Montreal/Toronto

Kingston, Canada

                    Christmas 2005: Montreal, Québec City, Mont Tremblant, Ottawa, Kingston, Toronto… Sightseeing has become a wearisome parade of old churches, historic monuments, and kitschy souvenir shops. Even Niagara Falls seemed lackluster, as much from the grey winter light as from the hotel/casino perched right on its banks. It is Nature drained of the Kantian sublime, completely incorporated within the city, and turned into an urban spectacle like some Las Vegas attraction.

Niagara Falls

                    We live in an immigrant ghetto of Montreal, a hub where Filipinos come to roost after caring for the young and elderly of posh French and Jewish neighborhoods. It’s quite disorienting to pick up Tagalog and Bisaya, or even more obscure Philippine dialects, dislocated from their sun-drenched origins. Their diction, like florid birds-of-paradise, does not quite belong among the stolid architecture of the Second Empire…

                    But now it is New Year’s Day in an apartment in Toronto. We plan to drive back six hours straight to Montreal, and hopefully convalesce from the past two weeks with my remaining days in Canada. It would be a needed pause, a break, a vacation from my vacation. It’s a lot of work to be traveling with a large party, as most Filipinos do. I require the steadying quiet of solitude, something perhaps like the soul-clearing silence and space an old church provides. Perhaps I’ll go back and just sit at the Notre Dame de Montrèal, where we heard mass in French on Christmas Day, and just gaze at the ceiling, painted a vivid turquiose-blue to honor its patroness, Mary, and to imitate the sky (ciel)—a formal reproduction that ever reminds the faithful, even in winter, the real sky is out there, high above, beyond the grey.

(Gainesville, FL, 2007)