Old Friends, New Views

What is new is exciting. What is old can be treasured. Put the two together and you have a trio of lifelong friends visiting Montreal for the first time. Coming together from three directions we met at the airport, or tried to. It was a bit of a time warp walking off the plane onto portable stairs to the tarmac. It was not quite the every-man-for-himself experience of deplaning in a Central Asian city like Tashkent, but it was a far cry from what I had come to expect in the States. Montreal is its own place. It is hiding out from its English speaking cousins on all sides to try to retain something of a Franco European insistent carelessness. By this I mean it is crumbling before your eyes, which many say helps to give it the unique charm they love. Not the crumbling part, but the laid back part.

Mike, Bob and I are crumbling as well, and have been for about as long as the city, given that there does not appear to be significant investment in infrastructure over the past 40 or more years. On the contrary, I have invested heavily in my own infrastructure through diet, training, (prayer!), yet with diminishing returns. Now we had at least the advantage of Bob’s Apple watch to count our steps as we charted a course through Parc du Mont Royal, a stroll to Mile End, a course through the Old City, all the while wondering how much more we had in the tank. At one point on the shaded lanes of the park I commented, “You know you are old when a couple pushing a baby carriage passes you.” The dad turned back and smiled. I thought I was pretty funny, too, until in what seemed like not much more than a minute, they had all but disappeared from view on the path in front of us. Time has a way of moving faster than we do as we age. My great great aunt said at my grandmother’s funeral, “The older I get, the faster it goes.”

The graffiti scrawled on buildings, signs, and sidewalks reminded us of New York City in the 70’s, before America rediscovered her British virtues of public order and respect for property, fixed the broken windows, and rebuilt from the inside out. Apparently, today’s European World Cup fans are amazed by the opulence of even the suburbs of America. If they want to see what America used to look like, they should visit Montreal.

The young people were nothing like the Americans of our past. We Baby Boomers were swept along by the current. Mike got married, as other friends got married, then I got married, and Bob lost his social group to other people’s weddings and babies, so Bob got married. Snap your fingers, and we were all married. In Montreal we stopped into Else’s bar to learn that back when we were children Else left her husband and family in middle age, moved to Montreal and opened the bar. Her picture is still on the wall, overlooking tables populated by young women who emulate her pioneering spirit in charting a course that leaves family behind. Our bartender is the lead singer of a feminist punk band. She explained that life is hard. She didn’t feel like she was ready to have children. She wondered, half out loud, how do you know? I told her she looked ready. She was beautiful. Her eyes jumped as wide as saucers. “You can’t say that here.?” My first thought was: I’m not drunk. I didn’t shoot my mouth off. What couldn’t I say here? I thought ‘here’ meant Canada, but perhaps it was the bar. She helped me by adding, “People don’t talk about that.” About looks? I had kept it generic. I hadn’t been looking at body parts the way I may have done, even involuntarily, forty years ago. Her surprise taught me the most. Everyone else she encountered must have already known the rules had changed. Now she had clued in this Boomer. Mike told me to keep quiet, meaning don’t go digging around to understand the offense. Taking a cue from my “silence is the beginning of wisdom” friend, I let her talk.

“I tour in America. They drive fast.” Her eyes told the story. Very fast. “I like the pace here. I like knowing that if something happens, if I can’t make it, I’ve got a net under me. Like, I can still get health care.”

As she spoke, I wondered if the confidence of youth eventually encounters the creep of time my great, great aunt had learned so well. This pretty girl, seemingly determined not to trade on the biology of her looks, had questioned her readiness for children at an age when some women begin to hear the ticking of a biological clock.

Bob had already left the bar. Mike had finished a second drink, and looked to me for whether I was up for another. I wanted to explain our lives to that girl who had asked about our marriages, and children, in between telling us of her grandfather’s farm in Alberta settled in the nineteenth century. It is hard to put a life into words. It is hard to explain the currents that led us to family formation, to bonds that don’t break, to a brotherhood across the years. My family is my social net. My friends. My faith.

I had already said one ‘wrong’ thing. How to explain my life in this bastion of feminist determination, in a city whose currents had diverted from those that had swept me along? I had already learned enough for one night. We surrendered to the years and moved on.

I woke early, said goodbye to Mike and Bob, then headed downtown to the Notre Dame cathedral, built as the center of a great and growing city in the breast of the New World, grounded in a Catholic faith that stood fast against the onslaught of British Protestantism and the American Way that we three friends championed against the graffiti of Montreal. The Mass was in French, but I knew every word, though I don’t speak French. They celebrated Mass at the city’s founding all those centuries ago, right at this very spot. It is the same Mass - which is why I understood it, not in my head, but in my heart. I said a prayer for my punk rocker, whom I met in that same geography of the heart, where the Mass lives. It is there that I find we are not so different after all.