New to me…on Blvd St-Denis, south of Laurier. It seems that they make them to order for you; your choice of different styles of soles (flats, wedges), colors, with ankle ribbon ties or without. I'll be back there in the spring — somehow it's not quite espadrille weather yet! I also noted the nice selection of Portuguese baking dishes below the shoe counter.
Grey fur frames each face –
How many wolves gave their lives
to warm Montreal?
Finally, snow.
We were awake in the early morning, talking as we lay entwined, our heads on the pillows in the half-light, and then fell back to sleep, waking again at nearly nine. J. got up and drew aside the curtain, and came back to bed with his announcement: It's snowing hard.
How much do we have?
Maybe six inches already.
Really! They said snow flurries.
Well, this is a snowstorm.
We were ready, had been ready. Last week J. had gotten the snow tires put on the car, and the Tempo — a sturdy winter tent erected over driveways and garage entrances that was a final and ubiquitous harbinger of Montreal winters — had greeted us one day when we returned home on our bikes. And last night had smelled like snow.
A few days before, a Saturday, I had walked to the studio in the early afternoon. It was the first really cold day, so odd for that late in November; like everyone, I had reveled in the extended autumn, knowing that each day was one more subtracted form the long account of winter. But it had gone on too long and become disturbing; I imagined hungry polar bears further north, waiting vainly for the ice to freeze so they could cross it to hunt, and the slow drip of water from glaciers that should by now be locked solid.
My fingers, inside a well-worn pair of red suede gloves, were chilled after just two blocks. I thrust them into my jacket pockets and kept walking, looking for sun. But there was none on the sidewalks of the long narrow northern blocks, even this close to midday; the sun's angle was so low that the shadows had already climbed halfway up the west-facing buildings.
I passed Le Boucanier, the shop of a man recently moved here from the Gaspesie who made artisan smoked fish; the city had already set up a Christmas tree in a large wooden tub outside his shop and others further down the street, awaiting strings of lights. Through the window I saw a new display of handmade breads, stacked in crossways layers like split, drying wood that showed charred patches from a wood-fired oven, and beyond the bread, the small filets of smoked fish lying in a refrigerated case: white, beige, terracotta, rose.
There was, however, plenty of sunlight on Mont-Royal. At the corner of Papineau music blared from an idling car at the intersection, drowning out the first strains of Christmas music piped onto the street by the merchants' association. The Beach Boys. The light changed and I crossed, the car passing me, its window rolled down in spite of the cold.
I walked quickly, my pace slowing once, in front of the florist's window to look at a calamondin in a lovely yellow-glazed pot, hung with perfect orange ornaments, and then again as I turned north on rue Cabot, wondering if the pretty tabby kitten I'd spotted last week would be in the window of a former shop now converted to an apartment. Probably not, I thought, there's no sun — but it was there, just the same, and yawned and stretched, looking at me with wide eyes when I touched the glass with a red finger. I didn't mind November, though many people seemed to hate it. I liked its suspended quality, the softness of waiting, the re-acquaintance with the bones of the trees.
I was all the way to Laurier before I realized I had been walking at the same pace as the song, ironic and unnoticed, playing over and over in my head: "Do you love me, do you Surfer Girl? Surfer girl, surfer girl…"
–
This morning, we drove to work in a world that had become white overnight. We were behind a huge truck without snowtires, its wheels sliding from side to side, when I heard the song in my head again. The strange idea of lying nearly naked on a beach in California, something I'd never done in my life. On the sidewalk, a woman pulled a blue plastic sled. The light changed, the truck, trying to move forward, slid. Surfer girl.
We pulled into the parking lot and got out. My feet felt the familiar crunch of snow and at this very first touch and sound I knew its wetness, its heaviness, its consistency. I ran my gloved hand along the side of the next car, gathering snow between my palms and squeezing it into a rough, crumbly ball. Then I took a bite and felt the crystals melt rapidly on my tongue; not water: nothing else tastes like snow.
On Sunday afternoon, our choir sang here. This is the Oratoire St-Joseph, a huge Roman Catholic shrine and basilica on the side of our local mountain, Mont Royal, overlooking the north-western side of the city.
This was the view in the early afternoon, before our rehearsal began. Starting at the parking lot far below this terrace at the top of the building are sets of steps, which pilgrims climb up on their knees. I walked up, but once inside the building I used the escalator — the most devout go all the way aux genoux. Below the main sanctuary is another chapel, and a shrine room filled with high banks of flickering votive candles, and the crutches of those who believed themselves to be healed by Brother André, founder of this shrine to St. Joseph. Brother André, credited with two "official" miracles but believed by millions to have healed many more, was made Saint André by the pope last year, and the Oratory — whose grandeur I doubt that simple man could have ever imagined — is a site of pilgrimage for people from all over the world and one of the most-visited sites in Montreal.
The occasion was a service celebrating 40 years of dialogue between Roman Catholics and Anglicans, and it was mainly about and for the clergy who have been involved with this mutual listening project over the years. We had been asked by the Bishop of Montreal to represent the Anglicans, and we sang both separately and together with Les Petits Chanteurs, the boys' choir resident at the Oratory.
Along with the clergy, we robed in a huge sacristy to the side of the main altar. This is part of our group, getting ready off in one corner of the room.
There were bishops. Lots of bishops.
I quite like the design of the Oratory; some don't. It's very modern, and feels Germanic, which is perhaps odd for Montreal where most of the Catholic churches are ornate, French, and rather baroque. This building has a number of large expressionist wood carvings, extremely beautiful ironwork (the central grille in the photo below, for instance, and you can see some candle stands at the bottom far left), many glittering mosaics (on either side of the grille) and a gigantic organ.
Here's the boys' choir rehearsing; we were seated beyond them on those semicircular benches, behind the crucifix in front of the grille. That rod and semi-circle at the left are a suspension system holding a number of tiny microphones.
They sang Bruckner's "Locus iste," a great piece; they sang the notes well, but (it seemed to me) without much conviction or feeling. We sang a Magnificat and a big Victorian number for double choir, "Hail Gladdening Light," by Charles Wood. In the Oratory's acoutsic, it was quite thrilling to hear our voices, and their overtones, reverberating for many seconds after we had finished the last chord.
And here's the view when I left after the service, around 6:00 pm. I walked down, and by the time I reached my car my knees were protesting a lot! Down a mountain is always worse, for me, than up — somehow I don't think Saint Andre will be fixing my old ski injuries anytime soon. But one of the great pleasures of singing in this choir is the occasional chance to perfom in different venues and circumstances; this was fun.
Actually, this couple, with the double-sided green character, inspires me to suggest a caption contest. Any ideas?
Early November. We’ve had a late fall, and the weather remains warm. The trees whose branches touch to form a golden tunnel each year over Ave. de Lorimier have dropped their leaves, but in the interior of Parc Lafontaine the autumn colors are still at their peak. Last Thursday evening I left my house at 5 pm and walked through the park, where the late afternoon light filtered through the yellow and red leaves as if through a silky, patterned umbrella. How can I describe the tenderness of this northern autumn light, as the day gently gives way to evening? Like a melancholy song heard from afar, it is blue, diffuse, and soft, but multiplies the intensity of all colors before gradually dying away.
In Iceland this light began much earlier in the afternoon. One day, when J. and I had taken off on bikes, we noticed the sun beginning to go down around 3 pm, and decided we should start thinking about heading back home. But we had judged the signs wrongly. There, so much closer to the Arctic Circle, sunset takes forever. We rode home, and several hours later, still in daylight, Elsa and Hörður suggested a walk to the top of the hill in back of their house, where we stood together, looking over Reykjavik toward the ocean. Even at seven pm the kind of low, glancing light we recognize here as day’s final signal still illuminated our faces, and turned the eroded slopes of Mt. Esja, in the distance, into folds of gold and blue.
Last night it was raining lightly, and the wet pavement reflected the sky and branches in the spaces between its pasted mosaic of leaves. I walked down the park’s long formal <em>allée</em> of trees toward the fountain, which was turned off for the winter a week or two ago, and then went left along the path above the first of the park’s two serpentine lakes, both drained now to reveal pebbled basins coated with green algae.
Just a few weeks ago, the park would have been full of people, on benches and blankets, catching the last warmth of summer, and the sounds of guitars and African drums would have mingled with children’s voices shrieking with pleasure as they threw bread to obligingly-eager flocks of ducks and gulls. Today, the paths were nearly empty, and the birds gone. I passed a handsome man with tousled grey hair and a brown leather jacket, riding home on his bicycle, and, at the northern end of the drained lake, a much younger man walked a small dog clad in a dog-coat so brilliantly yellow it mocked the trees.
I passed in front of the park’s new cafe-resto, shut tight, its oversize terracotta planters empty now, and stepped onto the path above the lower lake. Here, at last, were the ducks and gulls, splashing in the remaining pool of shallow water. A larger shape stood poised at the top of this pool, and, squinting now in the low light, I saw that it was a great blue heron, an opportunist no doubt drawn here by easy fishing for trapped minnows, or maybe goldfish. One night, returning home in the opposite direction, I’d seen a school of them in the light cast by a streetlamp, shimmering beneath the dark surface like shreds of copper foil. Now the heron presided over his domain: the lord of the manor calmly watching the squabbling peasants, his slate-blue coat turned up at the collar against a north wind.
At the end of the park, I waited for the stoplight and then crossed, keeping out of the way of the cyclists coming off the bike path on rue Cherrier. A young woman waited there for her bus. Tall and slender, with her black hair piled in an elegant knot atop her head, she wore a long black trenchcoat with a cinched waist, and black high-heeled boots. She held an oversized umbrella, the kind golfers use, with an outer border of black and an inner circle of alternating trapezoids of black, and a brown that matched the color of the face that it framed. Calmly, she waited, every now and then raising a cigarette that trailed across this background of black, like a lecturer’s piece of chalk.
I had been on my way to the Sherbrooke metro station to catch a train for a 6 pm choir rehearsal at the cathedral. But, after checking my watch, I walked on, mesmerized by the falling light, all the way to the center of the city.
Today, it has arrived, for sure. The breeze fluttering the white bedroom curtains was cool, almost cold, and for the first time in months I put on my fleece jacket for the ride up to the studio.
Last night I walked home around 6 pm. It was still warm, and raining lightly, but the air and the light had changed; unmistakable. I went down rue Cartier past the community vegetable garden, where I startled a fat black cat, and caught him in my lens, and then across Marie-Anne and down de Bordeaux. On the walls of Ecole Jeanne-Mance ivy was growing in ovoid patterns like poplars, and I ended up walking around the empty building, where only a few lights shone in upper windows — a custodian working late in a hallway, perhaps — taking photographs. The dated concrete structure and grassy, man-made berms planted with ornamental grasses reminded me of the Olympic stadium, a few kilometers to the east: a combination of abandonment and extensiveness that carried within its neglect and decay the sound of crowds, of young voices, and the way the hectares of poured concrete were slowly being cracked by the roots and climbing fingers of living things.
This school had once been the parochial school for Eglise Immaculée-Conception, which stands in front of it facing Papineau Boulevard, one side now shrouded in green netting and criss-crossed with scaffoding for the construction of a new roof. I waited for the light and crossed into the park, where I entered the trees.
(the sign in the second picture in the series above reads "Entrée des élèves: Students' entrance")
Today, while working on a large design job with a lot of tedious details, I decided to listen to some music, and put on my headphones. For several seemingly unrelated reasons, Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde has come into my consciousness in the past few days. I don't own a recording, and spent a bit of time reading recommendations. Eventually I listened to an old one, on YouTube: Leonard Bernstein conducting the Israel Symphony Orchestra, with the magnificent Christa Ludwig, contralto, and René Kollo, tenor. My first Mahler recording was the 1st symphony, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. That was when I was young myself, full of the emotion and excitement I heard in Mahler's music. Now — approaching autumn — Mahler touches me for different reasons. After I listened to all of the movements — Ludwig's haunting "Ewig…ewig…" at the end of "Der Abschied/The Farewell" — I read the original Chinese poems from which Mahler adapted his text, and then the text itself. The poet waits for his friend to arrive, the friend to whom he wants to bid a last farewell, but the friend is late…We leave the poet holding his lute, still alone, but transfixed by the beauty of the world, "the eternal, love-intoxicated world."
The Farewell
The sun departs behind the mountains.
In all the valleys, evening descends
with its cooling shadows.
O look! Like a silver boat,
the moon floats on the blue sky-lake above.
I feel the fine wind wafting
behind the dark spruce.
The brook sings loudly through the darkness.
The flowers stand out palely in the twilight.
The earth breathes, full of peace and sleep,
and all yearning wishes to dream now.
Weary men go home,
to learn in sleep
forgotten happiness and youth.
The birds crouch silently in their branches.
The world is asleep!
It blows coolly in the shadows of my spruce.
I stand here and wait for my friend;
I wait to bid him a last farewell.
I yearn, my friend, at your side
to enjoy the beauty of this evening.
Where do you tarry? You leave me alone for so long!
I wander up and down with my lute,
on paths swelling with soft grass.
O beauty! O eternal love - eternal, love-intoxicated world!Der Abschied
Die Sonne scheidet hinter dem Gebirge.
In alle Täler steigt der Abend nieder
Mit seinen Schatten, die voll Kühlung sind.
O sieh! Wie eine Silberbarke schwebt
Der Mond am blauen Himmelssee herauf.
Ich spüre eines feinen Windes Wehn
Hinter den dunklen Fichten!Der Bach singt voller Wohllaut durch das Dunkel.
Die Blumen blassen im Dämmerschein.
Die Erde atmet voll von Ruh und Schlaf,
Alle Sehnsucht will nun träumen.
Die müden Menschen gehn heimwärts,
Um im Schlaf vergeßnes Glück
Und Jugend neu zu lernen!
Die Vögel hocken still in ihren Zweigen.
Die Welt schläft ein!Es wehet kühl im Schatten meiner Fichten.
Ich stehe hier und harre meines Freundes;
Ich harre sein zum letzten Lebewohl.
Ich sehne mich, o Freund, an deiner Seite
Die Schönheit dieses Abends zu genießen.
Wo bleibst du? Du läßt mich lang allein!
Ich wandle auf und nieder mit meiner Laute
Auf Wegen, die vom weichen Grase schwellen.
O Schönheit! O ewigen Liebens - Lebenstrunkne Welt!
…life is so beautiful. After weeks of heat and humidity, we've had a series of the most gorgeous days. The late garden is blooming its heart out, and I've been bringing home tall spears of gladiolus (from the Latin gladius, for sword) in my backpack, which never fails to elicit smiles when I stop my bike at intersections. But it's not just the flowers and the harvest — displays of corn, melons, berries, peaches, sunflowers, red and yellow peppers, and ripe tomatoes outside the fruiteries – but a kind of late summer abandon in the way people are dressing, the flowered skirts blowing in the wind, the colorful tops, rakish hats, people streaming into the park with their dinner, their wine bottles, children, balloons. Everyone knows what's coming (the cruel shopkeepers are already putting winter boots and coats in their windows) but it's as if there's a collective, silent pact among Montrealers to wring every last bit of pleasure from the remaining warm, long days.
After I got going on this wash and ink drawing I realized I was being greatly limited by not having the right tools at the house — only a very fine dip pen and a big brush, and the crummy paper of this Moleskine rip-off sketchbook. But I was determined to try to capture something about the way certain branches were being tossed around wildly while the stiffer ones stayed put.
The mood of this "building" that is the park chanegs all the time, depending particularly on the weather, and the light. Movement is a big part of it too.
Here's a detail of the happening part of the drawing. The next attempt will be with better paper and a variety of pens, brushes, and marking tools.
I couldn't sleep last night, and got up and looked at a book of Chinese ink paintings. That was helpful too.
