Category Archive

I used to leave my house in northern Vermont with some combination of trepidation (would my family survive without me?) and anticipation (hot damn! I’m headed to the big city!) as I headed out across the countryside toward Montreal. The first time I went, I took a bus, enjoying the tales and tribulations of the rave organizer who sat next to me. I decided the next year that it was much more satisfying to have the option to stop along the way, and pile the car full of treasures that at the time were usually no problem to drag across the border duty free. I managed to fill my farmhouse with mod furnishings from Caban, electronic music, exotic vegetables and enough elaborate pastries to extend the stay at least a few extra days in feeling, if not in fact.

It was a getaway for me, to be sure, and I craved the city with the passion of Lisa on Green Acres (sans Hungarian accent), like a smoker trying to quit. “Bloom where you’re planted,” my neighbor from the dairy farm across the street told me. Oh, I tried. I tried. And I did sometimes, managed a few nice flowers from time to time. I looked across the street at the Holsteins and her business sign, “The Beauty Hut,” and the grey hills and the sky, and I tried.

And then, an hour into the trip, I could feel my heart race—literally race—as I drove through the fields and saw the skyscrapers in the distance. I loved the way that the city just sprang up like that, somehow adding to the excitement of it all, like Oz. The traffic picked up there, adding car after car, a few crotch rockets zooming their riders off to an inevitable early grave. And I would finally reach it, le Pont Champlain, there at last, over, then off the bridge, driving fast. Yee haw! (or something a bit more sophisticated than that).

I loved racing down the hill on University, downtown, to Rene-Levesque, the thrill of being back where it was busy. It’s hard to imagine the contrast from where I lived, where the first traffic light was ten miles away.

For all the luxury of time, bookstores, hair coloring (it was red then), and room service, the trips also gave me perspective. Vermont was beautiful, glorious. I was involved in the community, advocated for my kids constantly, knew everyone. I loved that, but I also always knew that at heart, I was a flatlander. Not my fault, really—I just didn’t grow up there. And I had this kid who needed so much. Once, in a grocery store, a man saw me pushing him and his sister through the store, and thought to share his thoughts with me.

“I hope you don’t plan to have more of them,” he said. I was taken aback. The man didn’t even know that my older boy was in school then. For all the time that I had faced the realities of my son’s disabilities, I had honestly never heard anyone actually voice such an opinion to me directly.

“These kids cost everyone else a lot of money,” he informed me. I found myself dumbstruck, then hostile, thinking of the man’s own cost to society. He was older, certainly had health concerns that were undoubtedly some cost to Medicare. But in spite of that, the man did deserve those benefits. I could not think of a thing to say, so I just told him that I loved all my kids, and walked on.

I checked out, pushed my groceries out to the car, helped my little girl and my three-year-old son out of the carriage. My daughter tried to climb out herself, but my son did not. He did not try to walk. In fact, at that point, he was unable to do that, but was getting closer to that developmental milestone with the help of over two years of physical and occupational therapy. My boy smiled, and let me load him into his car seat, placid, trusting. The man from the store was standing behind me, and I stiffened.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I said that. It’s really none of my business.” And he walked away.

I am sure that he felt better for apologizing to me, but I felt numb for a while, then mad at myself for not having the appropriate, politically active, stereotype-shattering response. Then, I just felt sad. I always assumed that everyone just absorbed the love that my little boy exhibited with his belly laugh and hugs. It never occurred to me that he was viewed as “too expensive.” I felt sorry for the man, probably counting every penny, and thinking about Town Meeting and property taxes. After all, he was right. My son’s education, which was still nowhere near appropriate, did carry a hefty price tag that was all too evident in the school budget.

Days after the man shared his thoughts about my right to have more children, I found out I was pregnant with my fourth child. And yes, I continued to take my disabled son out in public with the others, and let the glarers glare. Sometimes, someone smiled.

So, that brings me back to the perspective I gained from Montreal. What was I searching for? What could this Oz grant me? There, I was not the mom with a cause, except as I wished to be. I escaped, spoke French, saw plays, and thought about the life I had been called upon to lead. Sometimes it struck me, after days of seeing not one person like my son, that life felt superficial. Then, I’d come upon the man who sat, speechless, with a cup on Ste. Catherine Street, just a man and his dog. I knew he probably had autism, probably some other mental health issues, but enough skills to sit out there all day and collect his money. What more might he have been doing? Was this the life he chose, or was it all that was left for him to do?

I went because I loved the luxury, the freedom of letting go of a reality chained to limits imposed by disability. I could let go, once in a while. But why chains? why such limits? If I left feeling exhausted and questioning about why this life had been handed to me, Montreal did take me home. I returned to have it in all its fullness, with new energy and hope, a new fire blazing to make a difference.

So, now, fully recharged from the laziness of summer, I return.

When I lived in Vermont, I was always fascinated by a sign that pops up not far from the Canadian border on I-91. I cannot remember the exact wording, but it informs the passer-by that you have reached the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole. Wow. The sign is north of Newport, and I often saw it in times when the snow had been as high as my car for several months. The thought that a person could go even farther north, where it was certainly colder and snowier, simply horrified me at the time. Then, it made me wonder what was up there. So, one day, I decided to cross the border.

At the time, in the late 1990s, it was fairly easy to go to Canada, and not a whole lot harder to get back into the United States. Canadian customs agents usually came out, asked you the purpose of your visit, how long you were staying, and told you to enjoy your trip, all the while hoping you’d spend money and save l’économie québecoise. There was one place I crossed regularly, and the guy just stuck his head out the door and waved to me. I do not remember where that was, and it will never happen again in my lifetime, I am quite sure. On the other side, the US guards were a sometimes a little less friendly, sometimes asked a lot of questions, once made me cry (that was after 9/11), but I never had any serious problems getting back into the land of the free and home of the brave.

Still, I did not realize it was that easy at first back then. I was pretty sure something terrible would happen, some agricultural product stuck to the back of my van, and I would end up questioned in a room with a chair, a bare light bulb and two Mounties. Wait. That sounds a little weird. Visions of Dudley Do-Right…. And Nell. And Dudley’s horse. Definitely weird. I think I have just insulted the entire Canadian population reading this. No. You must understand. Many of my neighbors were very wary about crossing the border. When the speed limit signs said 100, they told me, it does not mean miles. That was different. And sometimes, in some places, there are no signs in English. You cannot turn right on red, and if you do, you are guilty until proven innocent. You can see why I was nervous.

But I went anyway. It’s kind of like the first time you go to a drugstore to buy contraceptives. You are sure everyone is going to make a big deal about things and tell you something is wrong with what you are about to do. Then you walk out of the store with your stuff, and it’s never a big deal again. Crossing the border was just like that. Well, without the sex.

It did not take me long to figure out that spending money in Canada was a good thing. I could have felt bad, and maybe should have after Ames went out of business, but honestly, I liked to dress my kids like the ones on “La Boîte à Lunch”. It was one of the sweetest programs on Canadian television, which is about all we got for pre-dish television, except Channel 3 from Burlington. Ames did not sell clothes like the ones Julie-Pier wore, and they also did not return your federal and provincial sales tax. Or speak French to you. Or tell you “qu’est-ce qu’ils sont mignons!” when they saw your kids in the store. And actually, I found nicer, warmer things. I love the United States, but I also like nice clothes. In the cold climate where I was living then, I liked warm clothes. I also liked the exchange rate. And as I discovered the benefits of nice, warm clothes, great exchange rates, and returned sales tax, I also had more excuses to return across the border, which I was also starting to enjoy. It was a vicious cycle, and one I came to love.

So, no visit to Canada was complete without a trip to the duty-free shop. For one thing, it was the place you had to go to get your sales tax back. For many northern Vermonters, though, the purpose of a trip to Canada WAS the duty-free shop, and its glorious and relatively inexpensive selection of what I think is termed in Canada as booze. [Now, I have no idea if this was a loose usage of the language, or if it was considered the term of choice for alcoholic beverages up there, but I did see the word used once, on the front page of the Gazette—I swear—in an article where you would normally expect a more formal description of the beverage consumed before the accident.] I liked many things in the duty-free shop, including the nice selection of watches, pens and perfume, also the booze… um… fine wine and chocolate. But hell, I was happy with a trip to Costco in Sherbrooke, too. I liked Nutella and Tin-Tin videos.

What I really loved about crossing the border was the people. I loved crossing the border and immediately speaking French—albeit a French that I had trouble understanding at times, especially when older people in smaller towns talked to my kids. Most of the time, though, it was just fun. Sherbrooke had a mall, one that grew during the time we lived there, a mall. This, you must understand, was something I did not see everyday in the Northeast Kingdom. At Christmas one year, we were fascinated by a display that had real, live reindeer. I loved that what was the north in the United States was the south in Quebec. Lake Memphremagog was beautiful on its US side, but luxurious on its Canadian. Funny how perspectives can change. People talked to us all the time, and my older son began to pick up French. He liked Tin-Tin, too. That helped.

I loved the escape, the feeling that as isolated as I sometimes felt sitting in my Vermont living room, watching the snow swirl around the backyard on a bitterly cold day, I could get in the car and go to another world, with better coffee and people who talked about literature in French on the radio. That was pretty exciting to me. Not to say that there was none of that in Vermont. I still miss things from there, like the Eye on the Sky from St. Johnsbury and picking strawberries and that swirling snow and the Milky Way and packs of coyotes howling in the night and neighbors, both down-to-earth and eccentric, and hidden gems and the Willey’s Store in Greensboro. But crossing the border was different. It was the escape, the feeling that I had crossed into something new, something different. And that was before I discovered Montreal. I found Montreal a while later, and then… well, then, nothing was the same. But that is another tale for another time. I have wandered a lot from my intended topic, I think, but please be patient with my exhausted and circumlocutious writing style; for I am weary at the end of the day. Good night.