Oh Canada, au Revoir

August 2-4

We got back just fine, and on time. We pulled up at Joanna’s house around 5 on Friday. We had another family gathering to attend on Saturday in central Jersey, so we’ve been keeping busy.

There were a couple of things that I forgot to mention about our stay in Vermont. 

Joanna and her sisters, as they often do, were gardening together, moving some small saplings and flowers to more advantageous places in the yard.

I’m no gardener. When I touch plants, they usually die.

Rocks, on the other hand, are safe enough around me. So I helped Jeff pile the rocks for a stone wall he is building next to the driveway.

He picked up the heavy ones with a forklift on the front of his tractor. They were used as the first course and pretty much stayed where they fell. I tried to jockey one into a better position and it didn’t even show I was there.

OK. Smaller rocks.

I did all right for a while. I was bending to put some medium-size rocks on the forklift. When I stood up, the world got a little strange. 

I’ve had this before. I grabbed onto the top of the lift for support while my head cleared. It must have been apparent that something was out of whack, because Christopher asked if I was OK.

That was it for me. They wouldn’t let me do any more stone work.

A very colorful moment occurred when several of us were sitting on the porch of the house next door. This is the original farmhouse from the early 19th century. 

It has been expanded and updated over the years, and Dave, Jeff’s brother, lives there in the summer. He goes back to Florida for the winter.

A flash of iridescent red winked at us from inside a small tree by the porch. The reflection of sunlight was so intense that it seemed the red spot was a lamp.

Dave told me it was a ruby-throated hummingbird. 

There is a hummingbird feeder near the tree. It has small flower-shaped access points where the birds can reach in and drink sugar water.

I have only seen hummingbirds once or twice before. They are tiny things. And when they hover, their wings beat so fast you can’t really see them. All you pickup is a transparent blur. 

On Wednesday morning in Montreal, Joanna suggested we go a basilica up on the mountain, St. Joseph’s Oratory.

It’s a trip of a few miles from the hotel, and the Metro doesn’t run up there, so we took a cab. Besides getting us there, the driver took us to the upper parking lot and saved us a lot of stairs. 

I don’t know how many stairs there are, but it may really number a hundred or more. And the middle of each flight of steps is reserved for people who want to make the climb on their knees.

I had heard about places where worshippers do that, but this was the first time I had actually visited one.

Joanna had been here back in the '70s so she picked up a brochure that told how this place got its start. It’s uncanny.

A kid with a hard-luck life was born in New Brunswick to a penniless French Canadian family. He didn’t go to school. He and his siblings were orphans by the time he was 12.

He worked odd jobs in Canada and the States, and one day showed up on the steps of a monastery, where he asked to join as a brother. The guy couldn’t read or write, so what were they going to do with him?

They made him janitor at the College of Notre Dame, which is across the street from where the basilica is now.

He took the name Frere Andre and worked as janitor for 35 years. During that time, he started to receive stray people. He listened to their complaints and their stories. 

He told them to pray to St. Joseph. Many did and some claimed to be healed of their bodily and spiritual ailments. 

Word got around and more people came to see Brother Andre.

Meanwhile, he made a practice of climbing the mountain across the street to say his prayers in a grove. One day he scattered St. Joseph medals on the spot and told the saint that he would like to build a shrine to him on the site.

He floated the idea around and got backing to build a one-room chapel there. He also apparently lived in it because there is a tiny apartment above the chapel.

The walls are covered with plaques thanking St. Joseph for his help. There is a collection of used crutches. One plaque said the donor had been cured of cancer.

There are more thank-yous, crutches, and canes inside the basilica.

I’ve seen this before—at St. Lucy’s chapel in Syracuse and at the altar of the Infant of Prague, for instance—and I love it because it puts us in touch with our pagan roots.

It doesn’t matter what you believe or disbelieve. The human brain is hard-wired for this kind of mystical poetry. The Neanderthals threw flowers into the graves of their dead.

The basilica has grown in stages. Originally it was a larger chapel, now called the crypt, and it may have been built before Brother Andre died in the 1930s. 

He is a saint in his own right and is buried in the crypt. His heart is in a reliquary a floor above.

We cabbed back for a breather at the hotel before we strolled out to The Keg, a steakhouse in Old Montreal. We had stopped for a couple of beers on Tuesday and knew the Guinness was good. It’s great with red meat.

Remembering how much fun it is to drink beer and watch people walk by, we opted for dinner at a table outside. We were doing all right, too, until that thunderstorm hit. 

We grabbed our plates and drinks and ran inside along with everybody else. I had to make two trips because we couldn’t carry the bread on the first run.

Thursday was museum day. I had been on the web site of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and learned that every Thursday people over 65 get in free.

The museum is fun even before you get inside. There is a large bronze bird made of machine parts that appears to be laying a huge egg. A vivid orange glass installation by Dale Chihuly is on the steps. 

The street next to the museum is closed to traffic and is filled with a maze-like installation of what may be enameled sections of angle iron in various colors. You can walk through it, as Joanna did. Kids run and skip through it.

On the far side of it was a man in slacks and a woman in a skirt playing catch with a football. It almost seemed like performance art. Maybe it was.

We went to the part of the museum that starts with the 17th century and moves to contemporary art.

I love the Dutch masters, and there were several, mostly new names to me. There were none of the grand-scale groups that are so much fun in the Rijksmuseum, but even so, the detail and subtle color of the small-scale landscapes were terrific, as usual.

There were a few Rodins, including a small version of the Thinker. Renoir was there and so was Monet.

One gallery was devoted to paintings influenced by observations of nature, a 19th century realist movement. An animated video of birds and tree limbs in the breeze was projected on the walls above the canvases.

Joanna said it reminded her of the Monet rooms at the Orangerie. We had read about them and went to the Orangerie to see them last April.

We walked back to the hotel and then went around the corner to Chinatown for dinner—great roast duck, fried rice, and choy sum. I love roast duck. Chinese roast duck, French roast duck. Fantastic.

I had two beers with it. They were bottles with a name I had seen in stores but not tried—Boreale, with a large polar bear on the label.

One was a stout that was very good. The wrong stout can be cloyingly sweet, but this was fresh and crisp. So was the second beer, a Boreale pale ale.

Right up there with the Guinness, they were among the best beers I had in Montreal.

Friday was moving day. We were out by 10. According to Google Maps, it’s a six-hour drive. We stopped a few times on the way, mainly to stretch our legs. 

So allowing for the stops we were right on time when we parked in front of Joanna’s house at 5 o’clock.

God bless and good night, gang.

And I’m going to remember: when somebody says “duck,” I’m going to answer “roast.”

Harry