The fine art of resurfacing

The resurfacing of Cote St-Antoine is finally done. For a while anyway. The heavy machinery has fallen silent, the dust is settling and, little by little, the cowering citizens of NDG are timidly emerging to reclaim their front gardens and footpaths.

It wasn't quite a war zone but what a bloody noise those machines made! Worst of all was the orange brute identified on its flank as a Hamm HD+ 140 High Frequency. In this picture it looks almost benign, and its name reminds me of a HiFi audio component. But it flattened tarmac to a brutal soundtrack.

The Hamm HD+ 140 High Frequency

It hit with two distinct sonic impacts simultaneously: the first a low frequency rumble felt in the chest (amplified in the swimming pool water where I'd taken refuge so that it almost took my breath away); the second a high-pitched whine that a Boeing would be proud of, that rose and fell and, just when you believed it had ended, rose again.

The noise was exhausting, draining, but the workers seemed not to notice it. They wore no ear protection at all. (Nor did they wear anything over their noses and mouths against the dust and fumes, or anything to cover their bare arms and necks in the fierce heatwave that ambushed us this June). Their work looked and sounded violent but was so precise: the thickness of each layer of tarmac carefully measured by one of them every few seconds as he stabbed the tarmac with a stiletto ruler, a second wielded a spirit level to check the camber from roadside to crown and along the channels leading to each drain. Most impressively the driver maneuvered the giant roller to within millimetres of each path.

Their last day, Friday, was a long one as they rushed to finish: 7 am to 7.30 pm. Next week they'll undoubtedly invade another neighbourhood in a blitzkrieg of resurfacing. But for us on Cote St-Antoine the rest of the summer is, hopefully, silence.

The Coal Hole

The coal hole was the dark closet under the stairs of my childhood home in Crumlin. I would crawl in between the winter coats to sit down beside the hoover, staying still in the close darkness for hours with only the sound of my own breathing for company. 

There was no longer any coal there - there may never have been any - but there was certainly a faint yet sharp odour of gas from the metre. But mostly it smelled of my Dad's old coats, a comforting smell, the smell of him, of home. The ancient crombie overcoat which, though well-worn through many years, he still considered to be his best coat. A view most emphatically not shared by my mother. Various anoraks which he'd forgotten he had. And most impressively to my young eyes, his brown leather motorbike jacket, thick and heavy, and with it his old helmet and goggles.

My Dad's old motorbike had long gone by this stage. It wasn't very practical as transportation for a family of four. After a decade standing unused and forlorn in the garden, green, grimy, and rusting, he sold the old Sunbeam S7 to a passing dealer who restored it to the point that we saw it on display with other vintage motorbikes in the St. Patrick's Day parade. But my Dad always and forever considered himself a biker, as evidenced by his ownership of that jacket, even if he no longer possessed a bike. 

In my teen years I was often annoyed at Dad, for lots of trivial teenage reasons. Later, when I got over myself and wanted to talk to him, my Dad proved difficult to connect with. He adopted a persona for each situation, and with me he was always the parent. It was hard to get through to the real him, whoever that was, and I never really succeeded.

I've heard it said that it's in the effort to not be like our parents that we become most like them. As a teenager I resolved that I would be a biker, that I'd have the coolest and most uncompromising sports motorcycle, and that's exactly how it worked out. I had several bikes, each as red and deafening as a fire-engine and just as alarming to my wife. And of course, I had matching one-piece leathers and helmet. But the truth is, my bikes weren't very practical as transportation for a family of five. Eventually my Honda VFR750F stood covered in the shed for a decade before I finally sold it - and then only because the shed was being rebuilt and I had nowhere to store it. For I still considered myself a biker, and the bike represented that. Now it's gone. But I still have the red leathers and helmet, stored carefully in the space we call the cedar closet, a space I've seen my youngest son snuggle into on top of the bags of duvets and pillows.

What do we leave behind us when we die? Memories in the minds of those who knew us, a few material things we possessed that invoke those memories. Mannerisms and phrases, maybe even a predisposition to certain choices that we unwittingly pass on to our children. Things that we ourselves inherited.

I wonder what my children will remember of me.

 

Coronavirus: week 1 thoughts

'In years to come, let them say of us: when things were at their worst, we were at our best.'

- Leo Varadkar, St. Patrick's Day 2020 television address

'History is new, my friends, and we are all of us making it, all the time, together.

- John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed

'I never thought I'd say this, but I wish I was at school.'

- Philou, over bedtime milk and biscuits this evening

We don't want the aliens to think we're idiots

One morning this week little (no longer at all little) Philou asked me: 

'Dad, what's a parsec?'

Our conversations often begin like this, a subject coming out of the blue.

'It's a unit of distance', I said, delighted to have one of those increasingly rare moments with my children to show off my brilliance. 'A parsec is a few light years.'

This is the sort of topic I geek out on.

'You're wrong Dad, 'cos in Star Wars they use it to talk about time', he replied.

Well that can't be right. So we dug out the wikipedia article where it says plainly that a parsec is a unit of distance, and also that it's used incorrectly as a time unit in the first Star Wars film.

'So why do we need parsecs if we have light-years?', Philou continued.

'Well', I replied, 'if we were to meet aliens in a distant star system and tried to explain where we came from using light-years, they'd just think we were idiots!'

Imagine the conversation as humans encounter an alien on a faraway planet.

'We come in peace', our earthling spacemen might say.

'Cool! Where exactly do you come from?', the aliens might ask.

'Oh, a blue planet called Earth, a few light-years that way', we'd reply. 'You know, the distance light travels in a year'.

'The speed of light, gotcha', the aliens would say. 'That's a universal constant. But what's a year?'

Well that is indeed the killer question alright.

'A year is how how long it takes our planet Earth to orbit our sun. Well sort of, it actually takes a bit longer than that so every 4th year is 1/365th longer, called a leap year. But we don't use light-leap-years. Well actually we don't use years to measure light-years at all, we use metres per second. A metre is how far light travels in 1/1299792458th of a second. Seconds are 1/86400th of a day - a day is the time it takes our planet to rotate once on its axis. Well sort of, it actually takes a bit longer than that so we have leap seconds. So we've redefined a second as the ground state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom which in hertz is 9192631770 when...'

'Oh you guys are idiots!", interrupt the exasperated aliens. "How did you ever find your way here at all'.

And that's why we have parsecs. All our alien needs to understand is the concept of a circle and a little trigonometry, both probably understood by any intelligent life form, and then we can tell him how far away earth is in parsecs.

A parsec is the distance at which one astronomical unit subtends an angle of one arcsecond.

Like this:

How cool is that? (OK so there's teeny bit more complexity - see the parsec wikipedia article - but still!)

If you must know, a parsec is around 3.26 lightyears - but let's not go there again.

Roddy Lumsden, 1966 - 2020

Many years ago I searched the internet for famous Lumsdens. There weren't many. But I found a Scottish poet, Roddy. How likely was it that this relatively unknown poet I'd found was any good?

He was brilliant. Poems of dazzling wit and wordplay. And then I heard him read aloud in soft Scottish tones, and I loved his work even more. Over time he became quite celebrated, appearing on BBC radio, referenced by other poets as an influence on them.

Around 2014 he disappeared from public view. Finally I saw him again in a YouTube video giving a reading of new work in 2017, looking haggard and old beyond his years, though his new poems were as vibrant as always.

He died last month, just 53 years old.

His poem "The Young", an ode to youth that catches the breath, is so poignant now.

One cartwheel over the quicksand curve 
of Tuesday to Tuesday and you’re gone, 
summering, a ship on the farthest wave.

He reads it beautifully here, in a recording that I hope never ever disappears from the internet. 

RIP Roddy.

Austerlitz, again

It's the book to which I continually return. I'm often aware of it swirling around in my mind like music, below the level of my consciousness, sombre and profound as a cello concerto.

Austerlitz by W.G.Sebald

Sebald died in a car crash just a month after his masterpiece was published in November 2001. So when we come to its end there is nothing more. The rest is, literally, silence. Unless we return to its beginning, which I do every few years.

Impossible to summarise but I'll try anyway. Jacques Austerlitz, 4 years old, is evacuated from Nazi-controlled Prague on a Kindertransport, never to see his Jewish parents again. His new life is in Wales, raised by a Calvinist preacher, his Jewish identity and all traces of his earlier life overwritten. Only when middle-aged does he come to realise what happened to him and sets off on a search for his former life. That's the plot, such as it is. It's also a book about monstrous buildings in old European cities, their architecture and morality, about the connection between mental illness and authenticity, about friendship and the barriers that prevent us individuals from truly understanding each other. And above all it's about the Holocaust, a shadow that darkens all time and every space, yet only seen obliquely. Sebald said: 

I've always felt that it was necessary above all to write about the history of persecution, of  vilification of minorities, the attempt well nigh achieved to eradicate a whole people. And I was, in pursuing these ideas, at the same time conscious that it's practically impossible to do this, to write about concentration camps [...] so you need to find ways of convincing the reader that this is something that is on your mind, but that you do not necessarily roll out on every other page  

[from Bookworm Dec 6, 2001 Hosted by Michael Silverblatt]

That quote comes from a remarkable audio interview with Sebald that was recorded in those last four weeks of his life after the publication of his masterpiece. I found it by chance, and was delighted to hear him speak in sentences as sonorous as his prose.

Sebald is asked about the significance of the moths that feature in several scenes and he refers to a description of dying moths in a work by Virginia Woolf. He says:

[...] her description of a moth, coming to its end, on a window pane somewhere in Sussex, and this is a passage of some two pages only, written somewhere chronologically speaking between the battle fields of the Somme and the concentration camps erected by my compatriots. And there is no reference to the battle fields of the Somme in this passage but one knows, as a reader of Virginia Woolf, that she was greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the damage it did to people's souls, the souls of those who got away and naturally of those who perished. So I think that a subject which at first glance seems quite some way from the undeclared concern of a book can encapsulate that concern

[from Bookworm Dec 6, 2001 Hosted by Michael Silverblatt]

Virginia Woolf is another author to whom I often return, to her novel Mrs Dalloway in particular, and certain similarities between Woolf and Sebald struck me in this interview. They both weave a novel around an "undeclared concern", seeing it obliquely from a perspective that adds to our understanding of it, shining a light on the seemingly trivial to show that it is anything but. And they do this with prose that is delicate and precise, and so sharp it catches you off-guard and cuts deep.

Each time I read Austerlitz it is a different part of it that leaves the greatest impression on me. I've been haunted by the images of the wide-eyed creatures of the Nocturama at the Antwerp Zoo, and the story of the concentration camp at Theresienstadt where Jacques' mother Agata was interned.  Somehow it was only on my most recent reading that I was struck by the story of Jacques' best friend, Gerald Fitzpatrick, at whose home Jacques often stayed and whose passion for flying leads to his death, an event that he and we can see on the horizon long before it arrives. Gerald is of Irish stock, and the opening of Yeat's poem "An Irish Airman foresees his Death" fits him well:

I know that I shall meet my fate  

Somewhere among the clouds above;  

Those that I fight I do not hate,  

Those that I guard I do not love;

At the novel's conclusion Austerlitz takes his leave of the narrator to continue his search and, in the novel's compressed time where past and present mingle, it seems to me that he may still be searching now, wandering amongst the brooding train stations and fortresses of old Europe that have borne witness to such terrible times.

In another interview Sebald recounted how he had watched a documentary about a real Kindertransport child, Susi Bechhöfer, and used some elements of her story in his novel. She was adopted by a Calvinist minister in Wales and only re-discovered her origins as an adult. She suffered appalling abuse from her step family and her biography is a harrowing read, though most of her story is quite different from that of the fictional Austerlitz. She was unhappy that Sebald used elements of her life in his novel, but his death prevented her from making that known to him.

Perhaps Susi Bechhöfer felt that her identity had been stolen from her for a second time, and that's a thought that upsets me. I felt that on behalf of Sebald the least I could do was to buy her biography and place it on my bookshelf next to my prized first US edition of Austerlitz. So when I next pick up Austerlitz I will also think of Susi, imagine her to life again, and think of her as the person, the little girl, she spent a lifetime seeking.

Rosa's Child: One Woman's search for her Past
by Jeremy Josephs and Susi Bechhöfer

Parenting milestones

I used to hold my children's hands when they crossed the road. It was a brief stage in our lives together, dad and child. Only a short time they could go to the park without me. Now it's been a long time since I held their hands in mine. 

I used to read them bedtime stories, sometimes the same story on a hundred nights, until they could read for themselves. I still know every word of "The Gruffalo" off by heart, but they only dimly remember it, if at all.

These were parenting milestones: my children developing their own skills, becoming independent. At the time, these milestones passed by without me noticing. I don't remember the very last time I held T's hand to cross the road, or the last night I read P a bedtime story. If I had known in the precise moment, that it was the last time, I would have been blinking away tears. It was definitely better for my mental health that I only saw the milestone afterwards when looking back. 

Today I signed T up for another summer of soccer, just like I've done every year in the past decade. But I didn't sign L up, as he's over 18 now. Last Autumn, as his team progressed through the championship, I knew that when the season ended I would no longer be bringing him to matches around Montreal, watching him play, cheering him on, shouting at the referee that he'd been fouled. His final underage game was on a Sunday morning in September, and in the warm Autumn sunshine I had a lump in my throat and blinked away a few tears as we celebrated winning the Montreal U18A regional championship. His last game of underage soccer, my last day as his biggest fan. The milestone was right there, looming over me.

I love being a Dad but some moments are bittersweet.

This morning L said he might want to be a referee this Summer. Maybe I'll follow him around, if he'll let me, show my appreciation for the referee when he makes the right call for offside. The referee's biggest fan. 

P.S. And then the pandemic happened and some milestones were missed, never to be seen again.