the cassandra pages

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.

Grief Unforeseen

The narrow road turned to dirt and began climbing up along the brook, just flowing now in the spring thaw, into the Worcester Mountains. We hadn't been here for several years, and took a wrong turn before backtracking and heading up Mick's road, through the stand of tall bare-trunked pines still standing in deep snow, fast through the deep mud-season ruts where ice and earth fought for our lurching tires, up onto the flat by the garden and the barn where Beau and Belle, the pair of handsome Percherons, waited for their dinner. Cascading down from a spring near the woods, a smaller stream sang like glass bells as we walked in the warm sun up to the house, the last of two on this road.

We were late; all the other guests at the baby shower had eaten homemade gingerbread and cheesecake and ham and soft white rolls already and were seated in the living room around the black woodstove, watching the couple open presents. It had been eight or nine years since we'd last seen the mother-to-be, and almost thirty since I'd met her for the first time, being breast-fed at the kitchen table by her own mother, whose house this was now. Mother, two daughters, and a son all rose from their seats to put their arms around us, and the afternoon light poured onto the pasture outside the window and onto the wooden floor of the hand-built house, the back of the rocking chair, the braided rug, the quilt of colored squares on the kitchen wall. The guests, mostly unknown to me, were silhouettes against the bright white light, nearly strong enough to erase the memories of hardship and tragedy that filled my eyes over and over as I watched each card being carefully read, acknowledged, set on a table; the eyes cast around the room to search out and thank the generous giver; the rustlings of tissue paper as each gift was opened and appreciated. Afterward the other guests drifted away; we stood and talked in the kitchen while the mother kneaded the communion bread for the village church on a yellow-checked oilcloth, then sat with the children on the couch as they told us the latest stories of their lives: some happy, some a continuation of difficulties that began long ago.

We left while it was still light and drove south to our home. The snow was finally gone from the garden, and in the dusk I noticed the white heads of snowdrops pushing through the dry leaves. We unpacked, drank a glass of wine, ate a simple supper, slept.

In the night I woke, disturbed by dreams. There were stars, blurry to my nearsighted eyes, in a clear dark sky. I climbed back into bed, slept again, and in the morning woke utterly lost, heartbroken by the terrible relentless beauty of the spring: the ability of the grass to resurrect itself, the mating-calls of the cardinals, the sleek grey breasts of the pair of juncos hopping unscathed between the thorny red canes at the base of the wild roses. I rushed down the stairs, pulled a coat off the rack, flung myself into the garden and stood over the patch of snowdrops -- dug from my grandmother's garden where I had picked them as first bouquet of the year with my mother since I was old enough to walk -- and wept and wept as if over a grave.

So grief, as she will, had her way with me, like a rag flung up into the trees by the gusts of a sudden storm to be tossed and rent and then left limp and bleached and drying in the clean, calm sun of the morning. And then I floated down again, slow and spent, to where my legs and voice were waiting.

Vibrations of the Third Kind

Well, I spent a couple of hours yesterday afternoon at the dentist - that makes seven hours in the past two weeks. The first marathon session involved an extraction and the prep work for a permanent bridge, which was installed yesterday, with the surprise inclusion of a root canal treatment. I didn't feel it, so numb was I at that point; all I felt was hammering and the cracking of the temporary bridge as it was removed, and the vibration from the drill. As I've said before here, I really like my dentist so it makes a very unpleasant thing tolerable. He also has a television screen set into the ceiling, so I watched an exciting tennis match and that helped take my mind off what was happening. I have another appointment in a couple more weeks.

Today I can really chew on the left side of my mouth for the first time in ages, and am feeling guardedly optimistic. My teeth are not the best part of my body.

We went out last night for soft Asian food - steamed dumplings and soup - and then woke this morning to incredibly loud drilling that sounded like it was right above our bed: someone in one of the other apartments had a leak in their plumbing and the sound of the repairs was vibrating all the pipes and reverberating throughout the entire building, like a bad joke.

But after getting up, and having a brand new day stretching before me with no appointment to anticipate, I felt like thinking about food again. We went for a shopping run to Adonis, the wonderful Arab supermarket. It was lunchtime when we finished shopping so we stopped at a small Middle Eastern bakery on one of the back streets near Marché Centrale and ordered two of their delicious sandwiches, made somewhat like soft pizza - they're rounds of soft flatbread spread with oil and zaatar, with some cheese, and then baked lightly so they're still pliable enough to roll. You then get to ask for whatever toppings you want: onions, tomatoes, mint, pickled turnips, hot long green peppers, olives - and the whole thing gets rolled up, warmed a little, and wrapped in paper. It's to die for. You can also start with a more pizza-like set of toppings in addition to or instead of the zaatar; I had some sort of spicy chicken, with the same lineup of extras.

Tonight I'm about to read some more in my book of the moment - This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin: the neuroscience of musical processing and perception presented in a way that lay people like me can understand. I'll write more about it when I've finished, but it's one of the more fascinating things I've read lately, and as far vibrations go, I will definitely take musical soundwaves vibrating the frequency-selective hair cells of my inner ear over any of these other less pleasant varieties. Right now I'm enjoying a performance of Handel's Israel in Egypt on the radio, recorded Monday night at Eglise St. Jean-Baptiste - it's vaguely Messiah-like but seems to have more choruses - and it's quite happy.

So...what's worth celebrating in your life? And while we're at it, what's the best thing you've eaten this past week?

Rachmaninoff and Brioches de Carème

We didn't make it to church this morning. We glanced, one-eyed, at the clock at 7:30; rolled over and went back to sleep; did it again at 8:45. At 9:30 it was too late. A few minutes later I got up, put on my robe and went out to the kitchen to put the teakettle on and turn up the heat. When I went back to the bedroom a voice from under the duvet asked if it was blue outside. I cracked open the blinds: "Bright. Some new snow."

J. usually gets up first to make his coffee, and brings me a cup of tea with milk in bed; I stay there and meditate for a few minutes, trying to face the day in what are, to me, its worst moments. Last night I'd kept him awake, tossing and turning from pain in my jaw - I've been having a lot of dental work and a temporary bridge has screwed up my bite - finally I got up and took a tylenol and was able to go back to sleep.

I went into the living room and turned on the radio: it was the Rachmaninoff Vespers. Perfect. Back in the kitchen I poured the water over the coffee grounds in the French press, made myself some green tea for a change, put two brioches du carème - lit, Lent brioches, or hot cross buns - into the toaster oven, prepared a basket-tray with a red plate for the buns, a small bowl of clementines and strawberries. The deep bass voices filled the apartment with Russian that sounded like smell of the coffee. I picked up the tray and walked carefully back into the bedroom: Good morning, I said. He rolled over with only a small groan, and smiled.

Catching up...sort of

The night I took that picture - Saturday, I think - was the last day of winter's tight grasp on this city. It's melting! The temperature has been above freezing for several days in a row, the clothes are peeling off, and the light seems suddenly as exuberant as the dogs chasing around the park.

I haven't been out too much because I've been swamped with work, but I've been enjoying it every chance I've had. Tonight J. has taken off - on his bike! - to an end-of-French-class party with his classmates, nearly all of whom are about half his age, and from all over the world. Last night he passed his final exams for Niveau 2 (Level 2) and deserves every moment of celebration - that represented a huge amount of hard work for the past two months. Bon travail et félicitations, mon cher ami! As for me, I hope to be back writing here more regularly soon.

How's everyone doing out there? Is spring coming yet? I know the Californians and Vancouverites are already enjoying some spring-like weather, and a friend in England mentioned that her plum tree was starting to blossom. We are still a long ways from that here, but at last we can feel it coming. Good for me, not so great for these guys, who were enjoying the ice this weekend:

A Valentine

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.

Examining the Evidence

In addition to the attic, with its boxes of old letters, I've been cleaning out my studio spaces. Thirty years of accumulated evidence, some sedimentary, are hard to ignore. There is a lot of information here about who I am, and even more about who I once was.

In the earlier parts of those years - for the majority of my life, in fact - I did a lot of creative things, moving fairly seamlessly from one to another. I was a calligrapher; I painted and drew; I sewed and knitted; gardened; did creative bookbinding; played the piano. And I loved doing all of those things. I never had any illusions about being anything other than an amateur musician, but I was a pretty good painter and probably worked harder at that than anything else. But painting was too solitary for me to do exclusively, and besides, we were building a business and working hard, and I didn't want to do graphic design all day long and then go and do visual arts; it felt better to play the piano or knit something, or read. And then I got to be forty or so, and had a crisis of meaning and direction - or rather, at 40 the crisis that had been building since I was 35 came to a head - and I decided to stop painting and put my energy into writing with a focus that had before been lacking in any of these other areas. For the most part, I haven't looked back, and the focus and determination have been worth it; I also think I was right in what I chose.

But as I've been sifting through those previous years, I've found myself stubbornly reluctant to part with the boxes of quilt fabric, the art supplies, and especially my painting equipment. I've kept my hand in, over the years, a little bit, and the painting studio became my meditation place as well so I have very deep associations with it. Today as I stacked stretcher-strips and looked through sketch books and sorted cans of gesso and bottles of linseed oil, and - curious - put unfinished paintings up on the easel for another look, I felt an almost overwhelming urge to begin again. The photography satisfies some of the same desires, but it is not tactile in the same way as painting,  nor is it as unpredictable. Most of all, it is not nearly as difficult. Painting, like writing, is all-absorbing, but in a very different way, and I've both loved it and hated it for that at times. Now I am tired, in a different way, of being cerebral and verbal all the time. I've used so many words.

We will undoubtedly set up a new studio somwhere else, and I have no intention of relinquishing these tubes and brushes and linens to my past alone. I do know that the person who plunged in again would be different from the one who left it aside a long time ago; it could be pretty interesting to meet her.

Observances

Yesterday I woke, and was 54 years old. And it was the first birthday of my life when I was not greeted by the voice that gave me birth.

It was a hard day.

I thought grief was nearly done with me, but the events of the previous weekend brought us closer again, grief and I. Yesterday it caught me up, like a white cloth in a storm; soaked and shook and wrung me and then cast me up on a raw place, a dusty porch where, gradually, I dried and warmed in the sun. And then the day grew better, when I could see it again.

This is just how it is, and it's better to go limp and allow yourself to be tossed around; it hurts less than fighting against a force that's stronger than your rational mind or conscious will.

--

On Saturday I had gotten up early, before anyone else, and left my father's house and walked down the railroad tracks and out through the field, still gravelly with forty-year-old railroad cinders that now sprout hemlocks and spindly pin cherries and blue-flowered viper's blugloss. I remembered walking there through the snow with my mother on one of our last excursions together, getting some Christmas greens last year. Canada geese honked uneasily from the pond on the other side of the tracks, and as I entered the woods and climbed up the ridge I startled a partridge. On the top of the ridge, which is narrow, steep, and dark, were the large trees I remembered from decades ago. A whir of large wings stirred the canopy. I stood there for a while, watching, listening, and then I walked east along the ridge and the old fenceline, picking my footfalls carefully. I came to a particular tree that had a split just below waist-height, and saw that it had a cavity between the divided trunks. Without hesitating, I knelt down on the moss and started picking through the stones that lay there. I chose six or seven and stacked them in the tree's cavity: a small, balanced cairn.

This, too, was not a rationally considered act.

As I came back to myself yesterday, I thought about it though, and was glad I'd acted, and not thought too much. I've done things like that all my life. Not often. But when I've needed to, something - some urge - has beckoned, and most of the time, I've gotten out of the way and listened and acted, in private, accompanied not by human eyes but by a catbird hopping in the branches and the breathing of the trees.

--

My birthday ended happily. I talked to my father, who had had a good day and had also sent me a special gift, and my husband cooked dinner for me and our dear friends and neighbors, who sang me "the birthday song" in English and then in Icelandic at the urging of their three-year-old daughter. We drank champagne, and ate carrot cake; the kerosene lamp glowed.

Next year they'll be back in Iceland, and who knows where we'll be. Life moves on, like the wind, and we can choose to observe the moments: the circle of the table, of the branches, of the hands, of the stones.

 

Quiet Happiness

Today I went over to the local big bookstore, in search of Orhan Pamuk's "Istanbul", but instead I found myself with his novel "Snow" - which I've also wanted to read - in my hand. I was ready to leave, and then I turned back to the in-store computer which had helped me locate "Istanbul" (shelved in the Middle East History section.)

"Maybe I'll just look my book up and see if by any chance it's come in," I thought to myself. I typed and clicked, and to my surprise, it said, "In store. Church History and Theology." Somewhat mechanically, I followed the aisles down to the religion section, and started scanning for Church History. There was the section, yes, alphabetical by author, OK, up on the wall to the left, there are the "A's" -- and there it was. My heart did a little flip, and then I stood there and stared, very quietly, without moving.

It was a happy moment when my publisher handed me the first copy of my book, in Columbus, Ohio, this spring at General Convention. But it wasn't the thrilled-to-the tips of-my-toes sort of feeling I've heard other authors talk about, nor did I expect it to be. J. and I had designed the cover, and I had already looked at a lot of page proofs, so the visual appearance was no surprise - plus, I've spent my professional life designing things for print, and holding the final copies isn't a new experience for me - in fact it's often accompanied by a huge sigh of relief that the whole production process is finally sucessfully over. I was also in the throes of recent grief. When the box of books arrived on my doorstep a few weeks ago, that was a little anticlimatic, because I had already seen them in Columbus and then again in Montreal. I didn't really have any feeling of unfulfilled anticipation and excitement today...but I guess I was meant to feel something extra-special sometime, and this was when it happened.

Maybe it was because I was all alone, browsing in a bookstore - that most ordinary and familiar place, but one that still retains a kind of magic for me. There is always some sense of quest, or of finding something I don't expect at all; of appreciation for the works on the shelves; and of being in a place where, from a young age, I've always cherished a small hope of finding a work of my own on the shelf too. There, today, it was.

I stood, and looked, and thought. And then I reached up and took the book - one of two copies - off the shelf, and placed it facing out. I stepped back, and looked for the first time at the other books keeping it company, to the right. Only two other authors in all the rest of that short shelf: St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Augustine. I had to smile at that. Then I just looked a little bit longer, wrapping up the memory of something that has never happened before in my life, and will never happen to me in the same way again. And then I walked up to the counter and paid for "Snow."

Thunder and Rain

...are what we woke to this morning. Today I am heading to my father's house, and J. is going back to Canada. I will be taking care of my mother's personal things and helping my father with some tasks yet to be done, like a gravestone. It won't be easy but I think when these things are finished there will be a greater sense of forward motion, which is what she would want for us. Send me good vibes and calm thoughts, please. I'll be driving to New York today with my wonderful niece M., who is visiting from L.A., and that will be a pleasure. She went to college in upstate New York and is looking forward to seeing that landscape again. Me too.