the cassandra pages

Winter Weekend: Quebec

 

Sunday.

It’s early morning; J. and S. are down by the huge stone fireplace, drinking coffee; G. is still asleep, and I’m in our bedroom upstairs. I just opened the shuttered windows to find that it’s snowing hard. It’s absolutely silent; we are really on the edge of the wilderness.

The house is in a clearing below a mountain, surrounded by a thick pine, cedar, and birch forest. When we arrived, two nights ago, after driving through smaller and smaller villages, increasingly uninhabited forest, and towering snowbanks on either side, the house struck me a little bit like something out of Pasternak – like the old family house out in the country where Yuri took Lara and that night, wrote the poems about her – and stood on the porch in the moonlight and clapped his hands to make the wolves retreat.

We’ve been here in summer but it’s totally different  – gardens and berries and ducks on the pond. Still kind of a dacha feeling, though. Now there’s easily four feet of snow on the ground and you can't move on the unplowed or unshoveled terrain without snowshoes; G. says it’s been white since the end of October. When S. tried to carry the corpse of a mouse out beyond the compost bin, she fell into snow nearly over her head and had to be pulled out: it's deep, deep powder with no layers of crust inside to hold you up.

Yesterday J. helped shovel the path to the front door; when you peer out the window it looks like a tunnel. There is another essential path they opened – to the woodpile – where it’s necessary to use a sledgehammer to get some of the frozen logs apart. A large sled is used to haul the wood back into the garage, where it thaws and drains before being brought into the house.

The house looks like a French farmhouse, in brick with some stucco; there’s a round turret on the north side and a large cottage garden in front; inside it is Shaker-style, very spare: white walls with light, beautifully-finished woodwork and light maple floors. The centerpiece is a huge fireplace, faced in rough yellowish stone, and since our arrival G. has kept a fire going continually behind the tempered glass doors; it’s very efficient because the stone radiates a lot of heat and there is a system of baffles that direct the heat out into the house. The fireplace also has a brick oven, for baking, to the left of the main chamber.

Yesterday morning when I got up G. was outside in her pajamas, wearing a short coat and hat, boots and snowshoes, filling the birdfeeders. Every time she straightened up she called to the birds with a little whistling sound and before she came in there were bluejays and chickadees and a flock of tiny redpolls waiting in the trees. The feeders are near the windows and as we’ve eaten the long lingering meals that are characteristic of our stays here, we can watch the birds eat too, almost as close as our friends across the table.

We've been listening to Andreas Scholl, reading, knitting, cooking, making brief forays into the outdoors; this afternoon we looked through a beautiful large book on European monasteries, and at pictures of English gardens. That's the feeling here: repose, stillness, reflected light, and an awareness that gently and continually shifts from interior to exterior, both of place and self.

The little woodpecker cocks his head at us, flicking his spotted tailfeathers, and takes a few more pecks at the suet before flying off into the trees.

Weekend in the Country

I'll be out in the Quebec countryside this weekend - out where there's already four or five feet of snow and more falling! Not sure if there will be reliable internet access or not - I think we'll have dial-up and, if so, I'll be posting some photos and comments. Mostly I'm looking forward to a different weekend than the last trip - I've packed my knitting and four books: a collection of Euripides' plays; "The Demons, Vol 1" by Austrian novelist Heimito von Doderer (has anyone out there read this? It is one of the strangest books I've ever read); Fresco, selected poems by Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku (a gift from my qarrtsiluni co-editor Dave); and the Penguin edition of The Epic of Gilgamesh. And a couple of bottles of wine...the firewood is already there, even if we need to uncover it.

With four of us and an equal number of snow shovels, we ought to be able to manage just about anything the Quebec winter throws at us. So -- let it snow.

Darkness at 4:00

(4:00 pm on November 20, Av. Mont-Royal, Montreal)

Are the weather and dwindling daylight getting you down? Read this, for starters, all ye northerners!

My own techniques for combating seasonal mood problems are similar: bright lights, warm baths, comforting warm foods (making soup always seems to make me feel good twice over), getting out of the house at least once a day for some real exercise in the fresh air, wearing (and knitting with) brighter colors, listening to upbeat/beautiful/favorite music and singing along... I also try to make myself get up from the computer and move around - just moving my body more intentionally helps to counter the confined, cooped-up feelings of a northern November. Although J. is still biking, I can see my days are numbered for this year - the last time I rode, a couple of days ago, I ended up with a terrible sinus headache that's still lingering, and I was really bundled up -- it's not worth it.

I think I'd be in much worse shape this year if I hadn't joined finally a choir. It's done wonders - for me, singing is just about the best emotional and physical therapy, and for the first time since living in  Montreal I feel like I'm really becoming part of a group. Anyone who's sung in a northern choir knows that you don't stay home on Thursday nights just because the weather is bad - you get in the car, or put on your boots and heavy coat, and make it to choir rehearsal because, for one, you're a northerner and proud of it, and two, that moment of walking through the door into the brightly-lit room, soon to be filled with music made by the quickly-warming bodies of the friends you sing with, reminds you once again that this night will help keep you going through the entire next week.

I remember talking to a cantor who'd been practicing in the cold, dark, grey interior of St. George's Bloomsbury (London) one late December - a very nice woman with an excellent soprano voice - and she told me part of her lifework had always been giving singing therapy to victims of war injuries, especially people who've been confined to wheelchairs for years and years. "It's the deep breathing, as well as the emotional release and the general joy of it, that's so good for people," she said. I know she's right.

The other day - a cold and dark one too -  as I paid for some groceries in a Vermont general store, I also thought about another soprano who had lived there and been the soloist in our choir when I first lived in New England - I think someone who looked like her must have walked in and jogged my memory. After this woman descended into Alzheimer's and couldn't come to church anymore, the choir director went every week to her home, out in the country, to give her a voice lesson. It was a long trip for him, and I doubt it was really a lesson: Ruth didn't need them anyway, but she needed to sing. He played hymns and familiar arias for her, and she sang, even long after she'd forgotten the words. He went there for years, almost until the day she died.

--

This Thursday night I drove downtown to the cathedral for the first time, instead of taking my bike. It was only 6:45, but night had fallen over the city. After I parked in the forecourt, I saw several people in heavy coats, carrying plastic bags, bending and picking up something under the trees, and I finally decided they were Asians collecting the best of the fallen, yellow gingko leaves before snow or rain destroyed them. On the cathedral steps, the homeless people were already wrapped in their sleeping bags for the night. I walked down into the underground mall and into the cathedral undercroft, already bright and chattery with the voices of this new group I'm just getting to know. Rehearsal began promptly at 7 - a half hour of work on Advent music - and then we were joined by members of the director's secular choir for a two-hour run-through of Handel's Messiah, which we'll be singing with the McGill chamber orchestra next week, stopping only for a ten-minute tea break halfway through. It was hard and happy work, with brief comments and instructions in French and English about the breathing, pauses, and tempos . When I left I was tired and still had a headache, but, driving up l'Avenue du Parc to the Plateau, with the lights of the city around me and the streets familiar, I had one of those moments of clarity where I realized  - with full force and no little astonishment - that this was now my life, and that I'd actually become comfortable with it. I think many of my own hallelujahs this season will be simply for that.

If you're interested in hearing our choir and some traditional (though not always!) Anglican liturgical music, Sunday Evensong from Christ Church Cathedral is broadcast live and on the internet from 4:00 - 5:00 pm. Here's the URL for Radio Ville-Marie (click on "Nous ecouter en direct) and tomorrow's program:

Organ Prelude: Trio,  Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924)

Introit: Glorious and powerful God, Charles Villiers Stanford

Preces and Responses: Thomas Tunnard 

Psalm: 145 (Cooper, Lawes)

Canticles: Second Service, Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625)

Anthem: Glorious and powerful God, Orlando Gibbons

Organ Postlude: Allegro in d, Charles Villiers Stanford

Trois Pèlerinages (Three Pilgrimages) - Part 2

The original reason for our trip north was to visit Cap Tourmente, staging area for the annual migration of snow geese. On Saturday morning we rose early, ate a hearty Quebecois breakfast at our B&B, and set off for the national wildlife preserve about thirty minutes to the north of St-Anne-de-Beaupre. 

This rough panorama doesn't begin to do justice to the beauty of the Cap Tourmente landscape. The peak of fall color had arrived, and the weather on Saturday was perfect. Behind us, stretching around to the left, were more tall rock faces covered with deciduous forest. By contrast, the floodplain of the St. Lawrence - the river lies horizontally in the center of the photograph - is very flat.  Cap Tourmente contains salt marshes full of bulrushes, the favorite food of the snow geese, and it has been the historic gathering place for the flocks as they come down from their arctic nesting areas on the way to Chesapeake Bay. Partly because of preservation efforts such as this beautiful, pristine preserve (not a souvenir to be seen) - the snow goose population that comes here every year has grown from endangered levels to more than 1 million. A limited hunt to control the population is now allowed in Quebec.

When I first heard about this place last year, from the same friends we traveled with last weekend, I immediately wanted to go. I have... a thing about snow geese. (Forgive me, longtime readers - I've told this story before.)

When I was young the appearance of just one snow goose on the lake was a reason to get out the binoculars and call all the neighbors; when a small flock arrived one year the local people all drove to the cornfields along the river hoping to catch a glimpse of the rare visitors to the central New York flyway, clustered in the middle of a flock of their larger brown Canadian cousins. Something about their graphic whiteness, set off by that triangle of black wingtip, seemed to epitomize for me their arctic origin and their rare beauty. But it's not as individual birds that they most move me, it's something about seeing them as a flock.

It wasn't until the late eighties when we began to see more each year. In 1990 my maternal grandfather died the day after Thanksgiving. It was the first death of someone close to me, and though he had been becoming more and more transparent in his 90th year, he died suddenly and unexpectedly. My husband and I received the call just after we'd returned to Vermont; we immediately turned around and went back.

After the funeral I walked down by the lake where he and I had fished on so many evenings, tears now running down my face as I tried to come to terms with his absence. It was late afternoon, and the large flocks of migrating Canada geese that rested on our lake during those weeks before it froze were returning from their day grazing in the nearby cornfields. I stopped to watch them make their descent, wings wide to catch the cupped air, legs outstretched: one, ten, fifty. I looked down at the water's edge, and saw an unusually bright, white, round piece of quartz. I picked it up and suddenly, impulsively, threw it as far out into the water as I could. Following the arc of the stone, I looked up into the sky and saw a shimmering flash of silver high above me - and then watched, stunned, the tears drying on my face, as an entire flock of snow geese slowly wheeled and descended into the middle of the lake like an apparition, or, as it seemed to me, a passage between worlds.

--

Although this past weekend is the normal peak of the snow goose migration, few flocks have left their nesting grounds so far because of the continued warmth of the weather in the far north, and the promised thousands and thousands of geese at Cap Tourmente were not to be seen. A steady stream of hopeful bird-loving pilgrims arrived anyway in the parking lot throughout the morning, carrying a range of effects from children and sandwiches to impressive amounts of optical aids and high-tech camera gear.

After a twenty-minute walk on boardwalk that wound through the tidal marshes to a specially-constructed blind, we did see several flocks rising and settling over the river. We also watched two heavy wooden sleds slowly pulled through the grasses by splashing, strong work horses, the last vestiges in Quebec of "la chasse traditionnelle" - a traditional hunting method for transporting hunters and their guide. In the blind and on the trail, the human visitors were quiet, looking into the distance through their own binoculars or the mounted scopes provided, explaining about the geese in whispers to their curious children and lifting them up so they could get their first look at something special, something that mattered to them.

--

Faucon pèlerin, reads the French description birds one might see at Cap Tourmente. Peregrine falcon. I'd never really made the linguistic connection in English until I thought back to the Cafe Pèlerin at St-Anne-de-Beaupre...; peregrination doesn't mean quite the same thing as pelerinage.

Did birds first teach us about the possibility of pilgrimage, as we wondered where they went each year? Or does their migration awaken in us our own innate restlessness and desire? The leap or pang in the heart at the call of the flocks passing far overhead is, I think, something more than joy or melancholy about the passage of seasons, though for us northerners there is certainly that.

My own inarticulateness, in the face of the emotions the geese arouse in me, tells me I'm in the place that contains fire and the great waterfalls; the sound of the hermit thrush and the flash of a school of bright minnows; a silent shaft of sun on moss in a dark woodland. The snow geese fly in that space of porosity between myself and the rest of nature, following a map imprinted in my own marrow, a route stretching forward beyond language, and back to a time before tongues.

--

Here is J.'s CAP TOURMENTE PORTFOLIO.

Next: Messiaen and a journey within.

Trois Pèlerinages (Three Pilgrimages) - Part 1

What is the hope at the center of our journeys, our private pilgrimages? Where do we find our own cathedrals? Not realizing at first they were pilgrimages at all, I’ve followed three different paths in recent days, walking with others on their own searches for a time, finding myself always curious, occasionally bewildered or even incredulous, sometimes amazed and moved.
--
Last weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, and on Friday morning we took off with two close friends for an overnight trip, four hours to the north, above Quebec City.

Our first stop, on Friday, was at the shrine of St-Anne-de-Beaupré, the oldest continuous site of Catholic pilgrimage in North America, which is celebrating its 350th anniversary this year. The first church in honor of St. Anne, the patronne of Quebec and mother of Mary, was built here in 1658. A succession of buildings was erected on the site where miraculous healings were believed to have taken place. The present basilica was begun after a fire destroyed the former one in 1922; it was consecrated in 1976.

St. Anne’s twin spires rise incongruously above the flat land and suburban landscape beyond the sprawling city of Quebec. The village of St. Anne-de-Beaupre is small and reminded us of a western frontier town, with a couple of inns for the pilgrims, a cluster of houses set close together and nearly touching the winding main street, and a few flat-roofed buildings devoted to the sale of tacky religious and Quebec souvenirs, from painted plaster casts of the Last Supper to moose and polar bears in plush fake fur. These are dwarfed by a great square with trees, a tall fountain, and a towering gilded statue of the crowned saint holding her daughter, the baby Mary, in front of a huge cathedral of carved and decorated grey stone. Encrusted with detail inside and out, the basilica welcomes thousands and thousands of pilgrims every year – and as we stood there, astonished, busloads arrived and disgorged passengers who also stood and gaped at the sight, blinking after their long journeys to the shrine from all over North America. I had absolutely no idea anything like this existed in the province, and certainly not outside of the major cities. We were about to see evidence, once again, of how close Quebec Catholicism remained to the Middle Ages - even in the mid-20th century.

After we passed through the heavy doors covered with copper low-reliefs and into the glittering vestibule, the splendor of the cathedral's interior was even more stunning. I tried to suspend my incredulity about shrines, relics, and the veneration of saints in favor of cpnsidering the devotion and craft that had gone into the building's construction and decoration. How on earth had all of this happened in rural Quebec? The same way it did in Europe: through the donations of thousands of individuals and parishes, and the money left at the shrine by pilgrims. It costs $4 to light a candle, and hundreds of them were burning. One doesn't have to be a genius to do the math; if every pilgrim leaves only $10  - a very conservative estimate - that would generate a huge sum each year.

The story of St. Anne’s life with her husband St. Joachim is depicted in mosaics on the vaulted ceiling and along the sides of the sanctuary. (If, like me, you are wondering where that came from, since St. Anne is never mentioned in the canonical Gospels: the story of her life is loosely based on the Apocryphal Gospel of James, written in 150 C.E. She was venerated in the Eastern Orthodox church as early as the 7th century, but no cult arose around her in western Catholicism until the 12th century.)

Along the walls, gold mosaics and contemporary stained glass tell the important stories of Catholic Christianity and of the cathedral's own history. The lower walls and stairwells are made of black marble striped with lines of tiny gold tiles; above them are walls of polished lighter cut stone with many holes that, on closer observation, are the remains of fossil shells. Every pew is carved with an animal and plant that represent the created world but are predominantly native species of the northern Canadian woods. The sides and back of the altar are surrounded by smaller chapels, each different, given like the windows by cities or individuals, and yet all carefully fitting into the overall design integrity; one, in dark green and gold with mosaics of stylized clovers and a carved dark wooden saint against dark green Vermont marble, was dedicated to St. Patrick. The leaded-glass windows, many also donated by local parishes, depict workers, priests and saints alike. Cities like New Haven and New Orleans are represented by pictures of metal workers and musicians; in one window I read the words "Les Abattoirs" (the slaughterhouses) beneath a portrait of a butcher holding a large knife!

In the vaulted undercroft, square mosaics with gold backgrounds depict more local flora and fauna, from pink lady’s slippers to robins; the central chandelier hangs from a ceiling boss that at first seems part of the blue and white mosaic decoration of the ceiling but revels itself to be a four-foot wide white snowflake. Semi-circular paintings tell the story of the encounter between the (adoring and accepting) native people and (benevolent, generous) French nuns and priests – entirely, of course, from the French Catholic point of view. (St. Anne is said to have been held in particular adoration by native converts to Catholicism, and an icon of a beloved native saint, Keteri Tekakwitha, dressed in fringed buckskin and carrying a rosary, hangs in a prominent place to the left of the main altar in the basilica.)

 

Masses and talks for pilgrim groups take place in this undercroft, where there is one of four purported relics of St. Anne, (the "Major Relic" - a wristbone - is in a marble reliquary in a special chapel to the right of the altar upstairs.) The undercroft also includes a chapel for meditation containing two polychrome statues of the crucified Christ, an altar where people leave photographs of their loved ones, and hundreds and hundreds of burning white candles arrayed on galvanized trays; the heat from this room hits you like a wall long before you reach the doorway.

Monseigneur Laval, the first Bishop of Quebec, is on the right; I don't know the name of the Native American chief holding the map of Nouvelle France. It was Laval who requested that the canons of Carcassonne send a relic of St. Anne to Beaupré: they responded by sending "the finger-bone of Saint Anne, which was first exposed for veneration on 12 March, 1670."

The true focal point of the cathedral is upstairs, though, around the painted statue of St. Anne holding Mary, an image that evolved over time from an Orthodox icon of Mary holding Jesus. The saints, with their gilded crowns, stand on a tall pillar, their feet in a huge cascading bank of fresh flowers. Below them is a circular place to kneel, continually filled with pilgrims in fervent prayer. Are their prayers answered? Some say so: on either side of the entrance to the main sanctuary are banks of crutches and prostheses left by pilgrims who say they walked away unaided, healed by the grace of God and the intercession of Saint Anne.

After we left the basilica, we walked across the street to a much older stone chapel which commemorates the earlier churches on the site. Inside, a woman with a mane of red hair and a flowing green dress was playing a violin, facing the altar. Her husband sat in the sun on the steps outside, working on a Sudoku. I walked with our friends around the back of the chapel where life-size statues enact the Stations of the Cross. When I returned, she was still playing, and J. was quietly sitting in the chapel behind her. “I’m terribly frustrated,” she had told him, in an American accent, during a brief pause in her playing. “I’ve been practicing to do for five months, but my bow is sticking and the trains keep going by so noisily!” The next day when we returned to the cathedral to take photographs in the early morning, we saw her again, in the same chartreuse gown, kneeling at the feet of St. Anne.

Please also take a look at a PORTFOLIO of St-Anne photographs, by J.

Next: Cap Tourmente

Conversations between Kingdoms

Loose gravel on mud, an uphill road through woods filled with new ferns, the dripping canopy, a sky trying to clear. Late afternoon light on the mountains, standing stones, the gardens where leaves of all shapes and colors within the general category of green form a sculpture in low relief, ankle- to knee-height above the dark earth.

A thin grey snake slithers under a paving stone.

Golden globes of trollius nod near blue forget-me-nots, violet violets. Under thorny rose canes, earnest purple johnny-jump-up faces; iris of deepest indigo studded with raindrop pearls; pure white starflowers, as crisp as starched linen.

A bullfrog jumps ahead of my foot into the pond.

Leaning over the water I see tadpoles, those macroscopic reminders of our own beginnings, in every size from mere black dots to near-frog giants, tails swishing, heads bigger than my thumb, legs starting to sprout. First we swim, then crawl, then hop...but not this one, the ghostly white carcass of a dead bullfrog lying on the bottom of the pond, starting to decompose, near him a large gelatinous mass of eggs. Healthy frogs peer from quick bright eyes above the surface, hop along the mossy bank and into the reeds.

Lupine, its budded flower stalks beginning to rise toward the sun, carpets the damp semicircle at the end of the pond, and beyond, over the bank, tall choke-cherries, hawthorns with tight clusters of white buds, lush growth of ostrich ferns, and cattails rise like torches in the swampy gully before the land moves up again, covered with mixed forest that gives way in turn to conifers, more conifers, and blue mountains.

Yellow throated warbler. Wren.

I head back to the house where J. sits on the porch talking to our friend K.; the host, G., is in the kitchen from which the smell  of roasting lamb and herbs is wafting. Waiting for the other guests, we all listen for car sounds - the new gravel on the road is deep and slippery after the day's rain - but soon we hear their voices; they too have made it up the long winding driveway and the ebullient greetings soon change to hushed "ohh!"s as they catch their first glimpses of the garden, the pond, the standing stones covered with lichens, the mountains from which the storm clouds are lifting.

Glasses of wine, the surprise of late-afternoon sun on our faces, black flies cheerfully waved away from pulse-points, ankles and ears. Stories of our childhoods in Vermont, rural New York, Detroit, Pennsylvania,  Los Angeles via Hungary -- all of us American originally but one, who grew near here, gathering and preserving enough fiddleheads to eat all year, eating honey and maple syrup rather than any other sugars, spending the winter caning chairs with sea-grass with his father. We never thought it was an unusual life, he said, it was just how you lived here, that was Quebec.

Before dinner, I acquiesce to the quiet urge I've had since arriving, ask a quick permission, and slip away to the separate building that is G.'s meditation and yoga space. I open the door and step inside, into the silence and fullness I knew would be here, the vibrating fullness and emptiness of a place that has become sacred. There are folded blankets and cushions on the edge of the large rug with its subdued pattern of olive and rust, and I notice G.'s meditation shawl of plain cotton that he brought back from the ashram in France. From a different pile I take a pink blanket and a white cotton cushion and arrange them in front of the rough wooden slab, on two sawn tree stumps, that holds a white perpetual candle where a flame flickers in a pool of paraffin. There are some books in a corner; some natural objects, a rock or two - which make me smile; my own shrines always contain rocks - objects from several religious traditions; incense burners; more candles, unlit. In back of me, a cold wood stove and a rocking chair. And on the wall above the wooden plank, a photograph I first saw last year, of rows of meditating people wrapped in white cotton shawls or cloaks in a large candlelit room. He's placed it so that sitting here, you feel like you are in the back of the same room, looking forward.

The minutes pass; going deeper. I know I can't stay long. Wood thrushes sound their cascade of notes in the woods, and finally I turn my head and look out.

The big window that forms half the wall to my right frames a view of the green forest, punctuated by  wet black tree trunks and two narrow paper birches. In the soft last light of the day it is indescribably beautiful. Suddenly thoughts of my mother and my mentor, Herm, gone for many years now, rush into my head. I reach up instinctively and grasp the old pendant hanging around my neck that was my mother's; I rarely wear it but put it on especially before coming here; it is gold with a clear green faceted stone crowned by finely wrought, small gold leaves. Tears spring to my eyes, and then a feeling of immense gratitude. I shut my eyes, breathe deeply, open them again.

It's then that I notice the fern just outside the window. It's an interrupted fern,* one of Herm's favorites - he used to jokingly call them Fernus interruptus - and it is perfect in its newness, the fruiting bodies on the stem not yet dried, the fronds above and below them light delicate green. I search the woods nearby but it's the only one I can see. We look at each other.

So this is life, isn't it, I say to myself eventually. An interruption, aware of itself, named... with a task to ripen, dry, break open and scatter... while meanwhile roots reach down and fronds unfurl above and below, unconsciously, continually. Beautiful, perfect, complete.

I finish my meditation, fold the blanket again and put it back, open the door and step out into the world.

*(An Ontario site notes that the interrupted fern, Osmunda claytoniana, has the oldest fossil record of any living fern today, going back over 200 million years.)

Memorial Day Update

Quebec farmland just above the border with Vermont, Jay Peak in the distance

Back in Montreal tonight after five intense days in Vermont; Saturday was the memorial service for my dear brother-in-law (the husband of J.'s sister) who died recently, and so there were many family gatherings, many conversations, many meals, and also the happy reunions with old friends who called or came to the service and reception. My husband and I had also organized a meeting of the whole caregiver team for my father-in-law on Thursday, which turned out to be a very productive thing for all of us.

I'll try to write more about all of that when I'm rested, settled, and caught up with work. Tonight I'm listening to the first night of finals in the Montreal international piano competition (on the radio), eating Chinese food we picked up in Burlington on our way through, unpacking, and catching up on email and blogs I haven't read for several days.

The transition began this afternoon when we left the highway and entered Canada at a small crossing point, driving slowly through little farming communities and beautiful farmland that was new to us. We passed a farm where these animals were being raised: they look like reindeer but seemed bigger -- does anyone know what they are? (I must say that the idea of eating Rudolph doesn't hold much appeal.)

It's hard to believe that last year I was driving my father around Chenango County searching for family gravestones - his first real outing after knee surgery. Yesterday he played nine holes of golf and did his usual 75 push-ups in the morning, along with the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises he's done every morning since the 1960s. What a testament to courage and determination!

Finally -- thank you all for your comments on the previous post. I was moved by them and by your insights, and grateful.

What's at Risk?

My morning began (after checking email, of course!) with reading several articles about education. An editorial in the New York Times commemorates the 25th anniversary of the publication of "A Nation at Risk", the report of a national commission in response to “the widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” I had forgotten about the report and what it found, except that - contrary to what the administration expected - it corroborated the public perception. What was interesting about today's article was the before/after discussion of one of the report's conclusions: that a strong educational system focussed on "the basics" would result in greater economic competitiveness. American educators back in 1981 were very concerned about being outstripped by the much higher-performing, rigorous Japanese and Korean school systems. But then the American economy improved, while the Asian economies began to falter:

With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that the link between educational excellence and economic security is not as simple as “A Nation at Risk” made it seem. By the mid-1980s, policymakers in Japan, South Korea and Singapore were already beginning to complain that their educational systems focused too much on rote learning and memorization. They continue to envy American schools because they teach creativity and the problem-solving skills critical to prospering in the global economy.

Indeed, a consensus seems to be emerging among educational experts around the world that American schools operate within the context of an enabling environment — an open economy, strong legal and banking systems, an entrepreneurial culture — conducive to economic progress.

To put it bluntly, American students may not know as much as their counterparts around the Pacific Rim, but our society allows them to make better use of what they do know. The question now is whether this historic advantage will suffice at a time when knowledge of math, science and technology is becoming increasingly critical. Maybe we need both the enabling environment and more rigor in these areas.

My question, on reading this, is much broader: should the purpose of an educational system even be economic competitiveness? Does it distress anyone besides me that this is stated so bluntly as a given fact? First, who benefits from such a goal, and how? Are we raising children who are capable of thinking about the effect of globalization, for instance, or children whose primary goal is to make as much money as possible; i.e., are we raising yet another generation of capitalist consumers, or world citizens? On the other hand, I know that many young people today are quite idealistic - where are those values coming from? And is it only my perception that, 25 years later, an even greater percentage of kids are falling through the cracks, both in terms of secondary education and access to higher education, due to racial inequality, poverty, troubled family environments and many other factors?

What do you think? And I wonder if Canadian readers see differences between the stated goals of education between the two countries. In Quebec, at least, the values of the society are quite different, and it's hard for me not to think some of this comes from the focus of education, as well as what children learn at home.

Poutine et Paris-Brest

Sunday afternoon, as we were heading toward a birthday party in east Montreal. The city cleans the streets with twin graders, huge snowblowing machines the size of combines, and giant dump trucks that cart the snow away.

Blizzards have nothing on us: we've been consuming enough calories to survive on an ice floe. Saturday night, romanced by a beautiful but very cold evening, we decided to have supper at La Banquise - a lively 24-hour Montreal favorite always filled with young people, which is fairly close to our house. The specialty is...poutine, (scroll down to the third entry) and for the first time in three years, we deliberately ordered some and actually ate it, washed down with a bottle of Cheval Blanc. For those who don't know this delicacy of Quebec, it is a generous pile of expertly-cooked French fries, covered with gravy and cheese curds, plus other toppings, ranging from onions and bacon to foie gras. I ordered lasagna and some very good asparagus soup; we shared the two entrees (the poutine and the lasagna) and the dessert, which was a small, deliciously intense brownie. Then we went for a long walk, and returned home about the time our faces had become stiff, our fingers had been curled into little balls inside our gloves, and we had lost feeling in our noses.

Thus fortified, and feeling guilty, on Sunday morning we had a very light breakfast of coffee and fruit, and went off to the cathedral. It was already snowing lightly. When we walked out after the coffee hour, four inches had already fallen and the pace of the storm indicated it was going to increase and keep on like that for a long while. We had been invited to a surprise 50th birthday party in the afternoon, so we called to make sure it was still on, since the birthday girl and her partner were traveling from far out in the country - "Oui," her father said, "pas de problem."

So we stopped first at our favorite florist, on St. Urbain, where I picked out a bouquet of salmon-colored roses and blue agapanthus, and then we drove slowly through streets in various stages of being kept open or becoming snowed-in, to a neighborhood of small detached homes in the eastern part of the island, the heartland of Quebeçois Montreal.

 

We found a parking place of sorts on the already snow-filled street, and went up the drifted steps. It was a wonderful party. There were only five anglophone guests among the twenty-five or so who had gathered- two women originally from western Canada, and the two of us, and a next-door neighbor whose parents had been French and English, but both Catholic. We were immediately warmly embraced by our friend's family, who we'd never met before, and the champagne flowed as generously as the buzzing French conversation, which to our surprise we could follow and contribute to fairly well. Then came a fantastic lunch, with more wine, followed by a huge Paris-Brest, our friend's traditional birthday "cake" - essentially a giant, flat cream puff filled with hazelnut cream and dusted with powdered sugar.

Night had fallen, and the guests bundled up and made their way out the door -- into the scene in the video at the end of this post. That's my husband at the end, walking toward our car. The plastic tunnels along the street are typical winter car-ports, erected temporarily all around the city neighborhoods where people have the luxury of a driveway. This is not a wealthy neighborhood, but the warmth inside the house was just as intense as the cold outside. It was a happy afternoon for us, and we were awfully pleased to be invited and included in the occasion - and to find our comfort level with the language had really improved quite a bit. I can tell not only from our better ability to communicate and understand, but from the fact that we weren't totally exhausted at the end of the afternoon!

It was still snowing when we went to bed.

Quebec makes a green move, prodding Canada

From CBC Canada today: Quebec to Adopt Strict California-style Emissions Controls

Quebec will become the first Canadian province to adopt California's stringent auto-emissions standards in a move hailed as part of a domino effect toward greener cars.

Environment Minister Line Beauchamp made the announcement early Wednesday at the UN climate-change summit in Indonesia as a group of environmentalists looked on and applauded.

At least four other Canadian provinces are considering a similar plan, and Quebec described its step as part of a historic march toward cleaner cars across North America.

"This is a movement," Beauchamp said. "And it is an inevitable movement — it's one that cannot be reversed."