other western churches, especially the British one, don't have the courage to immediately join us. And I very much hope that both the Canadians and the Americans will stick to their courageous positions, and not backtrack in favor of the preservation of the institution, now that a split seems inevitable.

Meanwhile, if anyone would like a closer look at the "demon" in the eye of the hurricane, here is an excerpt from Bishop Gene Robinson's pastoral letter from this month's issue of the New Hampshire Diocese's Episcopal News. On the cover of the newspaper was a new logo, showing stylized hands holding a flame. It replaces a former logo, which Gene describes below:

I've been thinking about our own symbols here in the Diocese, and what we want to be communicating, to our own members as well as to the world. The symbol that appears on every piece of stationery, the doors of the Diocesan House, the New Hampshire Episcopal News, and every publication of our diocese is our coat of arms/shield. It is the face we give to the world.

Perhaps you've never given it much thought, but what does our coat of arms say about us to the world? In a time of war, our "face" to the world has arrows and a sword. In a time when we believe the Bishop to be a servant of the people, our shield displays a mitre bejeweled with precious stones. In an age when people are starving the world over, and the gap between rich and poor becomes greater every day, our "face to the world" looks like the coat of arms of a wealthy family. In these times which beg for our self-sacrificing love in the Name of Jesus, there is little in this coat of arms to communicate our warmth, our respect, and our love for all of God's children.

(he goes on to describe the new logo and what it symbolizes)...

Of course changing the logo from a bejeweled coat of arms to a pair of loving hands won't automatically make us the servant community Christ calls us to be. We have to work at that every single day. But the change might better remind us and signal to the world that our calling - and our intention - is to be God's loving hands in the world, empowered by the Spirit of the one who first loved us.

By all means, let's kick this guy out. He sounds really dangerous.

2005-02-23T09:30:00.000-05:00

"May you live until the word of your life is expressed"

I woke this morning from a strange and disquieting dream that seemed influenced by the film "Burnt by the Sun"; I remember only the final scene of the dream, in which I saw a figure with an indistinct head walking on a downhill path through tall grasses. Suddenly a huge orange orb, made of some deeply-crinkled substance like those fold-out paper wedding bells or balls that are sold as party decorations, but more irregular, like a giant hornet nest, floated ominously and unstoppably down the path toward the walking person - and I knew that they would be annihilated by it.

I spent the next half hour lying in bed thinking about that movie and the end-time Russia it depicted - the country life of brief transcendent summers, jam and bread, vodka, men in white linen and women in white lace, little girls with hair ribbons at their temples. I thought about the epilogue to that movie; what happened to the general's wife and his daughter after his execution. Maybe I have been thinking about Stalinist Russia since seeing (yes, this is how my convoluted mind works) Julie Christie playing - yes - a grandmother in "Finding Neverland" last week. Or maybe it has been from living in a snowy, far northern city, with its slanting winter light and greyness punctuated by the occasional bright, knife-sharp day.

So I was happy this morning, and not altogether surprised, to find a rare new post from Idle Words, this time about a recent experience of reading Pushkin's Little Tragedies. I won't give away Maciej's wonderful story-telling, but just encourage any of you who care about Russian literature or the Russian language, or who enjoy good writing about writing and writers, to take a look.

My early-morning spin through the blogosphere gave me several more gifts, also on the theme of finding happiness despite obstacles of the world's or our own making (Pushkin, for example, was stuck in the country, prevented from reaching his fiancee by an outbreak of plague). Here is a beautiful post from elck, about finding joy, and here is another from Jake, following a workshop with author/priest/anorexia survivor Margaret Bullit-Jonas about the necessity of discovering our heart's desires, in which she asked participants to reflect on the post title, above. Jake ends with a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke:

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

2005-02-20T20:05:00.000-05:00

There's a large food court in the Eaton Center, in the underground city, and we often go there for lunch after going to church at the cathedral on Sunday morning. There's just about every kind of food one could imagine there, from pizza to pad thai. We had spicy Thai food today, and took our trays to a quiet part of the court, which wasn't crowded anyway, near this old gentleman who was drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, all with his hat and leather gloves still on. On our other side was a delicate brunette beauty, reading a book and eating a small bowl of Tonkinese soup, and beyond the old gentleman was a family - grandmother, father, mother and baby. While the father held the laughing baby, the mother spooned food into its mouth and sang (in English, of course)"Old MacDonald had a Farm."

Today we headed back down to Vermont, arriving at our house around 4:30 pm after driving through a snowstorm and a pretty intense wind. Our time in Montreal was content and productive: we got a lot of professional work done, and finally, with the help of some encouraging friends (you know who you are), I got back to working on my book. I realized I was scared, after nearly three months of not touching it, to pick it up again - would it seem like a total mess? Would I be overwhelmed with the amount of work left to do? Would it read badly? I gathered my courage, spent one whole day going through what I had written so far, taking careful notes, and then began writing. And I'm happy to report that it's not as daunting as I thought, and actually the time away gave me some needed perspective; I was able to see some structural problems that had been bothering me and figure out a way around them, and I also realized I could cut a whole section I had thought was necessary - it simply isn't. I feel so much better.

We're also making more friends. We had friends over for dinner on two nights, and we were invited out to someone else's house on another. All of that was just great; happy times, good food and conversation, people we liked very much. (It's a little tiring - people are just getting going here at midnight. Saturday night we went to bed at 2:00 pm; our whole schedule, especially on weekends, is completely different in the city.)

The possibility of great variety - what J. calls "bandwidth" - is part of what I find so compelling about living there. Yesterday morning we went to the cathedral, where the choral mass setting was a sublimely beautiful misse breve for treble voices by Gabriel Faure. Instead of a sermon, and as part of a study series for Lent, there was a very moving video, from the Canadian Anglican church's global relief fund, about AIDS in Africa. Afterwards, talk with new friends there about all sorts of topics - from life in Montreal's gay community to the complicated bureaucracy of the French hospital system.

We came home, worked, had dinner, began packing for our trip today, and then at 9:30 pm went to Cinema du Parc to see "Inside Deep Throat", a new documentary about the famous porn movie (shot for a cost of $25,000, it eventually grossed over $600 million), the morality war it ignited in the United States, what happened to its stars and director, and where the "sexual revolution" has ended up today. It was an excellent documentary which explores past and current American history and culture: the rise of the Religious Right and southern indignation at all matters sexual; free speech, government and censorship; personal styles of self expression; the way crime seems to inevitably follow money; the sad and often tragic lives of the people who get caught in the middle. And it also took an ironic look back at the strange cleavage that happened in the late 1970s and 1980s between the movement for women's sexual liberation for women, and the rise of a particular strain of humorless feminism which, although it was crucial in giving many of us the equality we enjoy today, was also a precursor to our stifling political correctness. The film includes interviews with all sorts of people who saw it all unfold - Helen Gurley Brown, Harry Reems, Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, Erica Jong, the late Linda Lovelace and her family, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer... the film's director, the Federal prosecutor who went after it, movie theater owners...I wonder what one of today's young people would think of all this: does it look like insanity to them, or a progression? As Dick Cavett says in the film, isn't it amazing that a sexual act that turned an entire nation inside out is now not even considered to be real sex by many young people?

2005-02-18T17:20:00.000-05:00

A DIFFERENT WORLD

If anyone thinks a different kind of world is impossible, take a close look at this picture. It was taken today at Montreal's Musee d'art contemporain. When we arrived, this class from a local elementary school was just coming into the museum for a couple of hours of group workshops with a resident artist. I noticed that the students were so diverse it was almost a cliche - black, white, brown, Asian - and with teachers to match. But what was even more exciting to me was to see that the kids were close friends across those ethnic and racial divides - a white girl with blonde braids was arm-in-arm with one of these Muslim girls - and so on. Everyone was chattering together in French as they headed toward the bright classroom.

We checked our coats and bags and went to the exhibition we wanted to see (interestingly enough, a large retrospective installation of the work of South African artist William Kentridge, whose amazing animated charcoal drawings are as dark a window onto the world's problems as these kids were light). Afterwards we came back downstairs, and there were the kids again, teeming around the lobby as the curators proudly hung the product of their day - the exuberant, bright, joyful mural you can see in the photograph. It's actually a collection of big square canvases, put together; I loved it and so did everyone else.

"Did you make this?" I asked. "Yes!" they said, happily, while the resident artist beamed, camera in hand, and curators hung proper signs on the wall next to the mural, telling exactly who had made it.

Art didn't bring these kids together - they were friends before they ever walked into that museum. But it sure gave them a way to express themselves, and to work together to create something that - to their surprise, I think - was giving a roomful of friends and strangers a lot of happiness.

2005-02-18T11:20:00.000-05:00

Lest more people think I am in favor of fox hunts, please read the comments thread.

2005-02-17T20:19:00.000-05:00

LINKS

A warm blogosphere welcome to Jean, a familiar and thoughtful presence in the comments threads here, who has started her own blog. Congratulations and best of luck, Jean! I'll look forward to reading you.

And two very different stories about rural life: an eye-witness goes along on one of the last legal fox hunts in England, from the Washington Post; and an interview with a Russian village doctor - tooth extractions numbed by vodka, and cockroaches in ears - from the St. Petersburg Times.

2005-02-16T16:59:00.000-05:00

VALENTINES

We called on Monday evening to see how my father-in-law was doing. I could overhear him saying that it had been the first day in ages when he hadn’t been in any pain at all. “I don’t know what it means,” he said, “because nothing else has changed. But I’ve been telling everybody. I tell them it’s the calm before the storm!” I heard them both laugh. J. talked for a while longer and then passed me the phone.

“Hello, my dear!” he said, enthusiastically.

“Hello!” I said. “So, will you be my Valentine?”

He laughed. “Well, you’re going to have to get in line. I have so many Valentines today! I gave away all my remaining orchid blossoms but one, and oh, the ladies were so happy! When they see it’s an orchid, they think you’ve given them something really precious.” This is all so ironic; I doubt he ever gave his own wife flowers except for the bouquets he always brought home after conducting funerals, which were not exactly received with delight. Nor was he a womanizer. But he always had charm, and a keen sense of what people outside the family wanted him to say; if it suited his purposes, he’d say it, and then relate the story with a certain contempt later on. There was an element of that in his story of the orchid-giving, but something has changed since his wife died; the gift-giving to these fellow-residents of the retirement home now is more of an exchange, and more sincere. He wants and needs affection, and knows it, and the gestures are becoming more childlike and more genuine.

“Well, that’s great,” I said. “You’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that orchid plant! But can I still be your Valentine?”

“I only gave away three, and the Qu’ran says I can have four wives. You’re used to Islam, so if that’s OK with you you can be the fourth.”

I laughed; he never ceases to amaze me. “OK,” I said. “I can handle it.”

He paused for just a split second before replying. “Of course, if I were Mohammed, I’d be allowed seven!”

2005-02-16T16:37:00.000-05:00

A POEM

After Dinner, Rain

Apples, a pear;
an empty wineglass
on the wiped table;
spectacles,
a pen.

Headlights strobe
across vertical blinds

like fragments of poems:

strangers rushing
through the watery night

blinding me
again and again.

2005-02-14T21:50:00.000-05:00

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY

After working diligently all day, while cars sped through the puddles on the street outside, we bundled up and walked up rue Rachel to the Portugese section to pick up some grilled chicken for dinner. There was light snow falling, so light it was forming delicate drifts against the curb separating the bike path from the sidewalk. "It's not so cold," said J., and then we came around into the wider part of the street and were hit by a blast of strong wind. I felt the warmth begin to leach out of me, but it felt so good to be outside and moving after a day inside, ied to the computer. We walked past the fire station; past the closed corner cafe where the sturdy wooden chairs were piled on top of the tables; the yarn store with two grey, cabled heavy wool sweaters hung in the windows; the block of fancier restaurants where dressed-up Valentine couples sat studying their menus, and the cheaper bars where younger couples entered from the street, slipping against each other and laughing.

The wind blew harder as we headed up the hill and along the slippery pavement in front of Eglise St. Jean-Baptiste. Tiny pellets of ice bit into our faces. We made light of it with little remarks: "This jacket is really warm." "It's not nearly as cold as that night with D. and G." The typical cold-weather encouragement wasn't really necessary; I was happy, eagerly peering into the restaurants, the closed shops of children's clothing, consigned men's wear, the Portugese travel agency with its posters for Cuba and the Caribbean. J. squeezed my hand. "You're a good sport," he said.

"But I love it," I replied. "You know that."

Anyone else would think we were crazy; we've voluntarily moved to this, paid good money to live in a place where the Arctic constantly reminds us of its proximity; where the snow building up on your boots causes you to slip slightly a hundred times on a long walk but you don't even notice, it's just part of the rhythm, the stuttery dance of winter.

We reached our destination: a bakery and butcher shop with a grill in the back. They were still open but a girl with a red heart painted on her cheek was washing down the counters and setting the wooden stools upside down on top; the bread bins were empty but chocolate cakes and little lemon and almond tarts lingered in the bakery case, and beneath the cash registers lay a mound of snowy white meringues.

We went to the short-order window and asked for some chicken and frites - the home-cut French fries that were frying in big vats of oil beyond the wood-fired grill. A strong, sinewy Portugese woman was taking the orders. She looked at us with sparkling, sharp eyes; she could have been my age, or ten years older or younger; she wore a white butcher's apron over a black shirt open at the throat, where a gold chain and a heavy gold cross hung against her weathered, sun-darkened skin; behind her a young man tended the grill and fished huge baskets of fries out of the oil. The day's menu was written in Portugese and French on a whiteboard above the order-window. J. asked for a half poulet and frites. She explained in French, with a smile, flicking the paper tacked to the window edge in front of her, that the chicken on the grill was for a pick-up order and she could only give us the smaller pieces that were left. We shrugged and smiled; it was fine. She packed our order, topping it with a piquant sauce, smiled contentedly at us again.

J. tucked the hot package of fragrant chicken beneath his coat and we started back. It was warmer going home, away from the wind; we walked briskly and hungrily. On the corner of St. Denis the mannequins at Le Chateau shivered in their flimsy flowered dresses; the shoe store advertised all red shoes on sale, 50 % off. At the corner of Christophe-Colombe, two fire trucks tore out of the fire station, sirens blaring.

The wind had died down a little by the time we got home. We rushed into the apartment, peeling off scarves, gloves, hats, parkas, one layer of sweaters. I poured some red wine and turned on the radio while J. set the table and the room filled with the delicious scent of the grilled chicken, oil, spices, potatoes, and we settled down to our winter picnic.

2005-02-14T11:32:00.000-05:00

TYMOSCHENKO HIGH HEELS

Looking through the recent Google searches that had referenced my blog, I saw the above headline. The CassandraPages reference was to a recent post about a woman on the Montreal street wearing "pointy white high heels", and another unrelated mention i made of Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. But when i followed the number-one hit for this headline, I found this article from Ukrainian Pravda about our braided heroine and her "style" which was amusing both for its English translation and the very different (and, I thought, rather refreshing) way of reporting about a female political celebrity.

2005-02-12T15:11:00.000-05:00

MOTTA

Yesterday, getting ready for dinner guests who are coming tonight, we went out to the Jean-Talon market to check out the new building and get some vegetables, and then went on to Adonis, the Middle Eastern supermarket, for the rest of our provisions. But before shopping, we grabbed a bite to eat at Motta, near the southeastern corner of the Jean-Talon market. It's our favorite Italian deli. You can buy pizza by the slice (big rectangular pieces, with a thick but light crust, loaded with many savory toppings, from fresh spinach to artichokes to prosciutto) and have it heated up there, with a cup of espresso and maybe a little something sweet for dessert from the bakery counter. There's also a huge assortment of olives, cheeses, breads, deli meats, fresh pasta sauces by the jar, pasta, oils and condiments, and the most dazzling array of antipasto and Italian side dishes - freshly fried zucchini fritters, delicately stuffed peppers, veal scallops in a light tomato sauce, salads of every description and color - I've ever seen.

I waited for J. to bring our lunches to the table in the back of the restaurant, and watched a handsome young Italian guy and his two friends happily devour pizza, three cannoli apiece, coffee, and a huge sugar-drizzled cinnamon pastry ring they cajoled the deli waitress into heating up. Beyond them, another table was filled with a group of uniformed schoolgirls in Black Watch plaid pleated kilts, white blouses, and navy sweaters, out for a pizza lunch with their svelte, stylish teacher - for what occasion, I wondered? In the meantime, at the counter, more slices were ordered by Africans, a Vietnamese woman, an old Italian couple, two Asian teenagers...

Ah, pizza. The food of the world!

2005-02-10T14:34:00.000-05:00

ASH WEDNESDAY REFLECTIONS

In the context of Lent, which began yesterday, I’ve been thinking in particular about two recent posts I’ve read, one from Father Jake Stops the World, and another from Chris Clarke at Creek Running North. Fr. Jake wrote about James Fowler’s Stages of Faith, a work which attempts to describe spiritual development in “stages”. The post wondered if we might use those different stages of development – loosely defined as moving from a self-centered, self-serving focus to a spiritually-centered compassion for community and “the other” - to explain why religious fundamentalists and liberals seem to either shout at, or talk past one another; i.e., different people at different stages can’t hear one another. Chris’s post took off from the recent Ward Churchill controversy to examine the whole “liberal” label; he posits that it now means something entirely other than “leftist”, and that many people who describe themselves as liberal are in fact very far indeed from the values and beliefs that have traditionally characterized the left. I agree with him.

How to relate these two discussions, one seemingly so religious, and one so political?

In the discussion on Jake’s site, several commenters pointed out that those who focused on “individuality” or “individualism”, and judged it badly, were missing the point of Fowler’s “stages”, and I think that’s correct. I haven’t read Fowler, but I think he is using the term “individuative” to mean the ability to examine oneself and one’s beliefs apart from belonging to an institutionalized belief system where comfort is derived from everybody believing and saying pretty much the same thing. Assuming this is a good thing, how might we get there?

Many belief systems include some sort of meditation/self-reflection that is aimed, ultimately, at transformation of the individual from, perhaps, (don’t shoot me here) “unaware, spinning, and ego-driven”, to “more aware, more peaceful, and more outward-motivated”. (Some, but by no means all, Christian teaching has this as an important element – I could write for another year about that topic but I’ll spare you; please spare me the inevitable criticisms of much of modern Christianity too: you're right.) Most people begin on a spiritual path hoping for “help” or “relief” from problems, sometimes specific ones of a personal nature, sometimes simply a vague disquiet and unhappiness. Some discover, after a time, or after jumping around from one system or teacher to another, that the quick fix is a) not easy or even possible to attain, and b) not really what it’s about. And some, of course, drop out at that point. Others are intrigued enough to go deeper. If they do, there will often be an identifiable, gradual progression, similar to what Fowler describes – throughout life - toward greater self-awareness of oneself as both greatly blessed and suffering; awareness of that suffering as a shared human condition; the awakening of compassion and a softening of judgmentalism; greater acceptance of one’s personal difficulties and relinquishment of personal desires; and increasing desire to be of service to others and to the world; i.e. selflessness.

Clearly, people within any community – whether we’re talking about a church, a sangha, a larger grouping such as the Anglican Communion, or the supposedly secular political society of the U.S. – are going to be at different stages in how they see themselves in relationship to the world and what they want or think they deserve out of life. People also are always going to be at different stages in their need to say “my way is the right way”; they will have different levels of need for proving their “rightness”; and different levels of tolerance for what are acceptable ways to demonstrate and enforce that self-righteousness.

Certainly, communal societies act differently when making decisions than those societies where the individual and his/her “rights of self-determination” are considered paramount. But as one commenter at Jake’s pointed out, it is entirely possible to be a pretty self-realized individual and at the same time to be very compassionate and highly aware of one’s responsibility to the world. In a moral context, let alone a religious one, free will is understood as something quite different from “I’ll do whatever I want, and to hell with the rest of you”.

On to Chris’s post. As he wrote, most American liberals today have learned how to quote chapter and verse from the book of political correctness: they can talk the talk, and they can pretend to walk the walk, but for the most part they are as entrenched in American capitalism as anyone. And when the chips are down, they vote to confirm Condi; some of them – incredibly - even vote to confirm Gonzales; they vote to appropriate massive sums for war; they spout pro-environmental rhetoric but live consumptive lifestyles; they say they care about the poor in America and in the rest of the world but make lifestyle changes on the level of buying equal-exchange coffee to serve at dinner parties to which their one black acquaintance or token artist may be invited. This is not opposition to the status quo – it is the status quo.

I think that American liberalism is just as much a part of the problem we’re facing as a country as conservatism, mainly because it masquerades as something different from the Right while, through good intentions coupled with inaction, serving the same master and perpetuating a destructive and injust system. Liberalism does very little in the way of true opposition, the goal of which I would define as bringing about transformation – this time, of society. Here, as for the disenchanted spiritual seeker, true transformation is seen as just too risky; the cost too high.

Chris quoted Martin Luther King on this subject, and it’s worth repeating:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

King’s words were painfully reminiscent of the “thank you so much for doing this, it’s just not my style but it’s great to see you here every week” comments I heard during a year of publicly opposing Bush’s policies and the run-up to the Iraq war. I’ve heard the same thing from the same liberal, upper-middle class, university constituency about my work in interfaith dialogue, Middle East understanding, or gay rights. People say, quite sincerely, “it’s so wonderful what you’re doing” but wouldn’t be caught dead actually having a conversation with a Muslim, or inviting them to their house. The same thing is heard by those who work with the poor, or fight for funding for the arts, or the environment – the list goes on. If you allow it, you may become a “pet” for those who may share your political concerns and want to look good, but want somebody else to do the hard and dirty work, the work that may get criticized or carry personal risk, the work that is harder than writing a check, the work that literally puts a person and their beliefs on the line. The difference between writing a check to the soup kitchen, and serving in it day after day, having real relationships with people who live from hand-to-mouth and then facing yourself and your full refrigerator every night, is vast. I’ve only done this occasionally, but it changes you. I spent twelve years attending a real public school where many of the kids were extremely poor; it changes you. But our society isn’t moving in that direction; it’s moving toward gated communities and homogenous towns and churches and social groups, and many of the people inside them are so-called liberals.

In the end, it does come down to moral and ethical choices. A priest who I greatly admire puts it bluntly for his congregation: “Being truly religious people means that we must live in such a way that the poor can live.” That means one thing: we have to change.

What’s the real obstacle? We’re not ready. Not enough people are ready to look up and see the interconnections; they’re scared, they don’t want to lose anything; they want protection. So we are at different stages, whether we’re talking about spiritual or societal maturity, and the numbers of people who are willing to make real sacrifices at the risk of potentially alienating their friends and relatives, or are willing to devote significant chunks of their time, money, and energy into working for change, are actually much, much smaller than the perceived 50% divide in the voting public. And it doesn’t do any good to shout at each other. I’m afraid it’s a question of keeping small fires lit in a group of separate caves, trying to support the other lamp-holders when we find them, and doing what we can to work around the system and keep the idea and hope of real change alive during a most dismal and discouraging time. Each person who sees this needs to do whatever they can to make their corner of the world a better and more compassionate place. I’m convinced that people learn and change by example much more than they do by logic and argument.

During Lent this year, I’m going to be reflecting on how I can do better myself, because I am painfully aware that every observation and criticism I’ve made in the preceding paragraphs can be applied to me as well. One of the teachings of this sort of spiritual path is that we never arrive at a point where we can afford the luxury of complacency: as my husband and I begin the process of extricating ourselves from a lifetime of obligations, expectations, possessions, and ways of living, toward a simpler life that consumes less, compromises less, and is more compatible with our beliefs, we see just how difficult it is. I know someone who just sold all her possessions and is going to Africa to teach and learn. I couldn’t begin to do something like that, nor would it be right for me or for my family. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t try, wherever we find ourselves, to go deeper, to ask harder questions, to stretch more and more.

2005-02-10T11:04:00.000-05:00

WAGING WAR ON THE POOR

From an op-ed by Eric Garcetti, who represents the 13th District on the Los Angeles City Council, in the L.A. Times:

President Bush refers to himself as a wartime president, and he has shown resolve not to back down on the battlefield. But the budget he released this week waves a flag of surrender in another war, the 40-year "war on poverty." The budget announces cuts of 28% - or $1.4 billion - from our arsenal of critical social programs. The largest and most vital to Los Angeles is the Community Development Block Grant. As more cities draw on poverty-fighting grants each year, Los Angeles' allocation has steadily decreased, from $88.6 million in 2003 to $82.7 million this year. Under the proposed cuts, our allocation would plummet by at least $15 million. Alongside previously proposed cuts to Section 8 housing assistance, these reductions send a stark message to the country's poor, its elderly and its urban youth: You're no longer our problem...

2005-02-09T17:09:00.000-05:00

FAST DAY

Back tomorrow.

2005-02-08T20:56:00.000-05:00

MONTREAL

After a rainy drive, we arrived back in Montreal around 3:00 pm, buying vegetables and fruits on the way in. After unpacking, I sat down with a glass of hot tea and the well-worn copy of Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking I'd brought from Vermont - how I enjoy her tart prose! - and then chopped and sauteed onions, celery, a handful of mushrooms, a small zucchini, the end of a cauliflower, and a couple of potatoes for the start of a cream of vegetable soup before heading out into the darkening drizzle.

It was warm enough still to walk with just a scarf on my head; the sidewalks were mostly clear except for a few little lakes where the snow had created a dam. Car headlights shone on the wet pavement and the icy playgrounds and glazed snow piled up near the sides of buildings. More bicycles were out. I passed a tall, longhaired blonde woman in a white coat, stepping daintily in her pointy white high heels and carrying a flowered umbrella. I passed a debonair man in a beret and woolen greatcoat, walking his jaunty dog. An tired, intellectual bohemian in wire-rimmed glasses, a red fringed scarf tied round his neck, picked up his little daughter from the daycare that must continue, after hours, at the neighborhood school.

Darkness, made thicker by the rainy night, fell on the houses and street, while pools of yellow light spilled from the few storefronts that were open. In the fancy hair salon, a trim black-clothed assistant swept dark curls from the floor, moving his broom under the white upholstered chairs in the wide windows. Across the street, a small French restaurant was preparing for the evening: the bartender, his back to the street, polishing glasses; starched white tablecloths on the dozen or so tables; the blackboard of the evening's specials posted by the door.

I stopped at the depanneur to buy a little cream for our soup from the kind Asian owner who was watching ski racing on her television set, across from the cash register above the wine shelves. Then, the bakery. The warm light in the small shop illuminated the glass window-shelves of date bars, sugar-dusted almond croissants, sand-colored tuiles, brownies, and palm-sized sugar cookies, each with a ruby center of raspberry jam. As I approached, a little girl with blonde hair, wearing a dress and fitted woolen coat, bounded down the steps and skipped to her amused, waiting mother, clutching whatever delight she'd been awarded inside. I went in and ordered my mini pain-rustique, a small irregular white loaf, and a whole-wheat loaf encrusted with sesame seeds, the thick crust slashed into diamonds.

When I went out and back down the street, the salon owner had just turned out the lights and was heading for her door. The first group of diners, talking happily, pulled open the door of the restaurant and went in. I hesitated for only a minute, and turned away from home, extending my walk around a few more blocks. It was just too fine, being out, with fresh bread and cream in my backpack, and the glorious rainy night and its life, unfurling.

2005-02-07T20:04:00.000-05:00

Patriarch St. Sevarious (459-538) (from Malankara Syriac Christian Resources)

THE PATRIARCH

“I have a very busy week,” my father-in-law announced, landing heavily in his chair in the dining room. “Two things today – you, and I’m giving an Arabic lesson at 2:00. That’s one thing too much!” He laughed. “And tomorrow the principal of the S. school is coming to talk to me. On Thursday, Clara is coming for lunch. I really can only do one thing per day. It’s terrible, but I just don’t have the energy.”

“What’s this person coming to see you about?” we asked.

“About talking to their students about Islam and the Middle East.”

“How did they find out about you?”

“The mother of one of their students is a friend of mine. She brought her daughter to meet me, and the daughter asked me some questions about Islam, and I said I wouldn’t answer because I don’t feel that a little bit of knowledge is a good thing; I told her, ‘if you want to know something, then decide to really know it.’ Apparently she went back to the school and told her teacher what I had said, and they thought that made sense – so they proposed that I come there and give them a series of classes.” He looked up from his chicken broth. “But I think it’s too much. I don’t know if I can do it. We’ll see – they’ll provide transportation, of course.”
We could see the sparkle in his eyes and the gears turning in his head as he thought about it; he had taught in private schools his entire career and had loved it; obviously he wanted to do this – even though he’s refused for months to travel at all, except for one funeral; he won’t even to go to his children’s homes for dinner, five miles away.

“What if the teacher came here and videotaped you talking about the subject?” I asked.

He looked up indignantly. “I have no interest in doing that! It’s the face-to-face contact I want, the conversation!”

“All right, so do it!” J. said, shooting a “you-should-have-seen-that-coming” look at me. “It would be good for you.”

“Yep,” he said, turning back to his soup.

Later we began talking about the Pope – about whom he said several irreverent things -and then he started telling stories about the Orthodox clergy in Damascus. He had grown up in the Christian section, and the largest Orthodox church was nearby, although his family didn’t attend: they were Presbyterian.

“I was quite taken with the Patriarch, as a young boy,” he said. “I liked his robe, of course, and he wore that tall hat” – he motioned well above his head – “and he had a very fine beard. So he was quite imposing. Every day he’d go past our house, and I’d stand in the doorway and wait for him. He liked me, and he’d always give me a blessing by putting his hand on my head, but he refused to let me kiss his hand because he didn’t want to offend my father, who was Protestant.” He laughed and shook his head. “I liked him much better than our minister, who was fat and very full of himself. I don’t know where he had learned theology, but he was very learned, very educated. He had two daughters, one with a name that meant ‘good to talk to’ and the other with a name that meant ‘pretty’ and he’d always walk down the street in between those two girls, one on either side of him.” He imitated him walking down the street, swaying from side to side. “I much preferred the Patriarch.”

“And he was the Patriarch of Damascus?” I asked.

“No, his title was ‘Patriarch of Antioch and All the East’, and his see was in Damascus.”

“Patriarch of Antioch and All the East,” J. repeated, wonderingly.

“Yes,” his father said, matter-of-factly. “Antioch was quite important at one time. Now, if you’re going for coffee, could you get me one of those?” He pointed at the container of yogurt I had just finished. “But only if they have that kind, it had some pieces of fruit in it – what was it?”

“Peach,” I said.

“Peach,” he repeated, definitively.

“OK,” said his son.

2005-02-06T21:36:00.000-05:00

BRAIDS

After waking up in a terrible mood (I am not at my best first thing in the morning - dragging myself upstairs for breakfast with my parents at my last visit, my father took one look at me and asked, "are you still like that?") I rallied, drank the coffee J. had kindly made for me, got myself somewhat together, and looked in the mirror. What to do today? Now that my hair is getting long again, I put it up on my head a lot. Sometimes I make a French braid or a twist in the back. Sometimes I wear a barrette. But I've been wanting to try making two braids and coiling them over the top of my head. Yesterday's news photos of Yulia Tymoshenko, the new prime minister of the Ukraine, were the inspiration I needed. My mother used to do this for me when I was little; she often wore her hair that way herself.

My hair is just barely long enough, but I managed and...it looked good. J. had been out doing an errand, and when he got back he immediately said, "That looks beautiful." Hair is such a simple thing,and so often mine drives me crazy. But this made me feel pretty all day - what a funny thing.

2005-02-05T17:47:00.000-05:00

HOW LONG DO WE ENGAGE?

I'd like to call your attention to an excellent discussion that's going on at Father Jake Stops the World. It's ostensibly about the debate within Christianity over homosexuality, particularly within the Episcopal Church, but the points being raised have much wider application, especially in our American society today: how, and how long, do we engage in debate with those who seem to have no desire to listen to opposing points of view? When we do this, are we "mirroring" the attitudes of our antagonists, and what is that doing to us internally? What models can we use to try to see better the dynamics that are going on, and our own role in them? And, most important to me at least, have we lost sight of our original goals and responsibilities, and if so, how can we get back to them in new and creative ways, perhaps outside the traditional channels? The comment threads have been searching, thoughtful, and very interesting (and that's not a plug for yours truly, who has been weighing in toward the end - I'm merely one of many voices there.)

2005-02-03T14:15:00.000-05:00

THE ESKIMO

We were late for our weekly lunch, and all the other residents had already gone into the dining room when I came through the heavy automatic glass doors into the retirement home. My father-in-law was sitting in an armchair, waiting. He smiled, a little faintly, and I immediately began my usual internal assessment – is he paler? weaker? more or less depressed?

“How are you?” I asked, when he didn’t get up. He looked beyond me at the door, and back at me, cocking his head. “How are you?” he asked instead.

“He’s coming,” I said. “He’s just parking the car. I’m fine.” He pushed himself up out of the chair with difficulty. “How are you?” I repeated.

He made a face as if he’d eaten something unpleasant and shook his head. “Not good,” he said. “But I’m here.” He was up by then, and headed laboriously into the dining room, bent-over, leaning on his black-handled cane. He waved the end at me as we rounded the corner, “I’ve reserved our usual table,” and just then J. came up behind him, catching his father’s black shoulder bag in his hand to take to the table.

“Hi Dad!” he said cheerfully.

“Hi!” his father replied, perking up.

We got our lunch at the buffet – chicken and rice soup, plates of salad. It gets harder and harder for my father-in-law to carry the heavy plates of food across the dining room; usually one of us, or one of the staff, gracefully intercept the tipping plate and precarious bowl of soup before there’s an accident. We met him back at the table, where he was already starting in on some chipped beef on toast.

“Ah-ha!” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s one of my favorites. But it’s very fattening.”

“You can afford the calories,” I said, “you’re not eating as much as you used to.”

“I’ve really lost my appetite,” he said, for the umpteenth time. He says whenevr we sit down to eat anything, and it is truly his lament of old age. No one I have ever known in my life enjoyed eating as much as my father-in-law, or managed to put away so much food with such gusto and single-mindedness. It was fun to cook for him, because he’d almost always eat with such pleasure; he was a master of over-indulgence, and then would fast for a day, announcing, “I overindulged, and now I am reducing.”

I don’t know whether it was his medications, or just a digestive system that wore out, but a few years ago he really did lose his appetite. He complained of a metallic taste in his mouth and of food that “didn’t taste”. Part of it was a way of saying that he didn’t like the bland food at the retirement home and missed his wife’s skillful and delicious Middle Eastern cooking. But when we’d bring treats or home-cooked food, it was the same – he was appreciative, but something had changed; the food didn't taste as good, and he didn't want much.

This day he was subdued, not talking much as he concentrated on cutting his toast with the side of a fork held in a weak and shaky hand. His eyes weren’t working well, he said, and the new glasses were “no good, no better than the old ones.” “The doctors say they can’t do anything for my eyes,” he reported. “and then they shrug and say, ‘what do you expect at 95?’” He grinned and waved his fork in the air emphatically, “I tell them 'I want to see!' Oh well.” He went back to his toast. “Forget about it.” I got up to get some tea. “Bring me some yogurt – the kind with fruit at the bottom – and a raisin cookie, please,” he asked.

“So you’re eating this kind of yogurt now?” J. asked.

“Yes. That woman over there” – he gestured with his spoon – “she is my age and she eats yogurt every day and she has tons of energy.” “She has all sorts of food theories,” he added. “She puts together the most inedible combinations of things!” When he finished he pushed his chair back and looked across the table. “In Arabic we say this after we eat…” and he recited two lines. “We ate and we didn’t fill our stomachs.”

He laughed and I laughed with him. “What does that really mean?” I asked.

“It’s just a comment on how the Arab feels about food. We’re never finished eating!”

--

He can still read for a while, until his eyes get tired and blurry, and some days are better for that than others. My sister-in-law has also been enlarging articles to make it easier for him. When we got back up to his apartment, after lunch, he settled into his chair and told me to go inspect his orchids. “They look great!” I called from the bedroom.

“Take any New Yorkers you can find,” he said.

“Don’t you want them?” I asked.

“No, they bore me,” he said. “I don’t care anymore, and besides, I can’t read them.”

This bothers me more than anything; he’s always wanted to read and to discuss what he’s read. I can’t stand the idea that he’s giving up, so I encourage him. “Come on,” I said, kneeling on the floor picking up magazines where he’d dropped them in front of his chair. “You’ll want to read the latest one, you always find something you like.” I showed him the latest issue, with a Valentine cover.

“I didn’t get that cover – what is it?” he asked. I studied it and read the title. “It’s supposed to be for Valentine’s day. All these people, and the red lines inbetween them are supposed to be Cupid’s arrows – showing that everybody’s attracted to somebody else.”

“Stupid,” he said, and I laughed – he was right.

'What's this? I asked, pointing at a portable radio and tape player on the floor.

"That tape player only cost $10 - can you believe it? Someone I met brought it to me along with some tapes of famous philosphers discussing their ideas. He thought I'd enjoy it, but I didn't want to listen to that." I knew why, and felt sorry for the poor person and his good intentions. "If I had been one of the people on the panel then I'd have been interested," he said. "But why do I want to listen to other people talking about their ideas, if I can't be part of the discussion? I dont' know what that fellow was thinking. He brought it after only meeting me one time, and I haven't heard from him since." Socrates stood silent on the shelf above my father-in-law's chair.

J. had gone down to the basement to see if a small loveseat in his father’s storage area would work in our apartment, after asking permission. “Use anything there that you want!" his father had said. J. came back up, said he thought it would be very good, and sent me down to see for myself. I took the elevator to the basement, and turned the key in the door marked “Residents' Storage.” It was a concrete-floor room filled with chicken wire cages, closed with padlocks, that ran from the floor to the ceiling. Each cage was about four by six feet wide, and they held odds and ends of clothing, outdoor furniture, wrapping paper, cardboard boxes. “Is this how it ends?” I thought. “Are our lives reduced to this – plastic flowers in an old wastebasket?” I felt enormously sad, and after looking at the sofa quickly shut the door and went back up.

“It’s nice,” I announced, “ but I can’t remember it being anywhere in any of your houses!”

“What does it look like?” my father-in-law asked. We described it – the matching chair is in our apartment in Montreal, and was always in my mother-in-law's apartment - but none of us could remember where it had been. Somehow this shared amnesia seemed to cheer him up, and he started talking more volubly. I told him some stories about my parents and my Iranian friend, who had just had a henna party for her women friends that I’d missed. “Really?” he said, wanting to hear more about it. “Don’t do it!” he cautioned. “It doesn’t wash off, you know!”

The bright afternoon sunlight came in strongly through the balcony door, shining on the blooming red amaryllis and wafting the heady scent of paperwhite narcissus toward our noses. “It’s really very nice here,” I said. “Look at your beautiful flowers. And it’s so warm and sunny.”

He smiled and settled back in his chair. “I’m really very happy here,” he said. “I like the apartment, they take very good care of us, and for the most part, people leave me alone to live as I want. And when I go to bed at night, I am so comfortable.” He recited another Arab proverb, eyes shut, smiling to himself. He opened his eyes and translated. “It means, basically, when you can go to bed at night and shut your eyes and not worry, that is true happiness.” He turned and looked at me directly. “That’s one thing I really don’t do. I don’t worry.”

“That would be wonderful!” I said, very sincerely, thinking of my own restless sleep.

“I’m like the Eskimo,” he said.

“What Eskimo?” J. asked.

“It’s a story. There were some white men who traveled to the arctic and they passed an old Eskimo man sitting alone in the cold. When they came back, he was still there, and they said to him, “It’s cold here, don’t you worry?’ And the Eskimo said to them, “What have I got to worry about? I have a wife in the igloo, and plenty of fish!”

The punch-line was so matter-of-fact, so unexpected, and yet so typical of him that we all burst out laughing. “I have a wife in the igloo and plenty of fish!” he repeated, and we were all still laughing as we said goodbye.

2005-02-02T20:38:00.000-05:00

FINNISH PORTRAITS

I really enjoyed these excellent photographic portraits by the Finnish artist Pekka Turunen. (There was a sub-theme of wood-stacking that ought to appeal to other, northern winter dwellers.) Via Conscientious.

2005-02-02T20:01:00.000-05:00

It's 8:00 pm and I ought to be just revving up for some writing, but in fact I'm fading...drooping...crashing. We've been working really hard and getting too little sleep, and tonight that's catching up with me. The previous few nights have been both short and restless, or interrupted by long sleepless stretches; last night was sound-er, but still too short.

I've been working over the past week on a big, long-term professional project that's becoming increasingly fascinating and challenging and has brought me into deeper contact with some insightful people. The subject, like much of our work over the past ten years, is the reform of the U.S. health care system, and when you talk to dedicated people who are on the ground level of trying to understand and change a huge, complex, broken system like that, it's very interesting. What surprises me lately is how much the top people in this field remind me of the thoughtful, dedicated religious leaders I've known: they too have given their lives to something they see as being of primary importance, and in the process have gained a pretty sharp perspective on human behavior and human needs, and the role of money in both.

I don't think Mr. Bush sees it the same way. Both Leslee and Ernesto have been writing about their perspectives on health care recently too; if it's any comfort at all, there really are people who are trying to understand the dynamics of the system and create change in many different areas, from health care policy to clinical microsystems, from graduate medical education to patient decision-making, from better use of screening to responsible, informed journalism. They admit, though, that true change is going to take a very long time, and may even depend on a collapse of the system as it now exists.

The inequities that exist within the United States are glaring, but when we look internationally the only word that comes to mind is "shameful". On NPR the other day, there was a glowing report about how AIDS was on the brink of being eliminated as a cause of infant death in the United States. What about an entire, other continent where millions of people are dying, and can't even get access to standard AIDS drugs? What about the numbers of children in the world who die daily from malnutrition and diarrhea? How can we rest on our well-fed laurels for even a moment when this is the situation?

But anyway, I was writing about not writing, wasn't I? Today was our weekly lunch with my father-in-law, and what I really want to do is write about that, with greater attention and clarity than I seem to be able to muster tonight. So unless I'm up for a few hours in the middle of the night, check back tomorrow for the latest installment of his story.

2005-02-01T18:47:00.000-05:00

The drive across south-central New Hampshire to Peterborough is not one I’ve made often. The places I do go – Brattleboro, Vermont, close to the Massachusetts border, or Concord, Manchester and Nashua, New Hampshire, are quickly reached via the two interstate highways that lead out of northern New England toward New York and Boston. But within the mountainous country between the interstates lie forests growing on granite, a few small villages, and a way of life that has all but deserted the places frequented by skiers and tourists.

I left the interstate at North Walpole, passing the tiny one-room post office building, and the red-painted local feed store (“Equine, Livestock, Poultry, Pets) and headed uphill, through snow-filled woods where thin paper birches draw criss-crossing chalk lines against the dark green hemlock. It’s careful, wind-y driving, where one has to watch for deer and ice patches, and the road follows the rocky land rather than being blasted through it. And it’s Frost country, where after a long desolate stretch one comes upon a few houses, a pasture lined with stone walls, an old orchard; and I found myself quoting lines from half-remembered poems.

“I wish Ivy could be here with me, to see what New England is really like,” I thought, until, at the top of the seemingly uninhabited hill, a huge gravel pit suddenly appeared, like a raw grey wound, behind the trees. It reminded me ruefully of the Frost parody: "Whose woods these are I think I know/His house is in the village though/He will not see me stopping here/To chop his woods and shoot his deer…” Frost too had seen more here than the postcards with which his poetry is naively associated; he had his own dark side and saw it reflected in the inhospitable but beautiful land and its taciturn inhabitants.

Nearly twenty years ago, J. and I used to make this drive occasionally to pick up equipment at the home of PC Connection in Marlow, New Hampshire, the next town after Alstead, where, in an isolated community, some enterprising hippies had created one of the first and most successful mail-order computer businesses. It always seemed both incongruous and perfect to pull up to the typical, old, white clapboarded house-plus-shed-plus second shed that was home to the company and leave with a big shiny new computer or printer.

On this day, though, I entered Marlow and left it within the space of a minute or two, and was back in the depths of the forest, driving past the yellow signs warning of “Moose Crossing” or “Drifting Snow”, small green road signs pointing toward “Pitcher Mtn.” or “Ferret Farm Road”, and up to the top of the ridgeline, where the purple mountains suddenly stretched across the horizon beyond a white-blanketed hilltop field and the dark line of the forest at its far edge.

What is it that makes this landscape itself, I wondered. And even that word seems like a misnomer: there is no “scape” to it - or rarely - in the sense of “sweep” or broad vistas; on the contrary, the land is craggy and knarled and closed-in, like an unfriendly fairy-tale forest of unfamiliar yet endlessly repeating themes of dark trees, rocks, snow; you always feel like you’re inside it, not looking at it, except for the rare places where people settled, more than two centuries ago, and a white-steepled church and town hall and a few old houses still nestle like white marbles in the dark-mittened palm of the forest. Is it that, I wondered, those little vestiges of early-settler life, that define this place, with the stone walls running through tall woods that used to be fields? Is it the steamy breath of cows clustered around a water trough? Or the high, forest-rimmed lakes where cold dark water lies in granite basins, and the reed-filled swamps that used to be lakes, and the stands of saplings in swamps on their way to becoming forest?

Not long after moving to New England in the mid 1970s, my then-boyfriend and I were invited to dinner one night in Walpole, by another young couple we’d met in a house rented to nine or ten fuzzy hippies. Jamie and Tom were the gentlest, kindest people imaginable: flower children who dreamed of self-sufficiency and were living as many people did then - on little money and a lot of ingenuity and idealism. That path was perhaps easier in San Francisco than in New Hampshire, in the frozen depths of February. I remember driving that night through these same dark, forbidding woods, up a narrowing dirt road and then another, finding the mailbox with the small sign, leaving our car in pitch-blackness far down the hill, and hiking in carrying a lantern and a stoneware bowl filled with some offering – salad, beans, rice. They lived then in a small one-room cabin, whose light greeted us through the trees from a single window. We tumbled into the warm interior like cattle into a manger, stamping and rubbing; the pot-bellied woodstove took up a good deal of the space, along with the water bottles they had to fill at a spring and lug up to the cabin; a line hung with clothes and jackets; a pile of blankets; a make-shift bed. Jamie had cooked the whole meal on the woodstove – cornbread, probably, and a pot of soup. She had a pet chinchilla, and he had a dog; he did carpentry jobs, she made quilts; they were deeply in love. Like the woods and rocks that surrounded us, in those days it was a theme with slight variations. I remember the warmth of that evening, in the presence of their relationship; I remember being happy, hungry, and then well-fed; it was perhaps one of the last times that life felt simple.

How innocent we were. I thought that as NH 123 finally wound down the other side of the mountains, dropping toward broader, more easily-farmed valleys, like the one where Peterborough is located. Now the fields are giving way to development and there’s evidence of real economic activity. I took it all in reluctantly, still mesmerized by the road I’d traveled. Back in the tiny hill towns, a few people were still living that way -maybe even Jamie and Tom. But I doubted it, and thought of Frost again: “Nothing gold can stay.”

2005-01-31T17:33:00.000-05:00

THIS DINER'S JUMPING

Yesterday I met up, for the first time, with fellow bloggers Lorianne and Ivy in Peterborough, New Hampshire. "I assume we'll know each other...?" one of us asked, by e-mail. Yes, probably. I was the last one to arrive at the busy coffee and gift shop where we'd set our rendezvous, and when I rounded the corner, past the fresh flowers, patchouli-scented candles and chocolate moose lollipops (with peanut butter antlers), there was L.'s familiar face, waving her hands as she talked to I. She looked up and grinned, and the three of us didn't stop talking until we parted several hours later, at dusk, in front of the dark green Peterborough diner where we'd gone for a second round of tea and snacks. It was a fun place to show Ivy - a real American diner, with authentic pea-green tiles and swivel stools, and even a jukebox in the back.

As Lorianne wrote, there's often something magical about meeting people you've gotten to know online; it's no mystery to me why it works for people to meet on the internet, fall in love and get married. Despite never having seen either of these wonderful women in person before, or even talking on the phone, and all of us being surprised about some superficial physical things about each other, it all felt so...familiar. And it was so easy to cut to the chase, and enter into easy convivial conversation about poetry, the writing life, the personal challenges, where we'd been and where we hoped to go. With hundreds of posts read and written, there was no shortage of conversation topics, either: the dog, the trip to Australia, the apartment in Montreal, the marriages, the poetry manuscripts, the residency, the Zen retreats, the dissertation, the book half written...not to mention the other online personalities and relationships that spun back and forth between the three of us like shiny threads. What does surprise me is finding out that I like the people even more than I thought I would, and that none of us have revealed so much that there is nothing of interest left to discover. I would have happily kept talking, if I hadn't had a long drive back home in the dark ahead of me. And I'll happily pick up the conversation again, when the chance arises.

2005-01-29T23:39:00.000-05:00

RE-ARRANGING

Today we re-arranged the furniture. In our house we have two connected rooms that we use for living and dining space. For the past few years, we've had the table on the south wall, where there's the most light - but that has meant that there are two seating areas, one in each of the two rooms. It hasn't worked that well, and after moving some of our favorite things to Montreal, the whole living area has seemed depressing to me. So today I cleaned up all the leftover Christmas things, cleared off all the surfaces, and started dragging furniture around. J. came up and offered to help me; three or four dusty hours later the only item still in its same location was the piano. We decided to get rid of the coffee table and one other table, and to make one sitting area in the southern room, and make the other room into just dining. We also straightened up the bookshelves - no more books piled on other books, or papers stuck inbetween books - but stopped short of the actual purge we're planning to do. We moved the couch away from, and perpendicular to, the wall of books, so you can actually see all of them and easily get volumes off hte lower shelves. Now, sitting here after having our neighbors over for dinner, I'm very happy: it all worked so much better than before and I don't feel crowded by stuff. The Montreal move has made us both very clear on this: we want less, and only the things that really matter. Every step in that direction has felt liberating.

--

Our neighbors are Icelandic, and during the conversation, which is always fun and far-ranging, there are usually some good-natured jabs from us about their "wenting" and "wegetables", and often some expression form them that we've never heard. Tonight, as they discussed their different styles of dealing with their little daughter, the wife suddenly acknowledged to her husband, "Yes, there's a fly foot."

"What?" we asked. "Did you say, 'there a fly afoot?'"

"No," they laughed. "A 'fly foot' means a little point - like 'a grain of truth'". How perfect!

--

Tomorrow I'm planning, with great excitement, to get together with two real live blogger-friends; none of us have met before. Report to come!

2005-01-28T20:47:00.000-05:00

SOME MORE LINKS

Two of my favorite bloggers have returned to their pages after times of mourning, for different reasons; I'm so happy to hear their voices again. Ana at Funny Accent writes in her engaging and fascinating way about how to make Malaysian fish curry, telling us much more than the recipe; and at Footprints, there is a new Pippi Longstocking story, (yes! remember her?) and some new hope after soul-searching for a response to the world's tragedy and loss.

2005-01-28T08:59:00.000-05:00

Good news! A new post from Idle Words, the blog of Maciej Ceglowski. I like Maciej's writing so much that I scan my RSS feeds eagerly each day, hoping he will have posted something, but these gems are like wild mushrooms - delicious, but rare and unpredictable. Maciej has recently moved to The Big Apple, after a long sojourn in Vermont and a too-brief summer in Montreal; if you ever have time on your hands, read his archives.

2005-01-28T08:42:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's linked interview with Seymour Hersh made some startling comments about race. Here, Paul Krugman of the New York Times takes on the President's argument that the present Social Security system is disproportionately bad for blacks, pointing out that the administration's argument is not only flawed, but immoral.

...so the claim that Social Security is unfair to blacks is just false. And the fact that privatizers keep making that claim, after their calculations have repeatedly been shown to be wrong, is yet another indicator of the fundamental dishonesty of their sales pitch.

What's really shameful about Mr. Bush's exploitation of the black death rate, however, is what it takes for granted.

The persistent gap in life expectancy between African-Americans and whites is one measure of the deep inequalities that remain in our society - including highly unequal access to good-quality health care. We ought to be trying to diminish that gap, especially given the fact that black infants are two and half times as likely as white babies to die in their first year...

2005-01-27T15:22:00.000-05:00

Pollarded Tree, Iberville, Quebec

I write here about politics reluctantly, even though it's one of my obsessions. So I will just mention my dismay at yesterday's vote on Condaleeza Rice's nomination, where only thirteen senators had the courage to vote against confirmation. I had called Senator Leahy's office earlier in the day to regster my opinion; I was sure he'd vote against her. He didn't, but Vermont's other senator, Jim Jeffords, did. I was also appalled to hear Joseph Biden, on NPR, defending his vote saying the "the single most important thing is for us to prevail in Iraq." And I was disgusted by Republicans insinuating that Democrats who voted against Rice failed to recognize the historic significance of confirming the first black woman secretary of state - as if a vote against blatant lying, or against a person who all of Europe detests and mistrusts, was suddenly racism.

2005-01-27T09:42:00.000-05:00

We've Been Taken Over by a Cult: Seymour Hersh talks to Amy Goodman

This is a very rough transcript of a recent interview. Some people are skeptical about Hersh, who has been writing what he calls an "alternative history" of the Iraq war in the New Yorker. But what he says here about the present American government and, more especially, about the largely hidden, and hideous, cost of the war to individual soldiers and families, and ultimately to all of us, is something everyone should read.

2005-01-25T20:57:00.000-05:00

Bus Stop, rue Rachel, Montreal

BUT HERE IN VERMONT, IT'S A WORKING AFTERNOON

2:30 Procrastinating from the paying work at hand. Lulled by the sunlight coming in the windows onto the busy little rosemary leaves; the translucent plump jade-plant leaves; the dusty floorboards; the pleated windowshade, slightly askew. This torpor gives way to a wave of sleepiness. I feel the sunlight on one foot, straight through the black leather of my clogs, and at the same time, shake my shoulders to lessen the winter chill. Here are an apple and two forelle pears on the table in front of me, all exactly the same shades of yellow and blushing red. I shake my shoulders again; it’s a voluntary motion, a decision that pushes away an involuntary shiver.

3:31 I’m getting something done – one chapter of the book I’m working on is roughly laid out. Right now the sun is glaring in my eyes, blinding me, but I can barely feel it, so long and feeble are its rays. Through the corners of my eyes I glance out through my own hair, backlit and golden. I pass my hands through the air, feeling for the ray –– it’s like swimming in a lake where there are springs. Ah, there it is, just barely warm. I cup my hands around it, this ball of invisible fire.

4:02 The sun went down behind the hill about five minutes ago, and in five more, I’m going to have to turn the lights on. I’m also going to have to have some tea, or fall asleep. My thoughts move toward the kitchen, and it occurs to me I have no idea what we might have for dinner.

5:34 An hour of tea-powered blog-reading and e-mail writing later, I’m going back to work.

6:45 Four chapters roughly laid out, and I’m not the only one who’s getting hungry around here; J. has already opened the refrigerator once, searching hopefully. The upstairs heat has come back on; evening thermostat cycle. Sigh. Breathe. Relax. Don’t look over at the piano and the untouched volumes of Brahms, Mendelssohn, the Christmas decorations still out, the unanswered cards. Make some dinner.

8:06 Final push. If I can get all five chapters done tonight, that would be great. My mouth is still tingling from dinner – an impromptu Thai red curry of shrimp and vegetables on rice, with yogurt instead of coconut milk.

8:54 Finished. J. will add the graphics while I am out tomorrow, then I have about five hours of table design to do, then another five of fine-tuning, adding tables of contents, map and figure lists, making sure the bookmarks work in the .pdf... but now, maybe there’s time for some piano after all, or some reading. Or some sleep.

2005-01-24T21:04:00.000-05:00

CYCLE POP (coin de Rachel et Christophe-Colombe)

Back home in Vermont now, but this was from today, as we left town.

We came home to quite a bit of accumulated snow - enough that we couldn't park the car and had to snow-blow and shovel first in order to get into the driveway. But it was beautiful, feather-weight snow, and I worked happily in early darkness, the crisp cold biting my cheeks and hands, with stars just beginning to come out in a cloud-smeared sky.

2005-01-24T08:51:00.000-05:00

This will be a travel day, and unless things change dramatically, we should be able to avoid the snow and drive fairly easily, taking my brother-in-law and sister-in-law to Trudeau airport first, coming back and picking up our things and leaving in early afternoon. I'm always a bit melancholy, leaving here, and in spite of the sunshine that was streaming into the apartment this morning - so strong and low that it reached all the way to the back wall - I found myself staring wistfully out the front window as I made the coffee.

Yesterday afternoon the four of us went to a matinee of a new movie about Haiti - "Taste for Young Women" - which is a male coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of Duvalier's death, with poetry by Haitian poet Saint-Aude. It's very good, and immediately transporting: at 4:00 we emerged, blinking and dazed, into the impossibly cold, bright afternoon.

2005-01-22T10:43:00.000-05:00

Wrapped in layers of scarves, wool, fleece, down, and polypropelene long underwear, the four of us we walked to the Portugese section of the Plateau (west of Eglise Jean-Baptiste on rue Rachel) for a late dinner last night. Passing several bakeries and groceries filled with piles of snow-white meringues, crusty round loaves and flat-bottomed sweet portugese rolls, hams, and fragrant barbequed chicken turned on a grill by a white-aproned chef, we tumbled, blinking and dazed, from the frigid night into the warm, yellow-toned interior of the restaurant, with its harbor landscape in handpainted blue tiles behind the bar, and the concerned friendly faces of the waitstaff and host who helped us peel off coats and find a table. (L'Etoile de l'Ocean, 101 rue Rachel)

We ordered a liter of red wine and were given a basket of bread and a plate of shiny black olives. D. ordered soup, a thick bowl of pureed potatoes with other vegetables and sharp greens - delicious - and J. and I. ordered a plate of grilled calamari, which arrived arranged like the points of a star, tentacles in the middle, lightly grilled and swimming in a sauce of garlic-infused oil. For dinner G. ate pork cutlets with perfectly fried potatoes; D. a stew of pork and clams that he said was a very typical dish. J. and I both had the poisson du jour - salmon for him, and dorade royale for me. I had never eaten dorade before, and it came whole, with its head and fins and all its bones. Other than its boniness, it was one of the best fish I've ever eaten - firm, delicious, in a very light butter/oil sauce. Meanwhile, a singer, in black beret, played guitar and sang fado, walking between the tables.

The dorade, I learned later, is a type of sea bream, and highly-prized for its flavor, but becoming rare in its main source, the Mediterranean. The Israelis have a booming industry of fish farming that includes careful dorade culture, and they are now the source of most of the dorade that make their way into the restaurants of North America. My British, tongue-in-cheek, and excellently chatty fish book also told me:

What's really 90's about these fish, or perhaps 80's come to think of it, is their bisexuality. Like many of the Sparidae family, they start off being male and transform themselves into females at a certain age, with testes developing first and ovaries next. what a life! And a crown and good looks to boot.

The crown theme continued when we arrived back at our apartment - from Le Petit Fourneau, also down the street, D. and G. had brought a galette du roi, a special French cake made only during the season of Epiphany, for our dessert. This was also new to me - a round, not terribly sweet cake with a crusty brown top and an almond-flovored interior into which a small prize is baked - the recipient gets to wear the gold crown that encircles the cake in its box.

I figure I can afford the calories. While we drank strong black coffee and ate our cake, D. read to us from an article on "The Food of the North" by Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson (from the journal Petits Propos Culinaires, No. 77):

Another invisible line crosses the maps, passing through Britain in the northern part of Europe, defining North by the regions where the climate will not support a diet based on vegetables and grain. This gave vegetables and fruit the status of a luxury in the north of Europe in the past, encouraged the building fo walled gardens, cold-frames, hot-beds. Denmark and the Netherlands are exceptions, ingenious in vegetable gardening and focused on milk as a source of protein. There are tracts of northern Europe where the only way of garnering regular food from the land is by eating the meat of grazing animals: cattle, sheep, then reindeer.

This grain to meat trends intensifies until, in the Arctic, it results in a people, the Inuit, who are physiologically adapted to living on an entirely animal diet. Animal fat, until the twentieth century arrival of imported food and power, was the essential fuel of the Arctic: fire, light, and human energy all came from fat. Fat is essential, virtually sacred, in a climate where it takes 6,000-7,000 calories a day to work while retaining bodily warmth...

We've got a good start on that.

2005-01-21T13:14:00.000-05:00

FIRE, NOT ICE

This was Thai fast food, being cooked in front of me a few days ago. Today it is -20 degrees C., so the idea of warmth in any form is welcome. My brother-in-law and his wife arrived yesterday from D.C., escaping the inauguration; they aren't used to the weather but are out today, exploring the markets - we plan to meet up for a Portugese dinner later tonight, since they know what to look for in that cuisine and we don't. Meanwhile, I'm layered-up, and working...

The discussion in the comment thread on the previous post is a lot more interesting than anything else I could write today, so I'll call your attention to that and invite everyone's input. Thank you to everyone who has commented so far for making this another great discussion.

2005-01-19T10:55:00.000-05:00

YESTERDAY. BRRRR.

In the comments on the previous post, Loren wrote:

It was tempting to just ignore the institution and to pay attention to individual students, the ones that most needed your help, but in the end unless you changed the institution itself you could never solve the problems those kids, and thousands like them, faced.

That's it, in a nutshell. And as someone who has always taken that path - of trying to work for change within the institutions themselves - I agree with him. What's changed for me is that in two particular places I feel that I've come up against a wall, and that institutional change is not the possibility I once believed in - although I continue to have hope that eventually, change will happen. One is within the Anglican Church, where one side is utterly unwilling to talk to the other, and insists on "our way or no way", and where the debate has all but obscured the work that we ought to be doing together (and look at what I've been doing - writing a book about the politics of that, hoping that my words can somehow persuade or influence change). The other place is American politics, where one side now controls everything, wielding almost unchecked power.

I disagree with much of the American left, who seem to feel that if they only can regroup, "reach out" and spin their message differently, the balance will shift to them. This is, I feel, both naive and limited, and except for a few outstanding individuals, it will have neither authenticity nor sufficient authority to really change policy or opinion at a root level - either in Washington or in the heartland. The true change required is enormous, and will take generations: it has to take place in the American psyche - including the hearts of many who "vote Democratic" but live lives that are exploitative and consumptive and do not embrace truly understand the diversity and interdependence of our world. Even more difficult, that change of heart has to include conquering the power of fear.

I'm questioning whether it is worth it to continue beating my head against these particular institutional walls. What I have to do, I think, is to take a much longer perspective. Making changes in my own lifestyle, speaking and writing and living about a different way of being in the world -- these are real actions I can take without arguing with anyone, but I think they have just as much potential power. Top-down change only works when you have a critical mass of people who are extremely courageous, and willing to put their careers on the line without compromise. The Episcopal Church in the US, for example, has been very fortunate that the presiding bishop, Frank Grisworld, came into his own during the debate overhomosexuality and refused to back down when the pressure to do so was increased. Here in Montreal, Christ Church Cathedral has taken a collective, progressive, and courageous stand in support of gays and lesbians - within a wider Anglican context that is much more mixed and even hostile. The rainbow flag at the door keeps being taken down, and to keeps being put back up - in fact there were jokes last week about painting it on the building. There are many contexts, both within the church and outside it, for me to be in solidarity with gays and lesbians and to work for change. On the other hand, when it comes to discussing politics and morality, the American church is just as divided as the populace: it is nearly impossible for an Episcopal Church, or other progressive mainline parishes, to take a strong stand against war and killing, while the conservative churches are united in their support of war and the current president. I find that untendable and deeply disturbing.

I don't see courageous leadership emerging in American politics; furthermore the extent of the division is so extreme, and corporate interests and money so linked with governmental power, that we are unlikely to see significant change happen for a very long time. This means that those of us who hope for a different paradigm have to find other ways to make our lives count and to live into our beliefs. Within many interest areas - for example, the environment, human rights, spirituality, encouraging creativity through the arts, education - there are ways to make a difference and to begin the process of changing hearts and overcoming people's fear of change, modernity, and "otherness". But we have to take a long view and realize we may not even live long enough to see the effect of our efforts; we have to find ways to keep working forward positively but perhaps almost in underground ways -- not losing hope so that we can continue to give hope.

2005-01-16T21:12:00.000-05:00

Two and a half hours of my day today were spent in discussion of the Eames Report with other members of the congregation of Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal. The bishop of Montreal had been invited, and he came to listen, saying very little. The conversation - the third of three sessions - was remarkable. No fighting, in spite of some disagreement; the discussion was intelligent, informed, searching, often profound; people spoke about their personal lives and feelings in a way that was caring, honest, respectful, and quite trusting of one another. I felt impressed and honored to be a part of it.

My own feeling, that I expressed toward the end, was that if the African bishops and conservative bishops in the US want to leave, nothing we do short of caving in to their demands and "repenting" of our "errors" will stop it. And if the Anglican Communion comes apart as a result, then it will come apart. I don't seek that or want it, but I can't stop it and be true to what I feel is right. But whatever happens to the Anglican Communion doesn't change one iota my own responsibility, and our responsibility together as a particular group of committed people, to listen to what we are being called to do: to love each other as ourselves, to alleviate suffering, to heal division, to bring hope to a broken world, to change our own lives so that the poor can live. This means, for example, that regardless of the views and action of African bishops I cannot stop being called into relationship with the people in Africa who suffer because of AIDS, or into relationship with my Muslim brothers and sisters regardless of what my government's policies are, or into relationship with the gay and lesbian members of my community. And in each of these cases, that means allowing the "other" to minister to me as well so that I can learn from them - as the bishop pointed out in one of his few comments on the discussion.

We spend so much energy dealing with institutions and their internal politics rather than doing the work that love calls us to do. When you're in a room full of people who want to do the latter, that's so very obvious. Choosing to use our energy otherwise is also a temptation, a seduction: it is often easier and more compelling to argue about politics, for example, than to act compassionately and simply from one's beliefs, or to try to enter into genuine relationship with others. This is not to say that systems don't need reform, and demand our attention. But at the beginning, and at the end, the needs of our world continue to exist, and our basic calling and responsibility to one another are the same. Part of what I realize I am seeking in my own life is a greater ability to get on with that work and leave the arguing behind.

2005-01-15T17:09:00.000-05:00

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 Bicycletta drinking 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.

2005-01-14T20:45:00.000-05:00

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.

2005-01-13T22:33:00.000-05:00

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.

It's good to be back.

2005-01-12T16:10:00.000-05:00

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.

2005-01-10T11:34:00.000-05:00

DRIVING

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.

2005-01-07T19:32:00.000-05:00

Saks Fifth Avenue, February 2004

In the wide-ranging, terrific comment thread, two posts ago -- I am continually so appreciative of the readers and commenters here -- Siona brought up a question:

"There's an odd paradox in the fact that while Canadians are more comfortable with themselves than are Americans, but they are less secure in their country . . . Canadian culture is seen as being constantly threatened... Does the apparent security of America as a nation mean that Americans have the 'luxury' of feeling insecure themselves?"

What an interesting question! I think Americans are perhaps "secure" about their culture, if secure means basically "content with", and that most Americans feel they're the ones on top who everyone else wants to emulate. This impression comes both from lack of a deeper, genuine exposure to other cultures, and the obvious fact that American movies, jeans, cars, technology...fill in the blank... are considered desirable in many places across the globe, even in many cultures who don't like us much politically. So does that sense of -- let's call it cultural superiority -- give us the luxury of feeling insecure about ourselves?

What do you think? I guess I'd say yes and no. Many people do have a much more nuanced view of American culture and our place in the world, and surely that would be more likely to create anxiety, not security. But I think there is a huge amount of underlying anxiety in our culture anyway, which may be expressed differently, depending on a given person's point of view - one may be worried about terrorism, another about the stock market, another about getting cancer, another about not having the right clothes or the right perfume, another about not being successful - and these worries are all fanned by the mass media and by advertising pressure, as well as family and marital expectations and a lot of other historical/psychological/emotional/practical reasons.

But I'd go so far as to say that I feel that this pervasive anxiety is the defining feature of American society at this point in time. From what foreign friends have told me, when they've come here in recent years, they are very shocked by the extent of this - going so far as to call it paranoia - and how deeply Americans on all levels of society have bought into it. I can tell you that people in other western countries may be anxious too, but it's about George Bush, not about anthrax or shortages of flu vaccine, and the latter sort of anxiety doesn't permeate people's thinking or interfere with their ability to enjoy and appreciate their daily lives.

Of course, in many parts of the world, and in those forgotten and neglected parts of our own country, people can barely live, or their entire lives are circumscribed by genuine fear based on real day-to-day circumstances. So I think Siona points to something essential when she uses the word "luxury". Many of us do have the luxury to be worried and insecure about seemingly trivial things, too, and to focus our attention on them. Some of this is due, I think, to a sense of helplessness and inability to think or engage effectively about the big things - war, terrorism, the economy, the environment - so that people transfer that anxiety to a more personal sphere. And we also have a cultural addiction to wanting things, as a distraction; and buying things, as a quick fix way to feel better; and flaunting them, to assure ourselves that we're actually OK. And this pattern of behavior is, most definitely, a luxury few people in the world enjoy.

Another aspect of this question has to do with cultures based on individuality and self-determination, as opposed to collective cultures where the individual's wants and needs are often secondary to the needs of the group. Here it is culturally normal and acceptable to focus on the self and ask "what do I want or need today in order to feel good?" while in other places, there are people who would never ask that question. Even in small American villages, I've experienced less of the posturing and insecure focus on self-identity I described than in more urban settings - but it still exists.

Anyway - what do you think?

2005-01-05T21:37:00.000-05:00

SOUND BYTE-ING the A. of C.

A thoughtful article about the theological questions raised by the Asian tsunami by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams appeared in the Sunday Telegraph last week. In it, Williams attempted to speak about how a thoughtful person might consider the inevitable (and perennial) questions about the existence of God amid terrible suffering. As in most of Williams' writings, he had something to say and said it quite well, freely acknowledging the doubts any intelligent person might have, yet speaking movingly about how action to relieve the suffering is really more meaningful, and may ultimately give us more answers, than theological debate. The Telegraph's headline writers, however, ran the article under the title: "Of course this makes us doubt God's existence."

Lambeth's response, as well as some comments by and about the Telegraph, can be found at Thinking Anglicans.org.

2005-01-05T21:03:00.000-05:00

Back in my blogging spot in Vermont, here in the living room where the Christmas decorations are still up and the house is gradually warming. We drove down yesterday afternoon in grey weather, the snow cover dwindling with each mile, and arrived to find our valley swathed in thick fog, the lawn partially unthawed and muddy. We unpacked the perishable things quickly and took off to go to a birthday party for an old friend.

It was a good party, with lots of good food and people we hadn't seen for a long time. But I had the same feeling I often have in such gatherings in the U.S.: a lot of these people are posturing. I think the feeling was heightened because of the New Year's party we had attended in Canada, where we knew very few people except the host and hostess, and there was no feeling like that whatsoever.

Now, I think I've lived long enough to be able to go beneath the surface of most emotions and see at least some of what's there and where the origins might lie. And I know that I used to be more confused and insecure about these social reactions than I am now; for the most part, I'm a pretty confident person and I don't think I need to convince people anymore that I'm anything in particular. So I don't think that these waving antennas signalling "something feels uncomfortable here" appear because of something from inside me, from my own insecurity. I think the feeling originates from the fact that there is a tremendous insecurity about one's own worth in American culture in general which is not present to the same extent in the culture to our north, where people seem much more comfortable both with themselves, and with others.

I've felt it all my life, this jockeying for position and impact, this rather desperate and unhappy feeling of people needing and trying to impress each other: "ohmigod, if only I'd worn higher heels or a more arty jacket or could say I had a show coming up, or if I had something, some new techno gadget, maybe..." It started in grade school, when the girls I walked to school with made cruel fun of each other for wearing knee socks instead of tights, or whatever they could find and use as a wedge of superiority/inferiority; hip vs. square. Grown-ups don't do that outloud, except on make-over shows, but the judging and the comparing still goes on all the time. And I've got to tell you - I am sick to death of it. Even though I recognized this years ago and made a decision not to participate, to learn instead to be comfortable with who I was and to hell with the rest of them if they didn't like it, what hurts now is walking into it and seeing and feeling the painfulness of other people who don't see and are, despite their hip exterior, very insecure inside. And realizing how our culture and our media feed this dis-ease and insecurity, because once they've convinced you that you should be insecure and off-balance, the way out is always to buy, to change oneself, to emulate someone who the cultural arbiters-of-the-moment say is the most beautiful or coolest or most successful. At the party last night, where many of the guests were artists and/or gay, the potential traps seemed even more cleverly hidden, and the posing even more deliberate and calculated. I felt a sea of unhappiness and uncertainty beneath the celebratory atmosphere.

The only way I could see to cut through was to listen and try to connect very attentively and directly, bypassing the surface stuff as much as I could. Several of my priest and minister friends have told me that this is the spiritual dis-ease they see most often: the inability of many, even most, people to believe that they are worthy of being loved, just as they are. Yet every person at that party was wonderful, lovable, perfect in their own uniqueness. Is it possible to tell people that with your quietness, with your eyes, with your careful attention?

2005-01-03T16:51:00.000-05:00

Today we shopped for the first time at Canadian Tire, and got our first Canadian Tire Money. Forgive me, clueless readers of other nationalities: I am nearly as in-the-dark as you about this Canadian institution, but I've taken my first steps toward learning.

When you walk into a Canadian Tire store - and these are huge, box-store size establishments, located on the outskirts of towns or in malls - it feels sort of like a Home Depot, sort of like Wal-Mart, but somehow different. It's home-ier, less packaged, low-key but fairly high quality, but still a great big store selling automotive parts, sporting goods, tools...I don't know how to describe it. But I liked it, and didn't have the same shuddering, steel-myself, incipient-headache reaction I usually do when entering one of those enormous fluorescent-lit, high-ceilinged monstrosities.

"Today, nine out of ten adult Canadians shop at Canadian Tire at least twice a year and 40% of Canadians shop at Canadian Tire every week. Eighty-five per cent of the Canadian population lives within a 15-minute drive of their local Canadian Tire store." (from the Canadian Tire website)

The lines were long, so we did a quick circuit of the store, trying to get an idea of what was available and what the prices were like. We checked out an entire rack of various flashlights; a wall of hockey sticks; a display of hockey and figure skates; the parkas and boots and camouflage hunting gear, and the socks with fish printed on them (big fish - one per sock - head at the ankle, tail running up the leg).

A bin of hockey sticks on sale

There are dishes, and pots and pans, and storage containers, and some furniture, and lighting. I browsed the Christmas lights, now on sale, for some of the intense blue LED lights I've seen up here, but didn't manage to make a buying decision. In an impressive section of snow shovels: snow scoops, collapsible shovels, adjustable-length shovels, children's shovels - not surprisingly, more choice than I've ever seen - we found a clever folding model for the car, and I managed to ask for a windshield scraper ("un outil pour grater les fenetres d'auto?") - hey, don't laugh, he understood me!

At the check-out, J. said, "be sure to get the money." I don't quite understand about Canadian Tire money, except that it seems to work kind of like S&H green stamps (yes, how old are you, dear reader?) being redeemable for future purchases at Canadian tire. Canadians joke about it, saying it's worth more than their own currency - which, as the loonie (the vernacular for a Canadian dollar, called that because it has a loon on it) rises in value, is becoming a lot less true. But he needn't have worried. The cashier, Sonia, handed me my currency automatically, with my receipt. For my $20+ purchase, I received a 5-cent and a 25-cent Canadian Tire bill - which, mes copains, is not much. But I was delighted. I walked out to the parking lot turnign the bills over in my hands, staring at them like the clueless immigrant that I am, but feeling that warm glow of crossing yet one more threshold.