Item from the Past: Notes on the Back of an Envelope

May 2002

A few notes on Montreal, since it's an enjoyable destination, full of flavor and life, and we're doing it in our vacation style, that is, a lot of walking around and seeing things, buttressed by stops to eat or resting ourselves on benches.

I suppose a lot of people do their trips that way, but I have heard of people (two in my office, as it happens, on recent trips) who fly off somewhere (Las Vegas, the Bahamas) and park themselves near water for a week or even longer. That counts as a form of rest, but I can’t really understand it. Then again, some people are more naturally kinetic than I am in their everyday lives, and that is one way to press the pause button. More phlegmatic ordinarily, I go somewhere to be kinetic. Of course, this has its drawbacks, such as the fact that it takes several days -- some of them here at work -- to readjust to everyday life.

Yesterday, while both Yuriko and Lilly were getting their hair styled at a Chinatown salon, I made my way down Rue St. Catherine, a busy commercial street well occupied by shops, cafes, restaurants and even the vestiges of Montreal’s adult entertainment industry. Also, I saw a woman beside a folding table on the sidewalk hawking Lyndon LaRouche’s ideas in French -- this I knew from reading the signs taped to the table, which included his name. I passed by a Jesuit facility on that walk, and read the English plaque at the entrance, a companion to the French one. Even in English, it referred to the transfer of Quebec sovereignty from the French to the British in the 18th century as “the Conquest.”

On Wednesday, after I returned the rental car that we used for a day trip to Ottawa to a site near Dorchester Square, perhaps a mile from our hotel, I walked back. It was about 10 pm, and I stayed along Rue Levesque, a major street. At the intersection of Levesque and -----, I saw young men, not quite homeless-looking but perhaps at risk of it -- with squeegees “cleaning” windshields of cars stopped at the light. I have seen this before, of course, but I’ve never seen the cops drive up suddenly and tell the squeegeers to stop. Or so I assume, as it was in French, but there were barking as cops sometimes do. And the squeegee men got lost.

Besides the many times she went to the hotel pool, and the one time we went to the vast Olympic pool, I believe Lilly’s favorite part of the trip has been throwing rocks in the reflecting pond near the entrance to the Biosphere, a geodesic dome on Île Sainte-Hélène in the St. Lawrence River, a Buckminster Fuller creation and relic of Expo 67.