Decorative Pillars and Fries

Bonjour!

A few days ago a decorative (and not supporting) pillar on the front of the Law Building, where I now have my research and study desk, collapsed. When the red stone pillar still stood, it served as an honorarium to the man the Law Library is named after, Nahum Gelber. Support pillar or not, a one and a half story high collection of red rock creates a mighty tumble when it falls over and through a story and a half high window of glass. The entire kafafel occurred early this week just ten minutes prior to when I would have been walking through that very hallway and door. The crazy part of the story, if you can imagine that we haven't hit that point already, is how the pillar fell over.

Montreal keeps it streets and sidewalks clean in the snow-less months with small, ATV-sized, open cars that carry a large collection box on the back and a one-foot in diameter suction tube on the side and the front. The tube moves about like an elephant's trunk, flexible and far-reaching, sucking up leaves along the ground and depositing them in the collection box at the back. As any motorized vehicle would, the elephant-trunk, leaf-sucking, ATV-sized, open-topped car has a slight vibration to it. Earlier this week, the driver of one such vehicle was motoring about in front of the Nahum Gelber Law Library and paused to elephant up some leaves. The vibration of the machine, it turned out, was enough to rattle the decorative pillar right down through the front entrance of the library itself. The vehicle did NOT attempt to suction up the pillar rocks afterwards. Remarkably, not a single person was hurt.

Those of us that arrived on the scene shortly thereafter were VERY BRIEFLY explained the situation and told to cross the entire length of the building in the opposite direction to leave through the West facing door. Now, several days later, the window has been replaced but the security of the other decorative pillar operating as honorarium to the name of Nahum Gelber has not been determined so we continue to enter through other passageways.

This past Monday, also known as Canadian Thanksgiving, was spent in Burlington, Vermont. Rachel and I were all day at the University of Vermont Children's Hospital. In August it was discovered that Rachel has, what appear to be, surprisingly large lymph nodes in her neck. Because of the apparent swelling she was immediately given a blood test and it was determined that her lymphocites and nutriphils were irregular in a similar way as they would be with the early stages of Leukemia. I was cautioned that Leukemia was unlikely (since it is rare) but that it would be essential for me to get a follow-up blood test this Fall in Montreal.

Unable to find adequate health care for Rachel here on the Ile de Montreal, I located a facility Stateside and drove there for an all day session of examination. It turned out Rachel's blood levels had returned to normal but the lymph nodes were still surprisingly large and so they began screening her for Lymphoma instead. I was again cautioned that it was unlikely she actually had Lymphoma (since it is rare) but that it would be necessary to perform chest x-rays and neck ultrasounds to make sure, and that a lymph node biopsy was being considered. The doctor gave me three possible reasons for her enlarged lymph nodes (Lymphoma being one of them), each of which demanded repetitive follow up visits with doctors and at least one round of antibiotics. The tests were performed and then at 7 PM we were sent on our way told we'd hear back from the doctor once the Pediatric Oncologist had the chance to confer with the Pediatric Surgeon.

Gratefully Rachel was unaware of my level of concern during the visits. She's curious enough that the tests offered her a storm of potential questions to ask. Our friend Brian drove with us to Burlington as well and his presence offered her the chance to focus on playing games with him.

I finally heard from the doctor late Wednesday afternoon and will confess that by the time I received the phone call I'd skipped two classes, unable to cope with the idea of sitting still at a table discussing Hobbes' State of Nature, or the use of Thought Experiments in Fiction when I wasn't sure of my daughter's health.

It turns out Rachel is completely fine. In fact, she's extremely healthy. I got to see what the inside of her chest, abdomen, and neck look like. Not to mention what the buttons of a dress I wore as a little girl, that Rachel now happily wears, look like on an x-ray. What mother has the chance to claim that? What the doctors were sure were enlarged lymph nodes turned out to be a cluster of all-normal size lymph nodes quite close together. The bumps in her neck really do *feel* abnormally sized, but the ultrasound proved even the largest is within normal range. So she has weirdly clustered lymph nodes. That's the diagnosis. As a friend of mine put it, what can we ask of our kids but that they be weird but healthy?

Rachel also turned seven yesterday. She told me when I picked her up from school that she was having the best birthday ever. Her teacher let her choose three French songs for the class to sing in celebration, and then the teacher surprised her with two more songs in English. We went last night with three of our adult friends for a dinner of Fries (they actually originate in Belgium, you know. The American that brought them back to the States made a mistake when he named them.) and Burgers. Of the five of us there, it turned out only one person didn't speak French. Guess who that one person was, not Rachel. She spoke 2/3 of the meal in French with a beautiful Quebecois accent. Turns out along with turning seven she's gotten over the idea that she doesn't know French. Turns out she knows a lot of it.

So, Rachel's still healthy and energetic and very happy. With the collection of recent events in my life, I have to admit I've rattled loose most of my decorative pillars. The structural pillars that hold me are still standing and sturdy--my family, my friendships. Will Durant said "La famille est le noyau de la civilisation." Let's add, "et l'amitie" to that. Incidentally, though his mother was French-Canadian, I'm not sure he actually wrote that in French, but it sure sounds pretty that way.

(The family is the core of civilization. --Will Durant (And friendship.))

Love to you all,
Elaine

Rachel and I Still STILL Okay

Bonjour!

A little over a week ago an entire overpass in Montreal (in Laval, for those of you "in the know") collapsed *splat* flat to the ground. Five people were killed and several others seriously injured as they fell off the overpass into the resulting hole. A major throughway is now closed and the government owes the victims' families loads of money. In an attempt to reassure the public that all other bridges and overpasses in the area are actually still safe the head of Transportation and Safety made a speech and informed everyone, "We don't know what happened. We inspected it a year ago and everything was *fine*."

For those of you that were worried, Rachel and I were no where near the overpass. We have talked to a few people that live within a mile of it and they said the noise resulting from the collapse was remarkable. A couple of people actually thought a bomb had exploded.

Wednesday of this week, exactly two weeks to the day after the house break-in, someone broke into our car. They smashed out the front passenger side window and took my beautiful, sleek, black ipod. Gratefully all the music and shows on the ipod are still available through my laptop (which was *not* stolen and in fact no where near the car) so I didn't lose anything that way. The greater tragedy would have been losing access to such classics as Bruce Springsteen's _Born to Run_, or Prince's _Purple Rain_.

In expression of the strange nature of coincidence in my life, the same day the car break-in occurred some one also performed a hit and run on my car. It's even possible that it was the same person that performed the break-in. The Executive Director of the College of Management (did you catch that? The HEAD OF THE ENTIRE COLLEGE) at McGill witnessed the hit and run. He said the window was broken when the accident occurred and the person that hit my car was clearly trying to hurry up and get out of the area. It wasn't one of those accidentally bumping a car while parking maneuvers that I'm so prone to. Anyway, the car hitting my parked car, caused my parked car to collide with the car parked directly in front of mine, thus illustrating Hume's billiards example of what we think of as cause and effect in a contemporary fashion. Remarkably, neither my car nor the car in front of mine were actually damaged by the hit and run. My bumper is scuffed but I hadn't expected it to stay pretty, so ah well!

The Executive Director of the College of Management actually recorded the license plate of the hit and run vehicle and then walked three blocks through the rain (oh right, it was RAINING the day the window of my car got busted out) in order to get an envelope and then three blocks back through the rain so that he could leave the information on my car for me. When I called his office number he encouraged me to file a police report, even though there was no damage, because apparently a hit and run here in Quebec is taken very seriously and can result in a person losing their license and their car.

Quebecois service industries are known for their relative slowness in comparison to service industries in the United States. As a result I was worried it could take WEEKS to get my car window repaired much like it took THREE weeks to get my washing machine back (by the way, I have one now, they finally just replaced the one I'd had with a different working used one). But remarkably, an opening with the car place was available the very next morning and I got my car back with a new window all washed and vacuumed too by that evening. As they describe car detailing here, "We wash your car inside, we wash your car outside."

After this series of events I had to hurry to my landlords bank to make a rent check deposit and discovered that there was only one branch of the bank open after 3 PM. Desjardins is a Quebecois bank that was started out in the country specifically for people that would otherwise have a very difficult time opening a bank account. In maintaining this history, branches of Desjardins tend to be in very non-centralized areas of the city and the rest of Quebec. For example, the bank has refused to open a branch in the downtown or financial district of Montreal. The area is just too accessible proven by the fact that every other bank is located there. After driving across town to a neighborhood I'd never been to I arrived at the one open branch of the Desjardins to make my deposit only to discover that the name of the branch, "Desjardins Ukrainienne de Montreal," really actually meant that it was a Desjardins specifically for Ukrainian immigrants. The bank tellers turned out to all be bilingual with Ukrainian and Russian. Waiting in line I wasn't sure how the transaction would go for me. But it turned out the bank tellers were all polyglots speaking Ukrainian, Russian, French, and English (and who knows what else).

After leaving the bank I wandered into a little shop called "Montreal Ukraine Bazaar" only to discover that it was a second hand store well stocked with suede shirt jackets, French Romance Paperbacks, and records of Quebecois Ballads. I'm not sure where the Ukrainian parts fits into any of that.

Rachel was shocked that our car window had been broken out and just kept saying, "They can't do that! They can't do that!" Finally she settled on the idea that "They *can* do that" but she still hasn't figured out why they *would* do that and we talk about it a little everyday. For my part, the only thing that continues to shock me is the American Republican Party Scandals and even those don't seem to shine with the vigor of something new or original anymore.

After discovering my car on Wednesday I kept hearing the following words in my head: "You take the good. You take the bad. You take the rest, and then you have the facts of life. The facts of life." I told my friend Annemarie that I didn't know how people in their teens and early twenties are expected to cope with these random life events since they grew up without the guidance of these 80's TV Show Lyrics.

Recent events have made it all too clear how important it is to maintain a sense of awareness about the lives we actually live. After focusing on performing this sort of assessment this is what I've arrived at. I take the good: Rachel and I are quite a nice little family with strong connections to good friends all over the world. I take the bad: Our social systems are not enough to keep people from needing to steal from each other. I take the rest: I am able to eat everyday; I have a car available to be broken into and repaired. And there we have some of the facts of my life.

Hope you all are doing well! We miss you all the more!

All our Love,
Elaine and Rachel