Sometimes I find myself pensive and somber in thought. It is often after I wake up and have had several mysterious dreams that stir my psyche. I come to the kitchen and start running water to clean my counter and then fill the tub with sudsy hot water. I often take a few dirty items from my dishwasher and wash them by hand. My mind is still churning as I continue to process a thing or two that requires something soothing like the repetitive motions of washing dishes.
We often equate tranquil moments with nature. Living across the street from a shopping mall with a huge parking lot, I find solace in hearing the concert of three to four snow plows at night. The roaring actually lulls me to sleep. Who would have thought that gigantic machinery such as these mega snow plows could be my winter lullaby?
The first time I heard the honey toned voices singing along with an acoustic guitar, I was a block away sitting in a small Jazz lounge called Le Jazzons. Very low key place it was where I sat next to Victor Vogel as he jammed with other musicians after hours during the Montreal Jazz Festival. As I walked out the bar I heard the music coming from rue St Denis and saw a crowd at the front of a bar I was about to soon visit and fall prey to its charm.
The closer I got, I could hear why there was a crowd where they were singing along, most swaying and moving their hips to the music inside.
Blues is the type of music that I personally feel has no discrimination. I suppose Jazz is the same but in Montreal, I noticed more people of all walks of life packing into this small Bistro à JoJo on rue St Denis every night of the week. Oh, you can sit in afternoons too to listen to open jamming but after ten in the evening the place is hopping. It holds less than 100 patrons, so it is not rare to see people on the sidewalk listening to the music. This was a place I heard so many French and English people singing and talking together savouring the blues here.
posée au comptoir sirotant une Maudite le Blues m’apaisent
Manhattan reminds me a bit of Montreal (on a much smaller scale) in that it is an island, drivers are aggressive and honk their horns a lot and it is a city of music and food. Well to me anyway. Driving off the island to get on any bridge is similar to Montreal when there are twelve lanes that merge onto three lanes and they do it day in, day out as we do here too. So on a much smaller scale I do see similarities…I think NY has a better nightlife in all areas and that is where we differ here. We have a slower pace lifestyle and unlike our Canadian mega city, Toronto who follows more NY style rush rush rush…we have kept a bit of our ancestor’s mode de vie, vivre et laisser vivre.
weekend gig island of many lights stringing the blues serenade on the Hudson under midnight blue skies
* La Maudite is one of many beers brewed in Chambly, Québec by UniBroue. Chambly is the town where my children were raised. La Maudite is a stronger beer at 8% alcohol and Unibroue has other beers up to 10% however my favourite is La Blanche de Chambly at 5%; it is a wheaty beer tasting more like a Belgian beer.
Oh dear, she thought. Mother had to arrange this outing, now didn’t she? She looked at her second cousin, Emile Candiac in the photo with her blushing and pretending to be shy. If only they knew she was turning red from rage.
I wish she would devote more of her time making Father happy, instead she finds it is her duty to make me miserable. Well, I’ll hand to her, she has succeeded.
Can you imagine, how embarrassing this will be for me if word gets out at the sanatorium that I was escorted by Emile Candiac! All of my colleagues had refused courtships by him. He’s the laughing stock of our neighbourhood, let alone le Sanatorium Alphone Genest. Now I will be the joke of the town! Me! a second year resident nurse! They will all think I am so pathetic that my mother runs my social life as well as my personal life! Jesus, Mary, Joseph, what next? Will she order me to go to the New Year`s Eve ball with him as well? I must feign illness. I must!!
Mother thinks that at the age of twenty, I will be an old spinster if I am not wed. I don’t want to be tied down like she was so young. Is it my fault she was without a grain of intelligence or logic marrying Father at fifteen years old, a man thirty years her senior! Emile Candia is twenty years older than me and I am not interested in being courted or even considered for marriage with such dunce! An old disgusting one at that!
I’ve been saving from my meagre wages, to travel. Maybe I could go with some of the girls to the States. We could take the train and head out to Newport, Vermont for a weekend. That would be nice. I hear their fabric, especially cotton is of higher quality than in Canada and at reasonable costs.
Now how can I get the image of that disgusting photograph out of my mind?
“One of the first paintings of the view was Mountainous Landscape Behind Saint-Rémy, now in Copenhagen, which Van Gogh identified in a letter to his sister Wil from 16 June 1889 as hanging in his studio to dry. Two days later, he wrote to his brother that he had painted “a starry sky.” The Starry Night is the only nocturne painting in the series of views from his bedroom window. In early June Vincent wrote to Theo, “This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big.” Two scholars working independently of each other have determined that Venus was indeed visible in Provence in the spring of 1889. So the brightest “star” in the painting, just to the viewer’s right of the cypress tree, is actually Venus.
The moon is stylized, as astronomical records indicate that the moon was waning gibbous at the time Van Gogh painted the picture. Even if the phase of the moon had been a waning crescent at the time, Van Gogh’s moon is not astronomically correct. The one pictorial element that was definitely not visible from Van Gogh’s cell is the village, which is based on a sketch made from a hillside above the village of Saint-Rémy.”
Our host has written this haiku with this image and story in mind:
from the asylum
he observed the starry night –
seeking for the light
(c) Chèvrefeuille
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I love visiting my friends in the country. Their home faces five mountains and one is very close, Mont Bromont. They live dans un rang (a dirt road) lined with farms and vast meadows. Any season has its charm but in winter the only light we see at night are on the mountain where skiers ski at night. Streams of lights squirming in shapes and curves. I like to walk near the barn facing the cornfield now covered in white, looking up I try to locate the Big Dipper. It isn`t long before I am off in my starry world of fantasy and wonder.
This was the second drought in three years and Father said he may have to sell the farm. Mother was up in arms since it was her father’s father’s father’s farm when they immigrated from Ireland. The winters here in Canada were cold particularly in St Jacobs and the summers were scorcher. Unlike the cooler summers in Ballybunion. Father would argue with Mother, “But Luv, we have to be reasonable! Your forefathers were wise enough to save their life savings and leave their land before the famine sucked them dry. Now we may just have to make a sage decision as well. Maybe it`s time to just settle with some cattle. There is always money in beef.” Mother was silent but her body clearly stated how upset she was with Father.
Ellie was not waiting any longer for Father`s decisions. She was leaving at the end of summer which wold give her ample time to help her parents move. They knew she had a “pen pal” from Toronto and although they had let her take the bus for a visit a few times, they had no idea of Ellie’s plans to leave St Jacob’s.
Lindsay was actually more than a casual friend; Ellie had fallen in love…fallen hard. She was eighteen, fresh out of high school and ready to explore the world. Lindsay had already signed a lease for an apartment for the two of them and they would both go to George Brown College to study Hospitality and Culinary Arts. She loved baking and Lindsay`s strength was in cooking. They had it all planned. They would work in posh restaurants for five years, save their money and open a B & B north of Toronto in the country. More and more city people were paying an arm and a leg for a weekend getaway outside the city along with fine dining.
She would wait until a week before moving to announce her plans, and avoid any scene she may see from Mother especially; she was pretty sure Father would also be “disappointed with his little princess.” She looked up at the sky and it was almost like a warning of the storm she was moving into. Once her mother and father realized Lindsay was a girl, Ellie was prepared for the worst …a cyclone for sure.
Tournesol dans un Jardin 
