I spent the last decade fleeing Montreal for the countryside during the summer.
I was stuck in my hometown for a long time, where I lived 365 days a year. As a student, and later as a young aspiring journalist, summer was the season to work, not to take vacations, to when it was difficult to find a job at McDo.
I covered festivals like a madman, in the heyday of paper newspapers when even an amateur puppet theater in the back of an alley could hope for an article. I wrote in the sweat of the heat waves, under the bombardment of fireworks, since I lived near the Jacques-Cartier bridge. I know it fills children’s hearts with joy, but the fireworks gave my parents’ dog seizures and made newborn babies howl.
I ended up suffering from acute festivalitis. At the end of I don’t know how many Just for Laughs galas, I hadn’t died laughing, I was depressed. All I dreamed of when the good weather arrived was to push myself into the woods to avoid this permanent party.
However, if there is a time of year when everything seems to be reborn, when everything seems possible, it is during the first heat after winter in this unloved city.
No matter how many orange cones, roadworks and rubbish there are, and despite this national sport of patting Montreal, there’s something in the air that makes this place irresistible as the June solstice approaches.
Is it the flowering of magnolias? The smell of lilacs? I always want to see again Eldorado by Charles Binamé who immortalized the summer of my 20th birthday. I activate my list of sunny musical classics that accompany my walks, A summer in Montreal by Dubmatique, spring summer by Jean Leloup The blues of the metropolis of Beau Pity…
But in the evening, I take off my headphones to hear the bursts of laughter on the balconies.
The real sound of Montreal.
This year, I feel a little more intoxicated by the smell of flowers than usual. Maybe because I moved three months ago to a street where there are a lot of them. Perhaps because there is no longer any question of the pandemic as well. My brain is in full reconfiguration, I swear, because it is the details of everyday life that are affected. I’m still looking for my dirty laundry basket in the house.
Here I am in this hated district of the province which was dominated by the very green Ferrandez. But the least radical people are the real ignoramuses who have the humility to confess their virginity. Just as people who have never smoked will always be less aggressive toward smokers than ex-smokers are, people like my boyfriend and I who never learned to drive or owned a car are much more lenient with drivers than are cyclists. We don’t cycle either, being true pedestrians, that is, at the bottom of the food chain, like plankton. Tanks and bicycles are also our predators, with different abilities to maim us.
We are such ignoramuses of the car that our opinion on the third link in Quebec was summed up, during all the time that the debate lasted, with “don’t know”. Montrealers without a driver’s license, it seems to me that we had nothing intelligent to say about it.
But there, living between Duluth and Mont-Royal avenues, which are pedestrianized, wedged between Mont Royal, Saint-Louis square and La Fontaine park, with these magnificent alleys as shortcuts, I can tell you that, as pedestrians , it is the foot.
I always want to go for a walk at any time, and it makes my little shih tzu very happy, especially since she has never met so many dogs.
But for the drivers, it must be hell. I expect my friends to come to my dinner parties in a bad mood after walking around in circles for hours.
Right now, the lover and I look like tourists in our own town. The last few months have been difficult, with the mourning of my in-laws, the move, the works. But the mere fact of going out every day in other streets changes our outlook, and therefore our mood. We are going to buy Quebec asparagus at the grocery store, stopping by the Port de tête bookstore, where I am unable to leave without having bought a book. The last time was A short guide to snooker by Mordecai Richler, the literary equivalent of Sugar Sammy once.
We went to eat at the Jardin de Panos, avenue Duluth, a childhood memory of my boyfriend with his late parents. The streets were invaded, revelers and families reunited, in a good-natured atmosphere. We strolled to a bench in the square Saint-Louis where, in the half-light, we necké like teenagers. Then we watched on the steps with the dog, like two gossips, observing the youth in its nightlife, which has been the same since the dawn of time.
What makes this city are its people. It is to them, much more than to the festivals, that the streets must belong.
We haven’t finished opening the moving boxes yet, there are still a lot of things to arrange in this old house. But it is not only for these reasons that we will stay more in Montreal this year. We want to reconnect with this city as with an ex whom we never stopped loving and whose secrets we know – almost – all.