Family: we're in this together whatever comes our way.

Hamlet says of his uncle Claudius, who is also his step-father: "a little more than kin, but less than kind". Family is always kin and there is always love, no matter its manifestation exuberant or shadowed, but the kind part is dependent on so many things.
Lets start with the good, the immutable.

• Love. It's not all happy ever after, not for parents and children, nor for spouses, nor aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews nor cousins, whether full or removed once, twice or wished-for removed. In-law love may take root, or not, but at the very least it seasons the other loves in our lives. Love is pervasive. Its roots go deep into our souls. The droughts, fires, freezing, earthquakes, floods of life may alter them, but they persist on deeply, seeking sustenance, nourishing us with green plenitude or spindly sourness, but nourish it does just the same. It cannot be beaten by any force. Not even death, the ultimate divider, can hold it off bleed us as death will. Love is forever. 
  

• We are never alone. We may have family members whose pain and suffering isolate them from others or we may do this ourselves in an attempt to scar over the pain of loss, grief, guilt, shame, disappointment or deep-worry; we can never isolate ourselves from the roots of love, both earthly and divine. Our family runs in our veins, warm sap passed on generation to generation by our ancestors whose unseen presence and unheard prayers whisper comfort, strength, tears and hope to us, unobserved, but powerful. No dam lasts forever because water, like love, will erode any barrier over time. So it is with the love of family. 

• We have a shared history. There is joy and comfort in knowing the stories, the jokes, the trials, the triumphs, the challenges, the losses, the people without having to explain everything. When you are away and come back you just pick up where you left off with them. In the meantime every phone call, every card, every letter, every picture means more. 

• We have each some of our loved ones in us. We share the memories. Where one person forgets, another remembers, so as much as possible is preserved and so we collectively make a mosaic picture as a family. We get know those who have gone before us who we have never met. We get to hold onto more of those we have lost. We get to see them in a glance, a laugh, a tip of the head, a saunter in a walk, a nervous tick, a singing voice, a speaking voice, a way of moving and many little things we never notice until they resurface ephemerally in a family member like soap bubbles on the wind. 

• We belong. We may be the life of the party, the funny one, the musical one, the storyteller, the great baker, the misfit, the black sheep, the embarrassing one, the peace-maker, the hard-worker, the quiet one, the chatter box, the hunter, the sewer, the keeper of the pictures, the keeper of knowledge, the confidante, the walker of hills, the gardener, the hewer of wood, the builder, the traveler, the teacher, the elder, the youthful, the wise one, the giving one, the needy one,  the joyful, the depressed, the hurting, the innocent, the faithful, the lost or the found but we all belong . We have membership by birth and it cannot be revoked, though we can choose to never revisit it in person it lives in our dreams. 

  
  

  We are dancers, and dreamers, tad pole explorers and hand holders
  

  
  

  There is, too,  the not so good. It comes as a package deal. You don't get to pick and choose what parts you want and what part you want to eschew. 

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Our genes are ours at the moment of conception. Learning problems, clumsiness, mental illness, a time bomb of cancer, of Alzheimers, of Parkinson's disease, of M. S., of heart disease, of diabetes  and many more, a propensity to obesity, to addictions, a mutated gene, a congenital defect any of these may be destined to be ours in the lottery of family genes along with all the desirable ones. There's no betting on it, no bargaining, no cheating, no trading. 

  
  

  
  

•  We parent the way we were parented for the most part. We may be lucky to have been passed a chain of careful nurturing and kind instruction from parent to child to parent to child. Many of us are passed a chain of abuse, poverty, neglect, uncertainty, doubt like wind and storm that may twist our limbs, snap them off or even destroy us. Many of us are passed some of each. The love showing like sunshine, mildness and warmth  and mental illness, addictions, hopelessness, abuse so many storm clouds bringing hurricane winds, ice pellets, driving snow like teeth, rain torrents like vertical drowning. Whether you grow straight, you grow crooked, or you are stunted depends on family. 

We may carry burdens together, hold hands, struggle to catch up, tame bears, or carry someone on our backs, but together we thrive.

• Familiarity may breed jealousy where the clear glass of our child hearts has been smudged, cracked, chipped or even broken. Where positive attention has been lacking, where potential has been neglected, where confidence has been eroded, where self-doubt has taken root in the arid, stony soil of neglect and violence, there jealousy and resentment and a sourness of view may thrive where there should be joy in the accomplishments of our blood loves, our loved ones. 

There is, however, always love. The universal truth is love and hope and belief and education are the gates that can lead us there to an unshadowed love. 

“You did not invent these family habits. Your family is like mine, for thousands and thousands of years our families have embraced a dysfunctional lifestyle, passing these habits as gospel on to subsequent generations. This was not done out of malice, spite, or hate, but what they knew best. As ineffective as these habits are, you never stopped to consider another way of loving.” 
― David W. Earle

One in five people in Canada suffers from mental illness. Explore this further if you wish. That means so many families are affected by this. I have always lived with this in my family. It has made me who I am and I would not trade away any of the challenges I have known, because I would not be so strong as I am, nor so able to appreciate life so much, nor so able to see how much light there is amid the darkness, to feel empathy so deeply, nor hope so strongly. That seems to me I got the best amidst some sad, painful experiences because love will find a way through as it did in my family. I have to agree with Rumi: “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”  

So we see that the good and the not so good about families is part of the same whole. We're in it together. Together we can triumph, grow stronger and every generation better our children's lives more, nurture more, celebrate all of life more. We must tell our family stories, the dark  as well as the light, so that we learn to lift our children above the past to new heights, without ever forgetting it or letting them forget. To forget is to weaken the appreciation of the gifts we have, to forget the love and the sacrifices of those who have gone before and to forget to be thankful and humble and aware and realize that we stand in the love of our families and on the shoulders of those who have gone before be they bent or strong. If we forget to remember how empty the gifts we have and will pass on. 

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.-Frederick Buechner

Montréal 2016

5 days in Montreal under cloudy skies for the most part with sun in our hearts and a much needed respite from the slings and arrows of outrageous, or even capricious, fortune. We stayed in the Auberge Bonaparte on Rue Saint François- Xavier.

Our welcome hotel the Auberge Napoleon

One of the highlights for us was in staying in such nice surroundings in le vieux Montréal.

We realize how lucky we were to be able to do this. I know so many people who cannot do this for one reason or another. The old bricks and the old catch on the deep window made me feel how ephemeral our existence is. I could almost hear the century old footsteps and voices and imagine the touch of metal and brick beneath so many hands. I felt adrift in time. A day or two later we came upon a plaque in Place d'Armes commemorating Paul de Chomedy, Lord of Masionneuve for having killed the Chief of the Iroquois with his own hands. It made me think of the original inhabitants of the area who do not seem to be commemorated at all except in touristic stereotypes. I must have been upset because the only picture of his statue I took is as an aside to the picture I took of Notre Dame Basilica.

Plaque celebrating the  murder of the "Indian Chief"

Stereotyping 

On the same day as I took this picture we came across a monument to the "prisoners of opinion " arrested during the FLQ crisis in 1970. The end of this plaque says history will give them justice. I wonder when First Nations people will have justice. I wonder, too, if there is any awareness of the irony in the fight for justice and independence amongst the Québecois when the rights and lives of First peoples have been so trampled for so long by those who lament oppression at other hands.

Life goes in a chronological fashion, but we remember it in sporadically as we get sensory or emotional input or sometimes as we try to explicitly remember. There are things we would like to forget, but they come unbidden into our active thoughts or, if we fortify against them, they invade our dreams. There are many memories we would cling to, especially of people we have lost, These may linger, but like pieces of puzzle the whole picture is incomplete  and try as we may we cannot retrieve the cadence of voice, the exact sound of laughter, the exact words, touch, place or time. If we are lucky, sometimes a glimpse creeps into our dreams like a mirage of emotion. I will then abandon myself here to a random order of sensations and impressions.

There are so many messages in the statues of Montreal.

Robbie Burns and Modern Art

Les vedettes des canadiens 

Queen Victoria in shadow, King Edward VII and Ste. Marguerite Bourgeoys
and a modern horse and rider with Matthew posing

A juxtaposition: Réné Lévesque. Sir Wilfred Laurier below,
 top right an English snob and a French poodle and iconic Québec art

We visited the musée des beaux arts and saw the exhibition on Pompeii, one on Napoleon and some amazing modern art and antiquities. We met out niece Miebet for a nice lunch. We really enjoyed our visit with her and touring the museum with her after lunch. The museum was a kaleidoscope of experience and emotions.

 Here is some of the statuary and other art from the city of Pompeii.

Bust of Drusus Major and garden statue of a maiden

Isis with Greek features (fecundity, rebirth), the hand of Sabazios ( good fortune, fecundity)
and Pliny's quotation. 

Male youth and woman in the garments of the time.

Tile fragments and frescoes.

Gladiators, theater symbol, portrait and garden bust

 The introduction to the moving resin casts of the people who died after Mount Vesuvius' eruption began with a cast of a dog, guardian to a home with a backdrop of a computer animated eruption sequence and the sound of a barking dog. It was very lonely sound and very moving. The child and man casts below show the same sentiment of isolation at the moment of death. 

These pictures are hard to see and in seeing the casts one cannot help but pray that they have been at peace despite the horror of their deaths. I should need no reminder that every day is a gift, that every person who loves us is a blessing and that every moment counts, but these frozen images of people from 1937 years ago have the power to humble and to slow the rapid pacing of our thoughts.

This is a half loaf of bread carbonized in Pompeii. I found it eloquent. 

Thankfully Matthew provided some comic relief.  Do not worry it appeared to be made of paper!

We saw a sweet exhibition which Miebet and I loved with Australian songbirds landing on electric guitars hooked to amps to make sound art. We were not allowed to take pictures when we were in the exhibition, so these I took through plastic glass with my zoom lens to give you the idea. Matthew prefers his electric guitar to rock rather more. :)

Later that evening we had a different sort of cultural experience when we went to see the Montreal Canadians play the Florida Panthers at the Bell Centre. Montreal did not play well ( lost 4-1), but we enjoyed ourselves as did the fans there. 

Warm up and pre-game stuff. The mascot is Youpi. 

Fans in their hockey sweaters and the strange cheerleaders that I found to be evidence of sexism in their mini-skirts.  

Time out for food, glorious food. We ate all sorts of food and loved it all. Here is a collage of food.

Here are some shots of the architecture.

Chinatown had bright colours, but I wished they kept the gates in better repair. One of the lions had black fill in its toes which seemed to have been vandalized.

More shots from outside. We never got tired of looking. This is Place Cartier and the Hotel de ville.

We took refuge in the Hotel de ville as the skies grayed and then it poured. 

The interior of the Hotel de ville. Note the curved door and the beautiful stained glass in the meeting room. 

We attended noon mass on Monday in the chapel at Notre Dame. It burned down in 1976 and they restored it beautifully to be a place of golden light.

Notre Dame speaks for itself. 

Votives - the far white one in the right hand picture I lit for family and friends.

Holy women with children.

Our visit to the Biodome was disappointing except for the beauty of the birds and fish. I was very upset at how little space  some of the birds were given, especially the birds in the Northern habitat. The poor puffins couldn't even fly. 

Four of the luckier birds with larger habitats. The diving birds were amazing. 

Parrot and penguin pairs two opposite habitats.

Habitats - some are from the Botanical Garden which we liked much more. 

Bonsai- the one in the middle is 110 years old. 

Couldn't resist these flowers. 

We were lucky that it was release the butterfly day. 

The Chinese garden in winter. 

The two of us.

We really enjoyed our trip. Here we are waiting for our taxi to take us to the train station. How very lucky we are. What a trip it was filled with so many experiences: language, beauty, time together, food, culture, entertainment, history, natural wonders, faith, and happiness. We feel blessed.