Did I tell you that there were ducks in flight as we drove across the countryside of southwestern Quebec? There were. Two ducks. I saw them as we drove down highway 40 headed west.
Two ducks. In flight. Crossing from some place off beyond the woods to the south. Flying to some place off beyond the fields to the north.
See?
In Ottawa they have the Parliament and the many-windowed, many towered building where they meet, sitting on the bluffs overlooking the river, the central tower’s patina dancing against the sky under a red and white maple leaf flapping in the breeze.
And in Ottawa they have a chateau in the center of town. It overlooks the Parliament building and the locks that raise and drop boats between the river and the canal. Today it’s a hotel where fancy people in fancy clothes congregate for fancy meetings.
And in Ottawa they have universities. And neighborhoods where real people live and work and walk on the streets and take the buses. And restaurants along the sidewalks where you might stop for pizza or sandwiches or shawarma or kabobs. And embassies where the elite really do meet to eat. And government office buildings. And bridges across the river to Quebec.
They have so many other things in Ottawa. Some which we know. Most of which we haven’t yet seen. But I want to tell you about one place where we always come and go.
In Ottawa they have an airport. You disembark from your plane and in our case, since we always seem to arrive on a regional jet, you walk up a gangway and thru twisting passageways and along silent halls and up and down long ramps until you come to the place where you find your bags. Like any airport in any city, they have this place where your luggage (usually) shows up and you grab it off the moving pieces of shiny metal.
You grab your bags, pull out the handles, walk thru a doorway where they check your papers again, walk down another hall and wait in a line to talk to the border service agents who look at your papers and make smalltalk with you about where you come from and where you are going and how often you come and what your plans might be. Those kinds of things. I am sure you know about these kinds of places in any kind of airport, and that isn’t what I wanted to tell you about.
What I wanted to tell you about is one more thing that they have in Ottawa, something you see after the border service agents let you pass.
There beyond the door. There in Canada proper. In Ottawa. There they have a vast waiting room. And in our experience, this waiting room is usually mostly empty. You walk thru that last pair of doors, your suitcases in tow, and there in the seats nearest to the door is a greeting party. Two people sitting quietly and patiently, eyes riveted on the doors waiting for you to emerge. And when you come thru the doors, they stand up smiling and give you a warm hello. They reach out to greet you. And hug you. And ask you how the flight was. And they smile some more. And they point the way to the car.
They have this kind of greeting party in Ottawa for you every time you arrive. We know. We have been there in summer and winter and spring, and they have been there and greeted us in this way every single time.
Welcome to Ottawa.
It was Race Weekend in Ottawa. The 40th.
On Saturday, a 2k race and a 5k race and a 10K, too. On Sunday, a half-marathon and the full. We had come for the Lowertown Brewery 10K. Dad and Khadija had dropped us off at our hotel, and at the appointed hour (in the evening!) we had taken the OCTranspo number 9 bus to Rideau Centre, walked thru the mall and crossed over the canal to the starting line.
“We ice skated here,” we told each other as we crossed the bridge. “It was really cold the last time we stood here!”
Il y avait beaucoup d monde là. From all over that part of Canada they had come: runners, friends of runners, families. And everyone was standing around waiting for the start. We all had smiles on our faces. The weather was wonderful: spectacular for a Texan, maybe a bit warm for the Canadians among us.
We took our place in the green corral way back from the front of the crowd. From there, a crowd of runners shoulder-to-shoulder rocked back and forth, waited for the start with the late afternoon sun in our eyes.
We cheered as the yellow corral (Or was it orange or blue? Whatever, it wasn’t green.) of fast runners started. Pulsing music played on the speakers, and we could see the first group go. And then we stood two minutes until the next corral was sent off to another blast of pulsing music. And then another and another as our green corral gradually moved downhill toward the starting line.
The pulsing music at the starting line was loud. The crowd cheered. The announcers shouted words of encouragement in French and English as we passed by. We turned on Elgin and ran past the pubs toward The Queensway, toward the canal. Crowds of friends and family and people cheered.
We ran together for a while, the fair and industrious Trudy and I. Then we got briefly separated. Trudy would smile and wave a blinking wave when I glanced back. And then I pointed ahead and she nodded. I looked down, and we separated.
“Did you see the tulips?” people asked afterwards. It was a week after the Tulip Festival, and it’s been such a weird, cold spring there that many of the flowers were still blooming when we got there.
“Did you see the tulips?”
“Yes!” Trudy exclaimed. “They were so beautiful!”
I didn’t really notice of the tulips.
Sure I’m sure I saw them as I ran along the canal noticing the water and the crowds and the runners. But no, I confess I didn’t notice the flowers that day. I run with my eyes mostly down: slogging, back-of-the-pack runner doing the best I can. Note to self: need to stop (well, look up at least) and see the tulips (well, notice at least).
Where the tulips were, where I should have noticed them, I was looking instead across to the other side of the canal. We were running south, and there on the other side were other runners running north.
They were well past half-way. The elites first, running at a blistering pace. Then a few others. Then more. And then a crowd as deep as the slower crowd on our side of the canal. With the bright westering sun in their eyes, they were running to the finish line.
We came to the 5K mark. It came so fast. It had been so easy. I felt so good. But it wasn’t our 5K mark. It was the marathon 5K mark. A big banner on the side of the route with 5K blazoned on it. 5K it announced. For tomorrows runners.
Someone in the crowd said, “We’re at 5K already?”
“Marathon 5K,” I mumbled. I don’t think anyone heard me. They all knew. We all knew. This wasn’t the halfway point. We all felt too good. Dang sign, how could they?
And now halfway in earnest: we looped around and onto a bridge, over the canal, around again on the other side and back along the canal with that wonderful sun now in our faces. Here more than three miles into the race, there were still crowds standing along the route clapping and cheering and ringing cowbells and flapping plastic clappers 8K and shouting encouraging words.
“You look great!”
“Past halfway!”
“Keep it up!”
2K to go. I wasn’t running fast, but the course was flat, and the crowd was fun to run thru. And although the finish line seemed to take forever after my watch announced 6 miles and I had picked up my pace at the end overoptimistically, the finish line did appear as we ran up a slight grade and turned a slight corner.
The crowd was deep to the right and left. Families and friends of all those thousands of runners cheering and clapping and ringing and straining to see the runners they came to see cross the finish line.
And so I crossed the finish line, but my time was slow. I won’t even tell you, although you can find it for yourself if you look.
There were bagels. And bananas. A girl was scrambling to unpack a box of granola bars, and I took one from her and reached for another.
“One per person,” a supervisory sounding person chastised me. “We want to have enough for everyone, eh?” I pulled my reaching hand back, ashamed.
I milled with the crowd of sweaty, happy runners up the hill, looking for the red flag where Trudy and I had agreed to meet. I saw it in the distance and turned in that direction. There was a tap on my shoulder. I looked back. It was the fair and industrious Trudy who finished three minutes behind me. She had a smile on her face. Her blue eyes glistened in the sun. We shouldn’t have split up. She would have made me see look up, notice the blooming tulips.
We found a place among the runners in the crowd in the grass in front of blossoming tulips with music playing and our medals hanging from our necks. And after a while, we reclaimed our checked gear and changed into dry clothes and wandered toward downtown and watched the sun set in the west, across the river, with the silhouetted spired of Chateau Laurier beside it.
And then we found a scottish pub in Byward Market and ate pub grub, the best we’ve ever had.
We left Quebec City with storm clouds gathering. Indeed, as we drove away, leaving behind us the Citadel and Chateau Frontenac and the cobblestone streets of Upper Town and Lower Town we thought we might stop and walk around a bit in the Plains of Abraham. But in those few minutes the weather turned, and the skies darkened, and rain began to fall. So we marveled at the park at the plains thru rain drop speckled windows, leaving a closer examination for another time, perhaps. There always seems to be a need for another time.
The clouds chased us as we drove west. Highway 40 through the green of a Canada spring. Good weather ahead of us, rain behind. And when we stopped for lunch it seemed as if we were no further from the clouds then than we were when we drove thru Porte St. Louis.
We drove thru farms spread out over rolling hills. We drove thru forests. Ducks flew over us. And black Ravens fled the onslaught of smaller parents fearlessly defending their nests.
Poplar trees stood in the woods, their gray-silver boles climbing to the sky, their quaking leaves shimmering in the forest canopies. And we finally out ran the storm.
At 9:30pm, I stood up. “Ok, I’m going outside now. Six minutes to go.”
The sky was mostly clear. It was dark — as dark as it can be with streetlights every half-block. We walked across the street and down a house or two and turned to the southwest.
Trudy held her hand up to block the glare from the headlights of a car down the street. I looked around wondering if we might sit down instead of standing. We waited. And then at exactly the appointed hour and minute, we saw a bright light flicker thru the leaves of an Oak in the distance.
I backed up a few steps until the bright light was visible over the treetops. “There it is,” I said.
Trudy looked at me and then in the direction I was pointing. A dim reddish point of light was climbing from the southwest, getting brighter and whiter with each passing second.
“It’s going right over us,” Trudy said quietly. “Right over our neighborhood.”
There are astronauts up there. What are they doing right now? Experiments maybe. Or maybe maintenance. For all I know, they might be on a spacewalk repairing some broken cable or replacing some broken box. And there are flight controllers in Houston watching the progress of that orbit, watching from a different perspective than ours.
Years ago, when we were very young, we had debates in school. Formal debates with teams and captains and judges. One of the debate topics I never quite understood asked whether or not the space program was justified. This was the seventies. We were still flying to the moon. It was so obvious to me that the topic seemed almost silly, nothing more than an excuse to form teams and have a debate. I wondered how the kids on the other side could pretend to argue the opposing view.
Resolved that the manned space program is a good thing…
Look up at that bright light passing over. It’s almost all we have now. No rockets launching astronauts into space. No space capsules reentering and splashing down. Russian rockets instead. Soviet era capsules landing hard in the steppes with a billowing burst of dust.
Dust blowing in the wind. After coming back to earth. After many orbits, ninety minutes each, just like the one that just passed over our neighborhood.
We stood out front briefly. We had just returned home from a weekend away. Ben had fed the dogs and was leaving. He had a weary look on his face, too tired to talk for long. And he was distracted by an incoming call once or twice.
As he stood there, he looked across the yard.
“What is wrong with the oak?” he asked.
It has burlap sacks wrapped around its trunk from the ground up to where the fair and industrious Trudy was just able to reach with with extended arms and clothespins in hand standing on a metal yard chair.
“It is dying,” I said. “Our Monterey Oak is dying.”
O Oak thou art sick. The Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers that tap at trees among the spreading branches have found thy trunk and shade-throwing limbs, and the marks of their love doth thy life destroy.
It was early evening. Everyone was gone. I was staring into my monitors clicking at the keyboard.
The janitor came around the corner pushing his cart, emptying the garbage cans and dusting off our desks.
I turned to look at him. “Hi Carlos,” I said.
He mumbled which was unlike him. Usually he comes by and says “Hello David” in an upbeat voice, sometimes talking about his other job, sometimes talking about his wife who is due in July. But today he mumbled something that I couldn’t hear.
“Why you call me Carlos,” he said. “You always call me Carlos. I’m not Carlos.”
I was stunned. Embarrassed. Ashamed. It was something I took seriously, our conversations in the early evening, the fact that we addressed each other by name.
“What…?” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Marco,” he said.
“Oh gosh. And I’ve been calling you Carlos for months. I’m so sorry.”
So how perfect is that. Mr. InTouchWithThoseAroundHim has been calling Marco Carlos for months in smug satisfaction that he knew the man’s name when indeed he was just as oblivious as anyone else in the building.
More oblivious.
There are snakes in the grass, here. We know it. The dogs know it. The birds know it.
I came home the other day, arriving before the fair and industrious Trudy which fact consequently bestowed upon me the task of server of dinner kibble.
This is usually the gist of the evening greeting: circling us at the door with wagging tails, jumping up and down and then dashing directively into the kitchen for the obviously most important part of the ritual. But this day was different. Instead of the dash to the kitchen, there was a dash outside.
Ok, there is often a dash outside, but I’m taking some artistic license, here…
So as I stepped onto our patio, a garden snake slithered across the concrete and into the leaves at the base of the Rose-of-Sharon. Guinness looked at me and then pranced over to that spot. He stepped into the leaves, gingerly choosing his steps, sniffing at the Wild Garlic and Heart Leaf Scullcap, looking up at me periodically.
“Yes,” I said. “I know. It’s in there somewhere.”
With the great pergola project of 2014 complete, we were loathe to put the cattle-tank-cum-pond back on the patio. With all that wonderful cedar towering over us and filling the air with wonderful smells, we thought we’d like to enjoy the full patio rather than putting the pond on it.
So we dug in the dirt and we created a place filled with gravel and lined with sandstone blocks where we could set the pond. Just beyond the edge of the patio, nestled amidst the Blue Mist Flower and pink flowering Penstemon and red-blossomed Texas Betony, the pond is now full of water and a few pond plants and a modest bubbling fountain in the middle.
And the dogs know that the snakes know that there is water there. In the morning after a night-long absence of canines in the back yard, there is evidently evidence of them. For even as we speak, the dogs are sniffing and circling around the cattle tank, notifying Trudy of the intrusion.
And in the front yard, a Blue Jay chick has fallen from its nest.
Maybe it fell from the Ash. Maybe from one of the Oaks. But wherever it fell from, it knows better than to sit helplessly on the ground by the greenery and blooming springtime flowers. It has somehow managed to hop or fly or clambor up the back of a rickety wooden chair, to the very highest part of the back of the chair.
Short of getting back into its nest, there is no safer place it could possibly be. And as I sit here looking out the window, it sits there safely high off the ground, wide-eyed, watching and waiting.
Because even though we have taken out the grass in the front, you know there are snakes over there. And the baby Blue Jay knows it, too.
From the street, you could see clouds in the west. From the highway, you could see dark skies. From the overpass, you could see towering thunderheads with dark black foundations and columns climbing into the sky where here and there there were breaks in the clouds that revealed vistas of billowing white and gold against a blue sky.
From the driveway when we got home, there was a smell of rain. In the distance the thunder of an approaching storm rolled over the hills, that crushy, gravelly thunder that sounds like it’s crackling about in the clouds from horizon to horizon, gathering its strength, getting ready to let out a crashing boom.
Then came the lightning. Bright flashes of strobe light following by crashing thunder. And finally came the rain. Drop by drop at first, then a steady stream. And then there was a lull. And then a deluge. Torrents of water fell from the sky. The wind thrashed the trees mercilessly as we stood fretting that the Arizona Ash was certain to finally fall on top of the Texas Redbud which bloomed so much this year.
Water poured off the eves, overwhelming the gutters, white caps spilling over the edges throwing a frothy mist upward in the wind. And then hail came. Gently at first, chinking against the windows. Then more earnestly, gathering white piles here and there. And then the onslaught began in earnest. Fallen hail covered the sidewalks. It floated in ice-jams in the streams of water running around the corner of the house. It looked like winter outside, such as it is in Texas.
And we thought of our tomatoes, as we seem to do at this time of year.
Think of them with us, those tomatoes that replaced the first crop that got caught in the freezes of several weeks ago. Those tomatoes that were starting to climb up their cages, that had begun putting out yellow blossoms. Those tomatoes that had given us renewed hope that we might actually get fruit before the heat of summer sets in.
Think of them and weep.
But then think of it, just think of it: all that rain.
I just had some time to myself, with the fair and industrious Trudy out of town. Well… not really time to myself, as the dogs are here with me. But it’s late, and they’re off somewhere else being quiet (for once). So I thought I’d dabble a bit with a Cezanne-based scene.
But my brush got permanently stuck one pixel wide, and so I switched to a different one that wasn’t really what I needed. And then it got stuck one pixel wide. It’s either a bug, or my old Mac is too old, or I am missing something fundamental.
Whatever the cause, I have no more patience for this. It is late, and I’d just as soon be reading something rather than fighting with the brushes.So the dabbling is done. Sad, that.
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