We Foreigners

Festival of Lights, Chinese Garden at the Botanical Gardens, 2016

We try to go to Canada at least once a year; it’s important to escape from your own country every so often and the urge becomes almost desperate pretty much every four years. 

Getting out restores to the mind a spaciousness that gets lost when too engaged in the blow-by-blow horror show in our home country. It’s a strange relief to not have a clue about most of what’s going on around you because your grasp of the language everyone else is speaking is rudimentary or non-existent. It also impresses on you how very much other peoples have a nice sense of humor about themselves, and how very much we in the US don’t.

When you drive north headed for Montreal – Montreal, doncha know, can be a day-trip from our neck of the woods: when the Husband and I were younger and more energetic, we’d drive there just for supper  – and you get to the place where the Canadians decide whether or not to let you in, you get your first taste of a different sense of humor. 

One year, up we went in the van the Husband had painted what our local cop called “psychedelic,” and then covered completely with glued-on stuff: giant black flies, rubber chickens, rubber duckies, sunglasses, Star Wars figures, old CDs … lots and lots of stuff. We fully expected to be stopped, frisked down, thoroughly investigated before we were let over the border, if we were let over the border. The Canadian border cop took a look; got out of his booth; strolled slowly around the van once, twice, a third time; went back into his booth; looked thoughtful for a moment; then asked, “Why did you do that?” and waved us through.

For a distance you drive through mile after mile of very flat farmland. One year we were lucky enough to be there when the Canada geese were migrating. The fields, and the skies, were filled with thousands and thousands of geese, all headed south but stopping at these farms to rest and fill up on harvest gleanings on their way. It was amazing and awesome.

Suddenly, you’ll be outside the city, going over one of the magnificent bridges. Montreal is on an island, and it’s compact, orderly, and easy to drive around in.  You’ll need to change money – with any luck you’ll have an experience like I once did. “Oh,” I exclaimed to the Indian woman who was changing my drab US dollars for Canada’s bright-colored, newly plasticized, artistic folding money and a few double-ringed loonies, “Canadian money is so beautiful!” “Not to be insulting,” she patted my hand comfortingly and replied in perfect, French-by-way-of-India-accented English, “but your money is truly ugly.” 

There’s stuff in Montreal that’s like our stuff, but different; and there’s different stuff there that we don’t have. Brother regularly goes up on his motorcycle just to buy bagels. We always go to the semi-enclosed Jean Talon market, to buy vinegars and cheeses and chocolates and pickled wild mushrooms and other wonders we can’t get in the US, to eat and drink little bits here and there at the various stalls, to marvel at the amazing and gorgeous displays of vegetables and fruits that can’t go back over the border with us, but that we can gobble greedily on our way back to the States. There are colleges – why, we wonder, did it never occur to us to go to college there? There are people from everywhere. There’s lots and lots of art and music and performance – Cirque du Soleil! Jazz! Film! Street performers! There’s terrible Italian food and wonderful Indian food, and there’s French-Canadian food that puts me in a memory-spin of my grandmother LaLiberte. There’s a botanical garden with wondrous things in it, especially during the October lantern festival in the Chinese garden. There’s history, so much like ours, so much shared, and yet – so different.

And after years of traveling north, still so much to explore.

When you spend a day, or several days, trying to read signs in someone else’s language, and being grateful for the kind strangers who listen to you struggle to sound coherent in their language, then answer you kindly in your own language for the difficult bits and in their language for the parts they can tell you’ll understand, perspective shifts. The mind opens up, and so does the heart. We are surrounded by people who are fluent in several languages. We have navigated places and circumstances where we were not only not in control, but were quite uncertain. We’ve eaten things we can barely pronounce.

All photos c Charley Freiberg, 2016

We’ve needed to rely on the kindness of strangers.  We’ve needed to ask for help. We’ve been grateful, not once, but many times. We’ve marveled at differences and similarities. We’ve fallen in love with the light, the smells, the sensations, the energy of a strange place.

We go home to dream of northern light, of Quebecois lilt. We aren’t – quite - the same people who left New Hampshire in the morning. 

Originally published in The Concord Monitor, November 20, 2016, as “Canada: A Love Story.”