Tomber et Revenir
(Update: I'll be in Seattle from July 20-30. If you are reading this, there is a pretty good chance you have a means of getting hold of me and would love to hang out. If somehow you don't have a way to contact me, you can use garbage.today [at] pm.me)
So revisiting the cliffhanger of my last post, my grandmother indeed go missing:
Despite assigned police detectives, a Silver Alert [[1]], and some social media machinations that involved getting a 400,000 follower Twitter account to broadcast said alert, it wasn't until the hospital called that we learned she had fallen while shopping.
Taking a tumble (tomber) and having a stroke is almost exactly how her first husband died, but with the benefit of good luck and almost 30 years of medical advancement, she is up and walking.
Effectively powerless to do anything useful 1100 miles away[[2]], I tried to concentrate on my French class. Luckily, it's been helpfully distracting lately:
Either because the weather has become lovely or we are at a level where it is no longer completely embarrassing to speak French in public, we've had two outings.
The first was with our animateur [[3]], Julien. Different groups were assigned different days for different neighborhoods in the city, and I ended up in Centre Ville (downtown, basically).
A cool part of being in an Empire (British or American) is that, at any given moment, you probably aren't too far from a monument to a truly despicable war. Seattle has Volunteer Park (see the brutal subjugation of the Philippines) and here in Montreal we have Dorchester Square (apropos the Boer War, with its widespread use of concentration camps).
Right next to Dorchester Square is the Sun Life building, which is where the British stashed a huge amount of their liquid cash reserves in 1940 when it appeared super likely England would be invaded/conquered by the Nazis. I'm not joking.
Finally, you almost can't go anywhere in Montreal without running into an enormous church. Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral is merely the third largest church in the province and its design and location appeared to be primarily inspired by spite [[4]] (Wikipedia).
The construction of the cathedral was ordered by Mgr. Ignace Bourget, second bishop of Montreal....His choice to create a scale model of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome was in response to a rivalry with the Sulpician order who had been the feudal seigneurs of Montreal, and with the Anglican Church, both of which favoured the Neo-Gothic style instead. The site also sparked controversy due to its location in the western part of downtown, in a then predominantly English neighbourhood far from the homes of the French-Canadian church-goers.
My brain has been broken by Dark Souls so I had to resist the urge to dodge-roll through the pulpits. Two things of note: the separate places for French and English prayers (a bottle of beer having been placed in the latter) and yet another callout to a brutal imperial conflict (the Anglo-Zulu War).
This is long enough so I'll cover the other outing in the next post. For now, you have to give the people what they want:
[[1]]: A version of the Amber Alert but for the elderly (personnes âgée)
[[2]]: I briefly considered flying out but (1) both my mother and aunt were on it and (2) the government language schools will 100% kick you out of the classes for missing more than like two days - they are paying you, and there is a long line of people waiting
[[3]]: As previously mentioned there isn't really a direct translation - an animateur/animatrice on a radio show would be called a "host". In the context of the class, it's basically someone who throws activities at us rather than gives instruction
[[4]]: As covered previously, spite is probably my favorite motivation for the building of historic edifices
