living in a tit

Some years ago I was sitting with a senior writer at a prestigious writing school. She wanted to know where I lived. I told her Montreal. She asked me to draw it.
I suspected a game but I obliged. I drew the island of Montreal which lies in the St. Lawrence River.

You'll have to excuse my drawing skills which are primitive. That's the shape, more or less. I've included the north-south axis to indicate a peculiarity of life in Montreal, which is that everyone pretends the bottom end of the island points west, the top end east, etc. That bottom end is called the West Island. The bulge is referred to as the south of the island. When you're on the island--and considering that you're in an urban environment where most people don't notice where the sun rises and sets--it makes perfect sense. It's only when you look at the map on paper that you see the West Island isn't west.
But to get back to my conversation with the esteemed writer. She was quite excited when I made this drawing of Montreal. Don't you see? she insisted. This is a breast! You live in a breast!
I didn't what to say. Before coming to the prestigious writing school, I had never sat and talked with a writer of renown. People looked up to this woman and sought her advice. I, too, had lobbied for this private afternoon with her. I wanted to answer in a way that seemed worthy of her attention.
I said, Do you want to know where I live in Montreal?
Oh yes, she did.
I live in Point St. Charles which is a point that juts out into the St. Lawrence. I scratched it in for her. She was delighted.

  

the last day of school

Is it the last day of school today? Will I miss the thumping every morning at 8 am?
The family across the street don't have a doorbell and don't seem to hear or respond to knocking. The kid who comes to collect his buddy on the way to school grabs the doorknob and shakes the door in its frame. The steady shaking/rattling/thumping sounds like a roll of thunder that never breaks. He can keep it up for three minutes at a go. I've timed him. The door doesn't open after three minutes. His arms get tired and he takes a breather. He shakes the door on and off, sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until his friend opens it and they slouch off down the sidewalk.
Too late--because it's the last day of school and the dynamic of their you-thump-and-I'll-come-when-I'm-ready relationship might not last through the summer--I realize I should have taken a picture. But for me it was always more of a sound than a sight experience.
Instead, here's a picture of an old-style Point doorway. Two side-by-side doors, one for the ground-floor flat, the other for the upstairs. Most of the older carved wooden doors have been replaced with modern fireproof doors that are more air-tight.

flashback to 2008 when sue had bedbugs

When Sue still lived in an apartment, she used to get the hankering to redecorate. The chintz armchair delivered from Sears three years previously? She wanted a blue velveteen chair with a pouffe to prop her feet. She maneuvered the chintz armchair out the door of her apartment and down the hallway. She left it in front of another tenant's door, so the concierge would think it was that person's garbage. Of course, the concierge wasn't fooled, because the chair was only one of many pieces of furniture Sue had pushed into the hallway. Anything small enough to be carried all the way to the trash bins, she could manage to carry herself.
R would argue with Sue because she didn't have the funds to accommodate her various revamping schemes. He didn't appreciate how, when she wanted something new, she made what she had disappear. Every winter she threw away the coat he'd bought the year before. The bathroom mat. Her kitchen garbage can.
One day she called R to say that her curtains were gone. Gone where? She had no idea. But guess what? She wanted blinds.
R ransacked her apartment and couldn't find the curtains. She needed something on her windows because she lived on the ground floor of a city street. She got her blinds.
As a footnote, Sue gave me two cushions she'd knit that Christmas. That, in itself, was suspicious because Sue doesn't normally give presents. Here's one:

I liked the funky colours and design. I've always believed Sue is an artist. But the cushions were lumpy. I bought proper cushion foam to restuff them. When I opened the seam, I found the curtains, ripped into strips.
In 2008 Sue decided that she no longer wanted her mattress and pushed it in the hallway. By then, Sue was felt to be a problematic tenant in her building. She'd started a couple of fires while she was cooking. She watched TV and/or listened to her radio--often both at the same time--at high volume from when she woke at noon until one a.m. It wasn't possible to convince her that she was disturbing other tenants. Or she didn't care.
The concierge claimed that when he found the mattress in the hallway it was crawling with bedbugs. To me, his story sounded exaggerated. Were there really hordes of bedbugs scrambling across the mattress in the middle of the day? Most unlike bedbugs. Why was Sue the only tenant in the building with bedbugs? No one took Sue to the doctor to examine her for bites. Indeed, when asked, she said her skin itched, but she always said her skin itched because it was dry.
The idea of bedbugs spreads alarm. With no more proof than the concierge's story, Sue's social worker decided that she had to leave her apartment immediately. All her belongings had to be discarded and her apartment had to be fumigated. She was taken to a residence where she was bathed and the clothing she'd brought was washed in hot water. Her apartment was dumped out. The concierge and owner of the building seemed to feel that Sue shouldn't return to the building. R was trying to figure out how to stretch Sue's welfare cheque to pay for the fumigation and new furniture he would have to buy. The various social services that are supposed to be implicated in the care of intellectually deficient clients did not contribute one cent. And then, after a few days, the social worker announced that the emergency residence where they'd taken Sue was no longer available. They put her on a bus to Montreal.
I remember the date very well because I had just had a collection of short fiction accepted by a publisher. The schedule for editing was very tight. I had three weeks to write stronger endings, develop characters more deeply, correct illogical sentences, be more precise, fresher, sharper, smarter. Anyone who has ever worked with an editor knows how intense this phase of getting a book ready can be. It was my first book too---everything I had been working toward for years.
And so, yeah, I was less than gracious about having Sue watching TV at full blast in the room directly under my den. The particular programs she wanted to watch didn't come in because we don't have cable. In frustration she watched whatever else she could find at orchestra volume. When I told her to turn the TV down, she turned it up again the instant I turned my back. If I had taken the controls away from her, she might have broken the TV. You think I'm joking? I'm not. Over the years, Sue has broken every electrical or electronic appliance she's been given or bought. CD player, toaster, wall clock, lamps, electric kettle, shaver...
Sue was angry because she wanted go home again. I was angry because I wanted her to go home too. Of course, she didn't understand that she'd initiated the upheaval by pushing her mattress into the hallway. R had to play mediator between two angry women--one desperate for peace and quiet so she could edit a book, the other intellectually deficient through no fault of her own. At that point, I'm not sure who was the most unreasonable.
I'd examined her body and found no bites, although it was only days since she'd apparently been ravaged by bedbugs. I've never believed the bedbug story.
Sue returned to her fumigated and newly, if sparsely, furnished apartment. I managed to finish my edits on time.

food heritage

A friend shared some of the excellent homemade ricotta her Greek neighbours gave her. Here, look, I made Kasnudeln.

They're  filled with cheese, mashed potato, browned onion, and lots of mint. Mint is what makes them taste different from pierogi.
It's been a few years since I last made Kasnudeln. It takes time to knead the dough, make the filling, form the dumplings. The fun part is pinching the "wreath". It was the nicest way I could think of to do honour to the homemade cheese. I served them with minced parsley, Greek yogurt, a green salad.
I don't often make Austrian food. Although my parents are Austrian, I didn't grow up eating dumplings. My mother preferred opening a can of Campbell's tomato soup, dumping it over a pan of ribs, shoving the ribs in the oven.
My aunts showed me how to make dumplings when I went to Austria. There's a large bread dumpling called a Serviettenknödel--a tea-towel dumpling because it gets steamed inside a wrapped and knotted tea towel. There are cottage cheese dough dumplings that enclose a fresh apricot or a plum. Zwetschgenknödel. There are dumplings made with cream of wheat, butter, and parsley, to be served with soup. Grießnockerl. Dumplings made of an eggy pasta dough dropped through a slotted metal grid.  Spätzle. There are smaller bread dumplings that can be made with different ingredients and herbs to flavour them.
Some day I'll have to write about people like myself, who don't otherwise identify with their parents' culture or heritage, but like to cook the traditional dishes.

sue gets a ride in a police car

Sue's social worker called yesterday to say that Sue had escaped the group home. Escaped, gotten lost, had an outing--it all depends on how you see it.
Sue is R's sister with Down's Syndrome. When she still used to live by herself in an apartment, she would make weekly outings to the shopping mall, have a plate of fries, sometimes get her hair cut, buy a shopping bag full of dollar-store finds.
There's no shopping close the group home where she lives now, and since she had a cerebral bleed last summer, she's under doctor's orders not to leave the home unattended. She knows that, but the old yen to trawl through a store, maybe shoplift whatever she doesn't have the money to buy (thousands-upon-thousands-of-stolen.html), have a Pepsi and a bag of chips wins over her wobbly sense of what she should and shouldn't do. I suspect that what guides her behaviour is what she feels she can get away with. When her desire is stronger than her fear of being found out, she takes a gamble.
Two days ago the spring weather called her. Off she went--with one of her various hats squashed on her head. She never goes outside, not even in the summer, without a hat. Her gait isn't steady because she's disproportionately wide for her very small feet. If I remember correctly, they're size 4. She found her way out of the warren of residential streets that surround the group home onto a street with some shops. She found a Mr. Sub and had a sandwich.
But then she didn't know how to get home again. We don't know the rest of the story--how it was that the police brought her back to the group home. If she admitted that she was lost or if the police stopped to ask her. The social worker has no details, and Sue doesn't want R to know, so R hasn't asked her what happened. In any case, Sue would say that she doesn't remember. That's her usual tactic when she doesn't want to discuss her behaviour.
Otherwise the situation at the group home is stable... as stable as possible, given that Sue isn't sociable and she's living in a group environment. She spends most of the day in her room, which is large and well-lit. She has her reclining armchair, her bed, her TV, her photos, her stuffed cutesy geegaws on all the shelves and surfaces and even tacked to the walls, her knitting, her mots cachés (what is that in English? word search puzzles? ... a jumble of letters and a list of words that have to be found in the jumble).
She likes the room and her space. She objects to having to go downstairs to the dining room for meals. She complains that when she wants to take the elevator, she has to get on with someone in a big blocky wheelchair. There's enough room for Sue and a wheelchair in the elevator, but she doesn't like having to stand to the side. She feels no empathy for elderly people confined to a wheelchair. Reasoning with her, suggesting that some day she might be in a wheelchair, etc etc is wasted breath. After years of watching Sue, I think empathy is a fairly low-functioning facility among intellectual deficients. She only feels it to a certain small extent when she already likes the person. If she doesn't like the person, forget it.
She has had to be moved around the dining room to many different tables because she grumbles about every grouping. At that table, she doesn't like the woman who asks questions. At that table, there's a woman who is too cheerful. Sue has been moved around the dining room so often that she's now at the last table. The problem here is that one of the men wears a watch that ticks too loudly.
R has explained to Sue several times that there is nowhere else for her to sit. Her meals are not going to be served in her room. The staff at the group home have done what they can to try to oblige her. It's not possible to get her to understand that she's the problem. R finally told her to suck it up. She thought the man's watch was too loud? Too bad.
I'll have more to report when Sue comes to visit. She used to come to spend her birthday but she didn't like staying with us. She had her own room with a double bed. She could sleep until noon. We brought her to a shopping mall. R took her out for pizza and fries. I made her a chocolate cake with whipped ganache frosting and brandied cherries. I don't know if Sue can tell the difference between a real cake and an IGA cake, but I don't want to eat a piece of IGA cake.
However, we don't have cable. Sue misses her soap operas too much. The soap opera characters are her friends. She feels more for them than for anyone in the group home. She needs to know what they're doing in the same way that someone checks up on their friends on Facebook. Soap operas are Sue's form of social networking.
When she comes to stay with us, her good humour with the adventure lasts 24 hrs max. Then she starts to get resentful and downright nasty. I understand that she's in major soap opera withdrawal, but I don't accept that someone who stays here, even someone who is intellectually deficient, should cover her eyes when I walk into a room because she doesn't want to see me. This is where I live. I belong here.
We'll see how long she behaves this time. We'll see how long before I lose my cool.
Here's a picture from the last time she stayed with us. She's waiting for me to fry an egg for her breakfast. Easy over and woe to me if I break the yolk. Notice her necklace, choker, watch, and rings, all of which she made sure where in place before she left me snap a picture.