Marie is the first neighbor I met when I moved to Des Érables after my separation. Most naturally, around a soccer ball, our sons of the same age began to play together. Like it or not, the friendship between two children builds bonds between mothers too. Otherwise, I don’t think I would have noticed it. Marie was probably never one to see first.
With her Mona Lisa smile on the edge of her lips that she only opens to speak in a low voice, my neighbor is discreet in her gestures as in her classic outfits that she wears under her cashier uniform in a Montreal Maxi. It was after secondary school that she started working there full time and never left. School has never been valued in her modest and dysfunctional environment and Marie has always “made do” with this job, “whatever anyone might think”, which she sometimes adds with her enigmatic Jocondian air when asked his job.
One day, she met a guy with whom she had her son. Everything happened very quickly. She found him distinguished. He expressed himself brilliantly too. When their little one was only a few months old, the lover returned to his country of origin to only give news on Messenger. It had to be temporary. However, the absence has lasted for seven years.
The little one seems happy. Mary too. We meet each other morning and evening at school, then at day camp in the summer. If our routes are the same, the means to achieve our ends are not. I have privileges that she doesn’t have. In winter, I see them waiting for the bus in their snowsuits, with bags in their arms. I have a car to get around. She is a single parent and without a solid network around her to take over and give a helping hand, while the father of my children honors her care half the time, in addition to being able to count on our helping families. They live in the basement of a dilapidated apartment building that the owner refuses to heat before the ground freezes, I have fun refinishing antiques to improve the decor of my condo… Marie is sweet and laughing with her son, I act like a fool when I have trouble in my forelock and I rush my children when the tide in the vase overflows. While dreaming of my next girls’ dinner, of course. Marie never has a break and it doesn’t show. When I don’t have “time for myself”, after a few days, that’s all it shows.
It seems like every time I’m on the verge of losing control, I run into Marie. She never speaks to me for long, but enough for me to perceive a call to order in the quiet strength that emanates from her entire being. In his Letter to Elizabeth (May 18, 1645), René Descartes wrote that “ [l]The difference between the greatest souls and those which are base and vulgar consists, principally, in the fact that vulgar souls give way to their passions, and are only happy or unhappy according to whether the things which happen to them are pleasant or unpleasant; instead of the others […] have satisfaction, within themselves, from all the things that happen to them, even the most unfortunate and unbearable ones.” Humbly, I would not go so far as to say that I belong to the group of “base and vulgar souls”, but I admit that Marie, like several others who rush a little more than me in these tough socio-economic times, knows how to deal with “unfortunate and unbearable things”. She knows how to deal with them, even to the point of having tamed them, over time…
By watching her go, I swallow my “discomforts”. In How do people do it?, Olivia de Lamberterie writes that “looking at your neighbor as yourself is not such stupid advice”. Just like “cultivating the taste of others, who are not like you, of a different opinion, of a background, of a different generation. The space between oneself dries up.” The other, in his differences, elevates us. I don’t know what I’m bringing to Marie, other than flowers in spring, but I will have to redouble my efforts this winter to live up to her.