Gathering Change
Bonjour!
It's Easter Monday here in Canada. Many businesses and all public offices were closed here three days ago for Easter Friday, and now today for Easter Monday. Realizing this morning that I'm unable to go and pick up the package I was given a delivery slip for last week made me think a lot about various contrasts between Canada and the United States.
The US doesn't give today off as a national holiday unless you live in the New England area where some states celebrate "Patriot Day", also known as "ah heck our taxes are due! Let's close the area post offices to give ourselves one more day." That sort of attitude is a strong example of how humans make the world they live in. Better said, we make the world in which we live, getting to, as a group, decide things like when to just take the day off from work.
I've never been overly swayed by holidays. Especially since my occupations have only sometimes matched themselves around calendar or clock events. Keeping track of school schedules is based on a weekly awareness rather than a daily one. And besides school I don't consistently participate in regularly occurring social events (like church, or Elks' Club, or Meetings of the Masons) so its always been hard for me to know when holidays would even happen. Here in Montreal I very happily get to ignore most of these special days. There aren't very many of the conglomerate chain stores that push holiday products like in the United States--Walmart, Target, or major Grocery Stores. So my contact with marketing is limited and occasionally entire months will go by without me clearly knowing what season I'm even a part of.
This lack of attachment to a calendar or clock has its disadvantages. The city streets are cleaned on a bi-weekly schedule here in Montreal and I rarely know when I'm supposed to move my car to the opposite side of the street in order to avoid getting a parking ticket. Garbage occurs twice a week too and being a graduate student that rarely goes outside I often don't even have the visual signal of garbage bags on the sidewalks to remind me to put the junk out.
Recycling is an interesting story here though. Once a week the whole city puts its recyclable goods on the sidewalk. A large multi-sectioned truck drives through the neighborhoods picking up and separating recyclables as it goes. The trucks never arrive until mid-day but everyone puts their neatly sectioned green bins out on the sidewalk first thing in the morning. Plastic, aluminum, and glass can all be submitted to neighborhood grocery stores in exchange for money. So at different times throughout the morning older people can be seen pulling a two-wheeled cart full of bags behind them and picking through all the green bins to gather up what they can exchange for cash. It's an interesting sort of spontaneous social program. The people I see doing this are always older and towing a cart. My street is full of young twenty and thirty something year olds and a grocery store is less than a block away. But somehow we all just put the recyclables out so other people that need the help more can gather their potential change.
As a result of this recycling-exchange process, Rachel and I have our very own Turner Girl. I have to admit to not quite knowing what this means. Except that a woman with short white hair and teeth so worn they're pointy comes to my house every three weeks or so to ask if I have a collection of bottles that I've saved just for her. In exchange for my giving her how ever many bottles I have, she puts what she called "an urbain on my electric bill" and gives my house an adjustment. It took twenty minutes of her and I talking things over on my front house steps for me to have any sense of what she meant by giving me an urbain. At first I thought she was describing some sort of social program where we really could get discounts on power for offering up our bottles. But eventually I realized that this woman meant she would do what she believes to be an energy adjustment on my house. She's done it several times now by simply tapping the handrail up my front steps and up my inside house steps three times in slightly different ways. She's very insistent that for my sake she must do it. A few weeks ago I found a piece of gold foil that she'd placed between the gap at the top of my hand rail and the wall of my house. Through the foil the railing and the house now meet. This winter I was sick into the beginning of March. Right at the beginning of March she very insistently knocked on my door. I didn't have any bottles that day. Though I told her she didn't have to she made her way into my front door and then tapped my inside hand rail and smiling at me said, "Enjoy your comfort." Within a few days I stopped being sick and finally started choosing to change my environment by cleaning up my house.
Some things are the same here in Canada as in the United States. Taxes are due in both countries on the 15th of April. Gasoline comes in three different grades. Kids sell chocolates as fund raisers for various causes.
Rachel and I will be spending our summer in Alaska to be with family and Justin, the man I'm dating. I'm still finishing up my academic year here in Montreal but have already focused in on a dissertation area to work in and subjects of specialization to study. Words and thoughts from poems have been bouncing (sometimes banging) around in my head so I'm looking forward to writing this summer too.
So much love to all of you!
Enjoy your comfort,
Elaine
Oh! And I forgot to say that I came upon something in the grocery store today called "Cretons classique" in the shape of a bunny. It looked just like it was an Easter Rabbit made out of either Almond Paste or Halvah but when I looked at the ingredient list it turned out to be made of ground up Pork, Wheat Crumbs, and Onions.
Cheers!
Elaine
It's Easter Monday here in Canada. Many businesses and all public offices were closed here three days ago for Easter Friday, and now today for Easter Monday. Realizing this morning that I'm unable to go and pick up the package I was given a delivery slip for last week made me think a lot about various contrasts between Canada and the United States.
The US doesn't give today off as a national holiday unless you live in the New England area where some states celebrate "Patriot Day", also known as "ah heck our taxes are due! Let's close the area post offices to give ourselves one more day." That sort of attitude is a strong example of how humans make the world they live in. Better said, we make the world in which we live, getting to, as a group, decide things like when to just take the day off from work.
I've never been overly swayed by holidays. Especially since my occupations have only sometimes matched themselves around calendar or clock events. Keeping track of school schedules is based on a weekly awareness rather than a daily one. And besides school I don't consistently participate in regularly occurring social events (like church, or Elks' Club, or Meetings of the Masons) so its always been hard for me to know when holidays would even happen. Here in Montreal I very happily get to ignore most of these special days. There aren't very many of the conglomerate chain stores that push holiday products like in the United States--Walmart, Target, or major Grocery Stores. So my contact with marketing is limited and occasionally entire months will go by without me clearly knowing what season I'm even a part of.
This lack of attachment to a calendar or clock has its disadvantages. The city streets are cleaned on a bi-weekly schedule here in Montreal and I rarely know when I'm supposed to move my car to the opposite side of the street in order to avoid getting a parking ticket. Garbage occurs twice a week too and being a graduate student that rarely goes outside I often don't even have the visual signal of garbage bags on the sidewalks to remind me to put the junk out.
Recycling is an interesting story here though. Once a week the whole city puts its recyclable goods on the sidewalk. A large multi-sectioned truck drives through the neighborhoods picking up and separating recyclables as it goes. The trucks never arrive until mid-day but everyone puts their neatly sectioned green bins out on the sidewalk first thing in the morning. Plastic, aluminum, and glass can all be submitted to neighborhood grocery stores in exchange for money. So at different times throughout the morning older people can be seen pulling a two-wheeled cart full of bags behind them and picking through all the green bins to gather up what they can exchange for cash. It's an interesting sort of spontaneous social program. The people I see doing this are always older and towing a cart. My street is full of young twenty and thirty something year olds and a grocery store is less than a block away. But somehow we all just put the recyclables out so other people that need the help more can gather their potential change.
As a result of this recycling-exchange process, Rachel and I have our very own Turner Girl. I have to admit to not quite knowing what this means. Except that a woman with short white hair and teeth so worn they're pointy comes to my house every three weeks or so to ask if I have a collection of bottles that I've saved just for her. In exchange for my giving her how ever many bottles I have, she puts what she called "an urbain on my electric bill" and gives my house an adjustment. It took twenty minutes of her and I talking things over on my front house steps for me to have any sense of what she meant by giving me an urbain. At first I thought she was describing some sort of social program where we really could get discounts on power for offering up our bottles. But eventually I realized that this woman meant she would do what she believes to be an energy adjustment on my house. She's done it several times now by simply tapping the handrail up my front steps and up my inside house steps three times in slightly different ways. She's very insistent that for my sake she must do it. A few weeks ago I found a piece of gold foil that she'd placed between the gap at the top of my hand rail and the wall of my house. Through the foil the railing and the house now meet. This winter I was sick into the beginning of March. Right at the beginning of March she very insistently knocked on my door. I didn't have any bottles that day. Though I told her she didn't have to she made her way into my front door and then tapped my inside hand rail and smiling at me said, "Enjoy your comfort." Within a few days I stopped being sick and finally started choosing to change my environment by cleaning up my house.
Some things are the same here in Canada as in the United States. Taxes are due in both countries on the 15th of April. Gasoline comes in three different grades. Kids sell chocolates as fund raisers for various causes.
Rachel and I will be spending our summer in Alaska to be with family and Justin, the man I'm dating. I'm still finishing up my academic year here in Montreal but have already focused in on a dissertation area to work in and subjects of specialization to study. Words and thoughts from poems have been bouncing (sometimes banging) around in my head so I'm looking forward to writing this summer too.
So much love to all of you!
Enjoy your comfort,
Elaine
Oh! And I forgot to say that I came upon something in the grocery store today called "Cretons classique" in the shape of a bunny. It looked just like it was an Easter Rabbit made out of either Almond Paste or Halvah but when I looked at the ingredient list it turned out to be made of ground up Pork, Wheat Crumbs, and Onions.
Cheers!
Elaine
posted by hawkbrwn at 5:44 p.m.
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