the cassandra pages

7 am, Mexico City

Grateful for a good night's sleep. Yesterday began at 4:30 am, and ended at 11:30 pm. The flight was uneventful until the end, when we came in over the volcano- and mountain-ringed city and encountered a lot of turbulence. I'm susceptible to motion sickness, though I'm usually OK on planes, but the taxi ride from the airport to the hotel in heavy rush hour traffic finished me off, and I wasn't good for much last evening. Today I feel a lot better, and we're about to eat some breakfast and head into the historical district.



Our hotel is in a real neighborhood, and the sounds of daily life drift up into  our window, like the birds that sing constantly and flutter by. Last night we heard a muezzin - not something I'd expected - and this morning at eight, a loudspeaker or megaphone from a nearby school, welcoming the children with a loud and cheerful buenos dias! which they all answered, many times over. I could see them, lining up in a courtyard with green walls in back of the school, and the noisy, happy exchange between the teacher or principal and the kids went on for at least fifteen minutes before they went inside. Beyond the school there are palm trees, and then the tall buildings begin. There's more bright color, just from this window, than I can recall in all of Montreal, except for the Portuguese neighborhood not far from our home.

Everyone speaks about the air quality here as being abysmal, but right now it's not too bad. I can see some pinkish smog over the city, but the sky is blue and last night, from the window, I could see stars.

The altitude, however, is something I can definitely feel. I have a slight headache, and we both feel more fatigued than usual. We'll see how it is when we're out walking about. Hasta pronto!

Departure

Five Years Ago

I'm getting ready to take off on a trip on Wednesday, so here are two posts from this week in February, five years ago, when we were still going back and forth between Vermont and Montreal, and my father-in-law was still alive. Enjoy.

Bach Partita #2 on a black and white day

Relentless snow. In the yard, wrought iron chairs buried under mounding pillows; arching rose canes; circled peony rings, their thin blue shadows.

Type etches a white screen, a page. Notes race over keys, under fingers -- courante, rondeau, capriccio -- drawing lines, circles, bodies; dancing out of the room.

---

"I'm Still Here"

"You know what we say in Arabic..." said my father-in-law on the phone last week, after we'd told him everything was fine with us. "...If you don't have any worries, invent one." Two nights ago my sister-in-law called to tell us that he was in the hospital again, after another incident of chest pain strong enough that three nitroglycerin tablets wouldn't relieve it. His regular doctor is out of town, on a lecture circuit, so she wasn't there to keep him out of the hospital, as their mutually-agreed-upon care plan had said.

We're going down tomorrow, but today I called and got the main hospital switchboard, where I was asked to spell his last name (something that never happens in Montreal - they know how to pronounce and spell it here). She transferred me to the nursing station on his floor, where I was asked to repeat the name several times more. Finally I heard the beside phone ringing, and the familiar fumbling and delay as he juggled the receiver on its precarious journey from the cradle to his ear.

His voice sounded strong, and he was full of stories about the staff's efficiency; the misfortune of being ill on a weekend when all the doctors were out "enjoying their profits;" the way "all the furniture in the room had been rearranged" since this morning. He had needed to wash up in the shower and to his horror, two young female nurses had been sent to the room. "Imagine! They wanted to go into the shower with me!" he exclaimed. "I told them, 'Over my dead body!'" and they sent a male instead, which was all right. he did everything for me." Even though I couldn't see him, I could imagine his head shaking in wonderment at this latest adventure. He said he was up sitting in a chair, and that he was comfortable but wouldn't be released until Monday, since there were no doctors anywhere around. "A helicopter just flew by the window!" he reported, no doubt seeing the rescue helicopter that transports accident victims and premature babies from the remote areas of the region to the medical center. "Amazing! It's just incredible what goes on here."

He ordered us to enjoy ourselves while we could. "How's your work going?" It was fine, we told him - the irony is that we're working on a publication about end-of-life care in American hospitals - but we didn't say that. We assured him we'd see him soon. "I'll see you then, insh'allah," he said. "In Arabic we have a saying:'The devil never cracks his own pot.' Catastrophes keep happening, but I'm still here."

Colors of the Sun

I made myself a sketchbook to take on our trip. The original plan was to buy one of Stillman & Burns' new Gamma series landscape-format sketchbooks; they're lovely, and the paper is heavy enough to take light washes. But they aren't cheap, nor are they carried anywhere in Montreal, and as a result I left the task of ordering from Toronto undone too long. What to do? Then it occurred to me that I could make my own sketchbook and fill it with whatever combination of papers I wanted! What a revelation! I've made a lot of small notebooksbefore, but never a sketchbook. The other advantage was that I could choose a size that was light and easy to carry. The binding itself is reversible; I can take pages out or add more anytime.

It helps to have a big papercutter and a heavy-duty adjustable binding punch and comb binder; we used to use it for binding reports for our design clients.

I already had these handpainted covers, waiting for a binding, so that part was easy. The next task was to cut up a sheet of a favorite drawing/mixed-media paper, Stonehenge, and another one of Arches 140-lb watercolor paper. It was enough for two books, one slightly larger and longer than this, with plain black covers, and this one. The binding here a flat leather thong; the other book has a black plastic comb binding.

Now I just need to make the time, and pluck up my courage, to do some sketches rather than being on-the-go every minute while we're away. The work of the Urban Sketchers, a growing international movement, both inspires and daunts me, because sketching buildings and urban scenes has never been my forté. What I'm most interested in isn't accuracy, but conveying the feeling of a place or scene.

On the other hand, having this blog, and you, my kind and generous readers, is a great incentive, though I admit that every single time I put pen or brush to paper, a little voice in my head worries about making a disastrous mess! Just do it, I tell myself, as all my teachers have told me too: sketch every day. Some drawings will be a mess, and some will come out all right. No matter what, you'll learn and improve through constant practice.

Funny, isn't it -- after all this time, and all this making-of-things, we are still fragile! I think that this beautiful bright color will help.

¡Hola!

"Taqueria Mexico dans la ville" a few blocks from our studio.

To live in Montreal is to swim in a sea of languages. I came here seven or eight years ago feeling my lack of French fluency very keenly. Gradually, it's improved -- through practice and immersion, helped by friendships and our deliberate choice to live in a French neighborhood -- to the point where I can read very well, manage to express myself in most situations, sustain fairly simple conversations, and converse with people who don't speak English. Best of all, I can finally follow the gist, at least, of most of what I hear. At first I thought being shy about speaking was the most isolating aspect, but I quickly realized, no, it was my failure to understand what was being said around me. In a way, it was like being deaf, and reminded me of my father-in-law's last years, when he so often simply tuned out of conversations he couldn't hear or understand, and as a result felt left out -- and he was, in fact, left out unless one of us acted as "translator" for him. I'm grateful to my bilingual friends here who've done that for me during meetings or other events when I was missing big chunks of important information.

But another aspect of Montreal reality is that many people are not merely bilingual, but trilingual, or even more. There are many immigrants and many blended families; people travel a lot too, and they're interested in other cultures, and want to be able to speak at least a little bit when they arrive; it seems like a cultural tendency, even a hobby, among many people in this city. I always laugh when I go to my dentist: in that office alone there are native speakers of French, Spanish, Romanian, and Farsi, which, when combined with my English, generally leads to a lively exchange rather than confusion, because they all find it fun to do that, and so do I.

Two of our best friends here are completely fluent in English, Spanish, and French, and I've been continually impressed and envious of the easy way they switch back and forth. They've been so generous in including us in family gatherings, sometimes with visitors from South America who speak no French or English. I've often wished I could converse a little in Spanish, a language I've never studied. Last year, when our bathroom was being re-done, the expert tile installer often brought his father, an entremely warm, nice man, to help -- but the older man spoke only Spanish. This sort of encounter happens all the time, and always feel like a missed opportunity when there's no language in common.

If I had been born here, I wonder if languages would have become more of a hobby for me, too. I studied French in school, then ancient Greek and German - but the later two were just for reading; speaking a language is different. I have some aptitude for hearing and repeating the nuances of sound -- maybe being musical helps. My problem, as an adult learner, has mainly been time. How I wish I knew the essential phrases and expressions and basic vocabulary in Arabic, Spanish, Italian, German, Farsi, Russian...not to mention Chinese and Japanese! Another potential avocation for a person with too many already!

Trudging...earlier today.

However, with an upcoming trip to points south, I am finally tackling task #1, and learning some basic Spanish. It's been decades since I seriously studied a language besides French, and I'm finding it fascinating and fun. French turns out to be a help, as well as a confusion - my brain rebels at similarities like "elle" and "ella." (I do feel a little bit like I'm trying to cram new puchases into an already-full closet.) To study and practice, I've been using the online beginner's course offered by "Babbel;" the computer environment offers not only drills in reading and writing, but the benefits of an oral language lab with speech recognition. It keeps track of mistakes and presents an individualized review of my least-internalized material.

I just wish -- as always -- that there were more hours in the day!

The Other Side of Winter

St- Emelie-de-l'Énergie, Quebec. Pastel on paper, 13" x 9 3/4".

For those of us who live this far north, you simply have to find something to like about winter - something that makes you actually look forward to it, and that gives you the endurance to get through the last two months of it. I was born in snow country, and have spent my entire life absorbed in the rhythm of seasonal change, attuned to the micro-signals of weather and temperature. We all do that to some degree, don't we? A person from St. Lucia probably knows the moods of the sea the same way I know the different sounds of snow under my feet, or what the cold air tells me as it enters my nostrils.

But what I love most about winter, in addition to the exhilarating feeling of being outdoors on a very cold but bright day -- a feeling nothing in summer can match -- is the way it looks.

The beauty of snow, its purity, its varying texture, the way it reflects light, the way it changes a familiar landscape, the quality of shadows cast on it or light passing through it, the different sizes and tempos and patterns it takes as it falls through the air or is blown about by the wind: all these are by now deeply ingrained, and loved, in spite of any complaints I may make from time to time during a long cold winter. It would be unthinkable for me to miss an entire winter, to fly south like so many Canadian snowbirds who escape to Florida or Costa Rica when the first flurries arrive, and never return until there's green grass and daffodils.

By now, heading toward late February, I'm getting tired of it, for sure. And we too are planning a brief escape soon to someplace much warmer. A lot of the ice has melted and the snow in the city has receded; walking is pretty easy right now, and though we'll get some big wet snowfalls in March, the accumulation seems to have peaked and started to turn in the other direction. I hear there's a huge amount in Quebec City still, as there was out in the country, inspiring the picture at the top of this post. As I worked on that pastel, I thought about the blue of the shadows, how intense it is, and how deep it seems to go into the snow itself.

It's such a strange substance, snow. In the city, where it accumulates in volume, it creates an enormous problem and has to be trucked out and piled in great snow dumps, but that weighty, voluminous substance is entirely ephemeral: pick up a handful and merely breathe on it, and watch it disappear.

Manon

A Montreal Valentine

From February 14, 2007.

Are you ready? he asks at 5:25, and we throw open the coat-closet doors, pulling out heavy parkas and scarves and woolen hats. We've eaten an early dinner of fragrant chicken slowly simmered in a lemony, fresh cilantro sauce with Indian spices, and the apartment smells warm, beckoning us to stay. But his French class starts in half an hour, and there's only one more week until the final week of oral exams. I lace my boots, zip my parka, wrap my scarf around my face, pull on a fleece headband and a wool hat over that; the final addition is a pair of stretchy gloves and a pair of thick handknit mittens, and then, padded to twice our size, we tumble out into the night.

In spite of the extreme cold, people are riding bicycles in the snow; young men with bare heads leave the park carrying hockey sticks over their shoulders. In a basement apartment, goldfish swim obliviously in a large heated tank. On the streetlight posts someone has put up white signs saying "La Collecte" bearing big red teardrop-shapes, and arrows pointing forward. What is it? he asks, and I say, blood - blood collection. But where? We speculate: the church? the firehouse? the school? All the signs are the same, leading us on toward the beating crimson source. A thin girl wearing a short skirt and tights crosses Brebeuf, her bare hands struggling to light a cigarette. Another girl hurries across, her mittened hand pressed over her mouth and nose. I feel my own cheeks prickling; soon I'll barely be able to feel them at all.

At Le Poisson Rouge, white tablecloths and wine glasses shine against the dim interior; the staff, in silhouette, eat at a back table before the first patrons arrive. In the window of the medical supply store, the macabre skeleton manikin still wears her white doctor's coat and stethoscope, and the clerk, in a black t-shirt, frowns over the cash register as he always does at the end of the day. We walk faster to make it across Christophe-Colombe with the green light. There are more red teardrop signs. Look how much lighter the sky is each evening! he remarks, as rue Rachel stretches out straight in front of us, all the way to the mountain and the lighted cross at the peak. I squeeze his hand. We pass Cafe Rico, where the smell of roasting coffee beans permeates a full block. The teardrop signs finally point to the right: the blood collection is somewhere inside the same building as the Toyota dealership! An answer, but wrapped as opaquely as a heart in the chest of urban life.

We're very cold now, but walking fast. How are you? I ask and he nods. It feels good, he adds, and I silently agree. People come out of the fresh pasta store clutching brown paper bags and hurry away down the street; overgrown pink-blooming geraniums and aloe vera plants press their greenness against the long expanse of steamy windows. As we run across St. Hubert, we pass the little boy who's always accompanied home from school by his mother or father at this exact hour; the parent firmly grasps his hand while the boy talks and gesticulates with the other: an exuberant personality refusing to be contained inside the bundle of hooded down parka, hat and snowpants.

Past the bars with their round St. Ambroise and Belle Geule signs; the clothing store where metal grills are being drawn inside the windows by a clerk; the frites shop with its smell of grease and potatoes. How many times have we walked like this, matching our steps, hips close together, noticing all the same things? I only think about it when I'm walking with people whose eyes are so different, who cover up all the possible sights and sounds and smells with their own conversations. Now that thought is succeeded, in quick succession, by a pang of regret for the times we've walked together in anger, and then shifts rapidly back to our rhythm, then to the cruel mathematics of years, and the unbearable potential for loss. I recognize the cycle of thoughts, and deliberately notice our steps - right, left, right, left - and the pattern keeps me here, now - and then we're at the corner of St. Denis where a firetruck is crossing rue Rachel surrounded by cars and I say all right, I'm leaving you here and then hesitate and say, no I'll wait with you for the light to change. I stamp my feet rather than stand still and he turns his face to me and we find each other's mouths, tongues exploring a startling wet heat while our icy cheeks press together. There's snow on his dark lashes. Dark-clothed figures stream around us and when we pull apart the last second has passed and the amber light changes to green; our hands separate; we move perpendicularly, arrows pointing in different directions, lost in the swiftly moving crowd.

Diary: Winter Weekend in the Country

near St-Emelie-de-l’Énergie, Quebec

Late afternoon. The long dark blue shadows that stretched across the snow from the base of each tree, each little shrub, each delicate sapling when I came upstairs to take a nap have disappeared now, an hour later, into a sea of the same dark blue, and through the round window high in the wall to my left, I can see the sun's final flares between tall pines.

We arrived at noon, having delayed the trip from the city by a day because of a snowstorm. After shoveling a path to the door we brought in the luggage, the bags of food and wine, a carton of twelve bottles of Boréale, the cheese we’d bought at Fromagerie du Champ à la Meule on the way. We added my snowshoes to the pile already stacked in the garage, and changed from boots to slippers. G. quickly built a fire in the big stone fireplace, and put out a half-kilo of peanuts for the bluejays, to whom she whistles on arrival (they come in about two minutes, she confided to us, grinning,) while S. set about unpacking the groceries and poured each of us a beer, which we drank with crackers and pickled herring while the fire began to spread its warmth.

Lunch was a salad, with breads and oatcakes, followed by grapes and cheese: a soft, round triple-crème, a firm wax-covered wedge from the fromagerie, and a Sablot de Blanchette  - a sablot is  hoof or a clog – a small, square block of aged goat cheese. While we ate, the birds did too, coming and going from the trees to the feeders just outside the windows that G. keeps full all week: chickadees and blue jays, pine grosbeaks, and a beady-eyed hairy woodpecker.

I love it here; the silence and the presence of nature, the light which streams into the many-paned windows all day, making patterns on the white walls and the woodwork. The house is Shaker: meditative and simple. But conversation has been a strain for me. I’m tired and drained after many days of dealing with people, of listening too much, and I’m tired of feeling entrapped by winter. Maybe I need to be alone, or to get away to someplace warm. Or maybe I just need this.

After we’d cleaned up from lunch G. went into town to do a few errands, and the rest of us fell quickly asleep. When I woke I felt considerably better; how much of my mood is merely fatigue? The others are downstairs; I can hear J. and G. hauling wood into the porch outside, and I know no one will press me to come down before I’m ready. The light in this north-facing room, above the garage, will only last another half hour at best, and then perhaps I’ll sit and meditate, or turn on a lamp and read before dinner. There’s to be Quebec lamb, they said, and probably sherry and west coast smoked salmon, from S.’s mother, before that. For dessert, crab apple jelly with whipped cream. Perhaps I’ll ask if anyone wants to sit with me. Or be sociable instead, and have a cup of tea.

(I went down, and had the tea.)

8:20 am

I woke at 3, after four hours of sound sleep, and rose quietly and went downstairs. The fire had died down to embers. I put the tea kettle on the stove, added a dry log to the fire, and made myself a nest on the sofa in front, under a fleece throw and a Scottish wool plaid blanket. The house was absolutely still. Even without my glasses I could see that the night sky was perfectly clear, and studded with millions of stars. The log caught and blazed, and I shut the door to the firebox, and came back to the sofa with an oatcake and my hot mug of tea -- tilleul, linden – it seems appropriate somehow that I should be drinking tea made from a tree. I was happy sitting there in the darkness, the fire in front of me, the frigid silent woods encircling the house like a mystery, and stayed awake with my thoughts until five or so, when my eyelids finally closed and sleep came again.

My friends came downstairs, S. first, then G., shortly after I woke at 7. I had rejuvenated the fire already, and S. made coffee. Now G. is preparing scones which she’ll bake over a wood fire in the bread oven, next to the fireplace. On the porch, the little red squirrel is defending his own pile of peanuts from six bluejays, who sit in the nearest tree, their white breasts fluffed and shining in the sunlight. The temperature is minus twenty-eight C.

11:00 am

We’re about to go snowshoeing, after a very leisurely morning. The bright sun has warmed the outside air to -8 C. (about 18 degrees F.) and the animals and birds are busy gorging themselves. During our own breakfast, a glossy black squirrel appeared – look, it’s Balthazar! G. cried, saying they hadn’t seen him for two years. He was quite gorgeous, fit for a nobleman’s hat if there were still French trappers searching for prize pelts. After a brief moment of reticence, he sprang up onto the brick wall and craned his neck to get a good look at the strange inhabitats of the interior, refusing to jump down even when we peered back at him, close to the window. Finally he began burrowing for seeds at the base of the feeder, bringing his head up every now, his black nose covered with fine snow, and eventually bounded away into the far trees, leaving a definitive trail of leaps in the pristine snow.

The shadows shrink as we approach midday. Because I’ve seen both sunrise and sunset in the past 24 hours, I’ve marked out the arc of the sun’s appearance and setting along the ridge of pines; it’s still short, this east-west wedge, and the sun isn’t even halfway to the zenith as it makes its transit.

1:15 pm

Back from a long trek on showshoes, around the new lake that was dug in the fall,  and then breaking a trail through the deep snow into the woods, past the cat cemetery, up the hill and down again to the old sandpit, where we stopped to take some photographs and catch our breath, listening to the silence. Then we retraced our path. A strenuous hour and a quarter, under an absolutely clear sky, the snow and the paper birches brilliant white against the blue. Twice I stopped to scoop up a small handful of fresh snow and eat it, feeling the fine crystals melt on my tongue. How I’ve missed being out in the woods in winter!

Now we’ll have lunch, and then a few hours of quiet before leaving around 4:30. I think the city will feel like a shock.

3:40

A last round; watering the plants, checking the bathrooms and living room for stray clothes, cameras, books. G. has given me shoots of a large, spotted angel-wing begonia, and her lemon pelargonium, which is quickly taking over the upstairs bathroom. Fortunately it’s a warmer day so I’ll be able to get the cuttings back to Montreal without risk.

The sun disappeared during our late lunch, but the northern shrike made her appearance, just as G. had predicted, sitting high in the little aspen and frightening all the other creatures into immobility or disappearance. She's a beautful bird, the first of her species I've ever seen, with a lightly striped white breast, a soft grey head, a strong beak and a slender black mask like an elegant Carnival figure of dubious and possibly alarming intention; everyone steers clear. At length she flew off, the sun came out again, and with it the chickadees, who seem to be the mascots of this house at the edge of the wilderness, always cheerful and hopeful, waiting for the next appearance of the humans.

A Reader's War

 

Well worth your time: this essay on Obama as reader and militarist, by Teju Cole, published today at the New Yorker Online. (It's currently #2 in poplarity on the entire New Yorker site, behind the article about the pope, and #3 in "most e-mailed.")