The Kennebec Report

Montreal: Observations

Being A Set of Short Essays on Various Aspects of Walking Around the City

Church

I attended Sunday services at the Anglican parish of St. John the Evangelist, the "church with the red roof," as it bills itself on its website. I'm sure that in a city the size of Montreal, there is a wide range of Anglican expression, but St. John's was, to my mind, enormously pleasurable because it was so very, very Anglo-Catholic. The church itself proclaims that it professes the expression of the Anglican faith in terms of the Oxford Movement, and the interesting thing is that the Catholicism that's built into that is a Catholicism that post-Vatican II Catholics would hardly recognize: enormous parts of the service were chanted (including the Gospel), the hymns were enormously traditional as only the Canadian Hymnal can do, and there was plenty of "Anglican aerobics" -- kneel, stand, sit, kneel, stand, kneel, sit, stand, kneel. The level of preaching was high, the parishioners were delightful to talk with after the service, and the guest organist is heading off to be an organ scholar at St. Paul's, London, in the fall. His postlude (J.S. Bach) was excellent.

The church itself looked like what I think a church should look like. It was Gothic, dark, smoky from decades of incense, and mysterious. I am not a snob about church architecture -- many modern churches are marvelous buildings -- but this very traditional setting fit the ethos of the place perfectly. And I am always happy when I get to sing any words to the tune of "Rhosymedre," though the texts in the Canadian hymnal seem to me to be more formal than those in the American one. This just sets up a different relationship with God (not a worse or better one, just a different one), and it seemed very fitting to me that an English church in multicultural, French Montreal would choose to be English to the point of crumpets and sherry in the vicarage garden.

Men on the Street

Montreal is the North American capital of truly buff men in tight t-shirts. I never saw a gym when I was there; perhaps they are all hidden somewhere, but they must be full 24-7.

I know that part of this presence is due to the fact that I stayed at a bed and breakfast just off Rue Ste.-Catherine in "The Village," the gay part of town. (Oddly enough, gay here meant gay male only. There were few women on Ste.-Catherine.) I am always self-conscious in such a place in that I am not buff, or at least not like these guys; my t-shirts are loose for comfort; and wherever I go, I would be identifiable as a Mainer for whom practicality is the primary consideration when putting on one's dress for the day. It was chilly, so I wore layers. The Montreal men strutted their pecs in the drizzle, oblivious to the weather.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. Montreal is also the North American capital of street ogling, as it should be.

Ethnic Food

Ethnic food abounds in Montreal -- well, in any big city, really -- and one of the pleasures of traveling is to eat things that you don't normally get to eat. Carl and I had west African food on Saturday night and Tibetan food on Sunday night for dinner. West African good some readers may be familiar with; in my case, it was Senegalese fish in a spicy red pepper sauce, lentil soup with cardamon, and a mango salad. Tibetan food is probably less familiar, though if you stopped and thought about it, you could probably guess that it's vaguely Chinese, and in such a bracing climate it would have to be filling. And it was. Carl and I both ordered beef dumplings with dipping sauces, one of them made with tamarind, the other with mint. I also ordered a filling, fatty drink called "butter tea," which is exactly what it sounds like. Normally made with yak butter, and thus an acquired taste that our helpful waiter assured us we would not want to acquire, this was a more benign Western version, but a bit weird -- tea crossed with a stick of butter.

Vielle Montreal

Old Montreal is a delight, once you block the throngs of tourists and twee shops ("shoppes") selling every possible Canadian cliche on a t-shirt that you can imagine out of your mind's eye. Instead, you have to focus on the buildings that are very, very French in their severity. I think that the popular sense of Frenchness is one of luxuriousness and high style, but to my way of thinking the classical severity of carefully hewn granite blocks and regularly spaced windows overlooking the extremely broad Fleuve St.-Laurent is equally French. Think about it: architecture in old Montreal had to express the power that New France held over potentially an entire continent here in this cold toehold at the foot of a hill (Mont Royal, from which Montreal takes it name) on an icy river, all to the glory of God and King. Luxurious? High style? I dunno about that. Old Montreal buildings seem to perfectly express their age and its people.

Navigating Language(s)

I spent the weekend in Montreal, a city that I had not been to before. I have plenty to say about it -- in a nutshell, it's especially wonderful, which is saying something, because wonderfulness is typical of Canadian cities -- but the one thing that struck me as a newcomer was its essential bilingualism.

Of course, it's a very French city. But having spent an afternoon at the McCord Museum of Canadian History (Musee de l'Histoire Canadienne) which is part of McGill University, I learned that it's also a very, very English city, with a lot of Scottish and Irish immigration thrown in for good measure. Presently, it's an immigrant city as well, so it's also Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and lots of other nationalities and cultures as well. French and English are the predominany ethnicities, but they're certainly not the only ones.

Historically, it became very French with the rise of the Parti Quebecois, which is the political party that advocated the French-only language policy in the '70s that continues in many ways to this day. Conseqently, many, many of the English fled Montreal for the greener pastures of Toronto, and because the English held most of the serious economic power, the financial power left with them. This is the reason that Toronto is now the financial capital of Canada, and Montreal is the "second city" of the nation. Of course this is a pretty fast simplification; there were lots of other cultural and political issues at stake, too, but suffice it to say that Quebec has managed to politically maintain its identity as a separate culture within the Canadian federation. (It's also worth mentioning that I can't figure out how to produce all the French accents and diacritical marks in this platform, so I apologize to all who think I'm misspelling all the French words, because I am.)

I expect that after losing the crown as the Premiere Ville de la Nation to that upstart on Lake Ontario, many Quebecois decided that perhaps insisting on French to the level that they did was maybe not the best idea. I can say that I noticed a bilingualism -- lots of classes for the English to learn French and vice versa, often aimed at businesspeople, which makes sense. And if I'm not mistaken, Canadian high schoolers routinely learn both languages in school, so that the lines drawn between the two sort-of-enemy linguistic camps have been blurred. A detente seems to be in place.

It's not an uneasy detente. Not at all, in fact. I was impressed over and over, as a visiting American and aspiring French speaker, at how normal it seemed for Montrealers to move back and forth between French and English with ease, apparently not noticing the fact that they were constantly and effortlessly navigating two languages as a normal state of affairs.

My first encounter with this was in a coffeehouse late Friday afternoon. I had a headache from the drive up which I assumed was caffeine related (or, more precisely, from a lack of caffeine). I went to the counter, and having returned to the study of French in the past year after my undergraduate study more than twenty years ago, figured, why not? "Je voudrais un petit caffe latte, s'il vous plait," I said in my best French. The counter guy, probably about 20, returned with something that I just couldn't get. He didn't say it particularly fast; if anything, it was normal speech. I expect that he asked me something like whether or not I wanted the latte for here or to go, which is something I learned in my colleague Chelsea's French class that I'm taking, but I just couldn't remember it. I said, "Pardon? Repetez, s'il vous plait," and he returned with "Would you like it in paper or in china? Is it for here or to go?" in perfect English, then turned to one his coworkers and exchanged a few words in French, who responded and then took a new order from another customer in English, all while talking to yet another coworker in French.

I expect that my accent gave me away, and of course I think that salesclerks are sensitive to being able to meet their customers' needs -- especially in an tourist city like Montreal, where lots of tourists are Americans who can't speak French. (Or Spanish, either, the de facto second language of the USA.) But I was more impressed that nobody seemed to break a sweat about this. All of the counter help simply went back and forth between French and English flawlessly and effortlessly, as if bilingualism was the most normal thing in the world. In a city like Montreal, it seems to be.

This scenario was played out repeatedly in every restaurant I ate in, in every museum I went to, and everywhere on the street. Montrealers simply live in two linguistic worlds and seem to inhabit both of them most comfortably. I don't mean to suggest that there aren't tensions. I bet there are. I expect that choosing one language over another can have enormous political repercussions in various contexts, and I woudl guess that there are some real class issues about choosing one over the other as well. English was traditionally the language of the ruling class who held power, French the language of the ruled -- though I would bet that that has changed a great deal as the Parti Quebecois came to serious power.

But insisting on one language and some kind of language purity is never a good idea, to my mind, and I'd like to think that Montrealers have decided that as well. I don't blame the French Quebecois at all for insisting that they comprise a unique culture in North America. They do, after all, and being surrounded by an overwhelming majority of English-speaking Canadians (and Americans), the only way to preserve their identity is to insist that their language has status, whether it be primary status or equal status. But linguistic purity has its own price; you can legislate how language is supposed to be used, but you just can't control how people actually use it. I'd like to think that Montrealers have figured that out and decided that the best way to honor both the importance and necessity of both languages in Quebec is to simply use them both.

I belabor this point because it reminds me of a conversation I had with my mother about a year ago. We were talking about getting caught in the hell of endless of voice mail when calling an 800 phone number, and she said out of the blue, "I just can't stand it when I'm asked if I want to continue in Spanish. Why can't it all be in English? Why can't they just learn our language?"

Those of you who know me well can imagine how I might have chosen to respond to that, but I politely held my tongue and thought to myself how absurd such a statement was. After all, Mom wasn't in the least inconvenienced by a request to continue in Spanish; nobody was forcing her to press "2" and listen to anything but English. The whole exchange does point up how intensely people feel about language, and she intensely feltthat English only was the way to go. I feel, with equal intensity, that language is inextricably tied to identity, and nobody, but nobody, has the right to dictate identity to someone else.  

But our disagreement would be a moot point, at least for most Montrealers, who have found a better way. That way requires work. I'm sure that my mother has no intention of learning Spanish, and given that she lives in Michigan, she doesn't need to; she never deals with Spanish speakers, so what's the big deal? For those who do live where there's more than one language in use, though, people would have to make an effort to learn both. More accurately, the people in power would have to learn a second language; in my experience, the people not in power already are, whether they want to or not. I give enormous credit to Montrealers, who not only figured this out but also live the rich experience of working in two languages all the time. I can't remember which French writer said this, but the quote I recall goes something like "He who speaks another language lives another life." Exactly.

Keeping Up with the Joneses

None of my neighbors are actually named Jones, at least to my knowledge, but that doesn't mean that we're not in competition with each other. We are. We are at war, in fact, and the stakes are high. Who on Pearl Street is going to have the best-looking flowerboxes?

Let me back up. I moved into a neighborhood where the houses are fairly close to each other, and it's a well-kept neighborhood. People mow their lawns, keep their porches tidy, trim their shrubs, that sort of thing. When I moved in last November, I didn't need to worry much about any of this stuff because the snow came pretty soon after I moved in, and despite the fact that you need to shovel it, snow has one great attribute: it covers up everything. Come this last spring, though, I realized that I had to get a lawn mower immediately because my lawn was beginning to look like a meadow, and not in a good way.

The real issue, however--the one that made my neighbors give me slightly dirty looks--was the state of my flowerboxes. I had left the dead foliage from the previous owners in my two flowerboxes over the winter, thinking that I would deal with it in the spring. While all my neighbors were busy planting their flowerbeds and trimming their trees and such, I was grading the final papers from spring term, so I knew that I'd get a late start on making my street frontage look presentable. Finally, I got to a local garden center and got some petunias to plant in the boxes. Petunias are not my favorite flower--I don't quite see the point of flowers that have no real scent--but a friend assured me that they were drought-tolerant, and I figured I'd better play it safe; furthermore, they are colorful.

Well, they were beautiful for the first month, but now they are leggy and spindly looking, and there's not a lot I can do about it. My flowerboxes don't look bad, exactly, but they don't look great either, especially when compared with my next-door neightbor Katie's beautiful pots filled with all sorts of foliage on her back porch. I won't even go into my hanging basket filled with impatiens that looks pretty forlorn by the side of my front stoop. The fact that I live in a Cape Cod that faces east doesn't help. It is a classic Cape, which means there is no covered porch, so all these flowers get full sun for half the day, and the boxes dry out very quickly.

I suspected that when I became a homeowner I might become the kind of person who obsessed about how nice or bad his house looked, and I didn't want to. I vowed long ago that I would not be this kind of person, fancying myself to be so much superior to people like the men in the subdivision that I grew up in and who tied their manhood to the greenness of the grass in their lawns. And I understand that keeping up one's home is a courtesy to the rest of the neighborhood, helping preserve property values and keeping the entire street from looking shabby. Even so, I wanted to think myself above all this, living the life of the mind and not worrying about how green my grass was or how tidy my flowerbeds were. I would be superior to those kinds of suburban mortals who cared about such foolish things.

Well. When I found myself heading out early every morning to see what my house looked like from the street, I realized that I had in fact turned into my father. When I got some more petunias from Robert to root and fill in some of the blank spots in my boxes, I realized that I had turned a corner. (Robert's lawn and beds are absolutely beautiful, damn him.) When I started looking for a big crock to put on my porch and fill with geraniums for next year, I realized that I had somehow become a suburban dad. All I need now is a barbecue and an apron that says "Boy Meets Grill."

Much of the planning of my flowerbeds and boxes has been enjoyable, actually. I have decided that I should not need to spend a lot of money on flowers--indeed, I don't need to spend any money, given that my friends are most generous about splitting up their perennials. I am planting perennials everywhere so that I don't have to replant each year (flowerboxes excepted). The long-term visioning of what my yard will look like has been a great deal of fun; this first year has been devoted to finding out what the previous owners actually had, so the beds have looked a bit shabby all year. They were older and couldn't really manage their yard any more, so they let it go, and it's fallen to me to bring it back to respectability.

I am surprised at how much I am obsessing about how things look, though. I mean, we are talking about flowerboxes, not health care reform. And yet it matters. It tells the people walking down Pearl Street that I care, it does make the house look attractive, and it keeps my neighbors from sneering at me behind my back. When these things matter to you, there is no turning back: you are now a Homeowner, and you are staring at the concerns that will overtake you every spring for the rest of your life.

So, if anybody has suggestions for drought-tolerant, good-looking, colorful flowers for flowerboxes that get lots of direct sun . . .

Zen and the Art of Wallpaper Removal

One of the projects -- the many projects -- that owning a house has foisted upon me is getting rid of the wallpaper that all of the previous owners put up over the decades. My house is a 1940 Cape Cod, and though I don't know how many previous owners it had, they all seemed to be partial to wallpaper. That's not surprising; as my mother (herself a wallpaper fan) would say, "Wallpaper covers a multitude of sins."

Maybe so, though I think "sin" is strong word in this context. My house has imperfections in its plaster, which is to be expected. After all, it's a 70-year-old house, so why shouldn't it look its age? This is hardly a sin; it's just Life. My preference is for paint, which has three major benefits over wallpaper: 1) it's far cheaper, 2) it's far, far easier to put up, and 3) it's far, far easier to put up. Putting up wallpaper is so much of a job that it counts twice. I know people who would disagree with me on this point. I also know people who nearly got a divorce when they wallpapered their bathroom.

The owners from whom I bought the house ran to country decor, which I usually refer to as "Victorian floral cutesy sweetsy country darling precious," and they managed to capture all of that in their home design. THis was especially true of their wallpaper choices, which included lots of borders over wallpaper for a busy-ness that in some rooms made my eyes hurt. I expect that that the borders came from the Thomas Kinkade ("Painter of Kitsch') Collection and had names like "Victorian Violets Villa" or "Brambleberry Bracken."

Friends came over to start ripping the paper off the walls of my dining room and to drink beer. (One of the pleasures of tearing off wallpaper is that you can slightly buzzed when you do it because it doesn't really matter how it comes off, just as long as it does.)  It took us a while to get the hang of taking off the paper, figuring out what the most efficient way to do it was. Robert brought a steamer, which is a cumbersome appliance that I'm unsure is worth owning. It's not as if it's good for any other purpose, though I would think that if you needed a deep cleansing facial, this baby just might be the ticket. I found on my own that the easiest way to pull off everything that would pull off, scrape off what I could after that, wet the wall a lot to the point of soaking, and then get the rest of it down to the plaster. Most of my paper has come off this low-tech way. I understand that my paper may be easier than most others, because this sounds too easy. In some cases, it's been very, very easy; the vinyl wallpaper in the kitchen ("Plumberry Baskets, Fruit Selection of Hope") pulled off in long sheets and the plaster was directly underneath. On the other hand, the dining room had five separate layers of wallpaper, and it took us the better part of the afternoon just to get to the last layer.

There is great pleasure when you work with other people on a project like this. Either saying "Many hands make light work" or "Misery loves company" appies equally well in this case. Even so, I've enjoyed taking off the wallpaper on my own in most of the rest of the house. Well, I ought to qualify that a bit. "Enjoy" is maybe too strong a word, but "tolerate" isn't entirely fair, either. I wouldn't say that stripping wallpaper is fun. I would say that once you get the hang of it, it's modestly engrossing work that thankfully doesn't demand a lot of you; you just do it, and it gets done. I've come to see it sort of as a Zen practice, though it won't be repeated as a Zen practice would. (Believe me, once it's off, wallpaper will never go up again.) It is pretty brainless, though to do it well, you have to pay some attention to what you're doing: scraping hard enough to get off stubborn bits of paper without breaking the plaster, soaking the wall enough to really get the paper off without drenching your feet in the process, getting a feel for how attached the initial layer of paper is and seeing if you can it all off in one fell swoop. It feels very Zen to me, too, in that though I've made considerable progress, I can't say that I ever feel as if I'm making any when I'm actually stripping. It goes relatively slow so that progress is incremental. I've been at this since the middle of June and the house is now maybe three quarters of the way finished. I do a little bit at a time, and over the course of the weeks, a lot has gotten done. When I finish a session of stripping, though, it's like I've done very little -- just a section of a wall, or the work around a pair of window, and I wonder where the afternoon went.

I would guess that a lot of home renovation is like this because a house is never a finished product; it's perpetually in a state of becoming. Once this project is done, then the painting will start, and I expect that I will do that in small increments as well. This is fine with me. It's a good reminder that we're all perpetually in a state of becoming, and it helps focus one's eye, as any good Zen practice should, on a big picture: these small, incremental tasks collectively add up to big changes. And then there is another project that is composed of small, incremental tasks. And then another. And another. With a home, you are never done. Instead, you are doing.