Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Ode on a City Wall














I came to Montreal for the first time when I was 21. It was summer and I'd just spent a season planting trees in the bush, getting sunburned, blistered and bitten by blackflies.

The city was hot and steamy, full of traffic and bicycles. People crowded the parks and sidewalks and ate in restaurants that opened onto the street as if there wasn't enough room inside to contain so much life.

I ran through a sprinkler park wedged into the middle of a block of rowhouses, walked up and down the Main, bought beads in a shop by the bus station, drank the best coffee I'd ever had and ate things I'd never tasted before – Chilean avocado sandwiches and heart of palm salads. I was so hungry for all of it, for the whole city full of languages, the clatter of old Portuguese guys playing dominoes, the cold beer for sale at every dépanneur on every corner, the way people looked and talked and danced. I was in love.

I came back a year later. It was November. The city was frozen, snowless, bleak and ugly. I walked all over looking for traces of the things I loved. There were only grey streets, à louer signs in storefronts, barren rings of hockey rinks waiting for ice. Montreal was on the skids and I was without prospects, but somehow it was all exciting.

I got a job as a waitress and then as a reporter for a tiny newspaper that paid me by the column inch. At the top of my stories they misspelled my name. My roommate and I lived on reduced price cheeses from Vielle Europe and frozen perogis.

Our landlord controlled the heat in our cheap St.-Urbain apartment and it was the warmest place I'd ever have. I slept with my window cracked open; swaddled up in bed I could feel feathery snowflakes kiss my nose. We lit our kitchen and its ugly linoleum with a desk lamp and a string of fairy lights. Though the green shimmering Montreal I'd first met was nowhere to be found, it was still the early days of love. Nothing could get me down.






















The "i love you..." graffiti makes me think of all this. The first time I saw it, I crossed the street to get a better look. It was on the no-man's-land of St.-Viateur East, low-down, close to the sidewalk. The writing was loopy, the way a schoolgirl would write in a diary. Later I saw that sometimes the i was dotted with a heart. The words are always followed by a pensive dot, dot, dot.

I ask people in the neighbourhood if they've seen this writing and they nod and smile, saying, "Oh yeah..." as if it reminds them of something, too.

A note scrawled on a garage door or on a bit of stucco close to the ground. It's like a little valentine. The words are seed bombs that guerilla gardeners throw into fenced-off vacant lots, planting flowers in the cracks in the concrete. Like the hearts that someone (the same someone?) is putting in the stop lights, the messages are surprise gifts, company in an unexpected place.

But who is this, "I", this "you" ? I wonder.

There's something wistful about the loopy writing. Maybe it's the dot dot dot that sends me back to that time back when I first loved the city, before I ever got my bike stolen, or my brakes stolen off my bike, or my handlebars stolen off my bike, before I ever got sick of bagels and waiting for the bus. Back when I used to go out late and come home later and we seemed to subsist on beer and ginger candies; when our Greek landlord greeted us shouting, "Beautiful girls! Beautiful girls!" The way he pronounced girls made it sound like he was complimenting us for having breathing organs like fish.

I take pictures of the graffiti, which really seems too sweet and gentle to call graffiti. I start a small collection.

But after a while the writing on the wall turns into one more familiar thing that I actually know nothing about, like the mystery of so many of my neighbours. Where does he go every day? Why does she leave the lights on all night? What are their actual jobs?

Then I notice the i love yous are fragile. When I go back and try to find them again, I discover they've been scrawled on top of or painted over.

That's to be expected, not much stands still, untouched. Bikes get stolen and my giddy infatuation has turned into something more complex. Yet in the noisy blur of snow plows and bike thieves, someone is out there, writing love on the wall, surprising us and triggering a thousand different thoughts with the words and the dot dot dot...


8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wonderful! Enough to make me (almost) miss Montreal, that heartbreaking hodgepodge...

Unknown said...

Poetic, Sarah. I love the picture at the beginning and the opportunity to think about those messages and the stop lights.

thx

LBE said...

You've made me fall in love with Montreal all over again...

PaulS said...

hey, i see the same graffitti all over Toronto! very similar "font", too....hmmm....

GE(T)OFF said...

Beautiful piece, even if it does remind me of my stolen bikes.

Really glad I found this blog, looking forward to more.

Unknown said...

it was a pleasure meeting you at the party a few weeks back and now to discover your stories ... what a treat!

Anonymous said...

awww... this post is my favourite so far. love what you're doing. love ... dot dot dot...

jencap said...

something is out there. indeed, and still. yes.