Sleepless in Montreal

Last night, after failing to find a place to stay on Couchsurfing, Zil and I wondered the streets of Montreal.  When both of us were too tired, we found a bar that was open and both of us immediately fell asleep.  We were soon awakened by an extremely kind bartender who asked us to sleep upright after we explained our situation.  He didn't want to get into trouble with his boss, but it would be okay so long as we didn't lay down.  I drifted in and out of consciousness, my head propped against a wall next to the booth.  Once the bar closed at 3am, the bartender said he would put us up, but he was going to his girlfriend’s house.  His absolute sincerity and kindness made me feel that one sleepless night was well worth experiencing such compassion.

 

Feeling content and tired, we walked toward the park in front of Mount Royal.  Zil suggested we try to sleep in the portico of a beautiful, old church, but when we walked up the stairs we found it already occupied by other sleepers. We continued walking to the park.  My bag felt like one hundred pounds and my knees felt tight, the night was beautiful and the city was nearly silent.

The park had a weekly festival of music and dance, which Zil and I had attended on Sunday and because Monday is also labor day here in Canada, there was still trash strewn out over the grass.  Voices descended like whispers from the forest that borders the park and marks the ascent of the mountain. Every night, it houses countless homeless people and travelers. 

Zil and I picked a random plot of grass and lay down to sleep.  A while later, unable to sleep I was reading a Stranger in a Strange Land on my phone and listening to the distant conversations and the occasional inhabitant shuffling across the the park.  I was beginning to wish we were on the Appalachian Trail again, where the worst visitor to come interrupt your sleep was a mouse or chipmunk trying to get at your food.  I wasn’t too afraid, but sleep seemed like a risky proposition.  It was about 4am and I made the decision to stay awake while Zil slept until the sun rose in a few hours.  This plan was interrupted by the first few drops of rain.

Gathering our things, we quickly climbed under a large gazebo (I love that word, gazebo) in the park.  We climbed because the floor of it had been removed and we entered a  4 foot foundation supported by metal beams and filled in with gravel, riddled with trash and empty beer bottles.  Zil sat on her mat and I perched myself on one of the beams with my feet swinging.  Zil and I looked at each other and both of us acknowledged how tired we felt and how difficult the night felt at that moment.

One of the denizens of the park was walking picking up bottles and singing songs in French, occasionally interrupted by a short monologue.  I could see worry on Zil’s face as the clamor surrounding the person came closer.  I looked back and saw that it was a gray haired woman and I relaxed a little.  She approached us and after giving us a joyous greeting began wildly arranging herself on one of the beams across from me while launching into a monologue that spun between Spanish, French and English.  Once she sat down she began to focus her words into English as she read our incomprehension and one of the most precious moments of my life began.

She told story after story from her life, launching into huge backstories and adeptly returning to the vain of each story.  She searched for words, sometimes in Spanish and sometimes in French before figuring out the precise English word.  She praised the beautiful night and what a miracle it was that we could be here watching the beautiful clouds crossing the moon.  She spoke about the disease of the world that called her manic depressive while people walked under such eternally changing beauty without realizing how exquisite beauty that surrounds everything.  She spoke about the men who had abused her and how she used to be a nurse.  She explained how she had found herself homeless 4 months earlier and the winter before when she slept on her mattress out in the snow covered in plastic.  She roared with laughter about the strange and dangerous things she had seen and nearly cried when she spoke about the kindness of others.

She described the circumstances of her parents.  Her father had committed suicide and her mentally ill mother and how her and her sister had ended up in an orphanage and foster homes.  She described the Pow Wow where her handicapped sister had fallen in love with the most beautiful Indian; how she was able to go with her mother to her confirmation.  She laid out the scene of her beautiful white shoes she had been wearing and the book of prayers she held with wonderful pictures of churches and priests.  She had wanted to be a priest and was told she couldn’t.  She said that men and women are inside each one of us and how the world cannot simply divide ourselves to support a wounded patriarchy.  She talked about sex and her desires without shame. 

She quoted Khalil Gibran’s prophet and called Zil her mother for this evening.  Her name was Maria, but she was often called Mama2, first named that by her black sheep nephew who loved her and now by the other homeless people she took care of.  She told us places to go where the energy would help us and how to get food and what benches we could sleep on.

She had been in a coma for 7 years and awoke with her mind broken.  She mentioned her daughter.  Later she described an R.V. she had lived in, but when she had been re-united with her daughter, she had given it to her.  When her daughter protested, Maria told her she must have it, because she was a nurse and had worked with patients whose minds were falling apart like her own.  She told her daughter she must have it while she could remember she had a daughter.  She wouldn’t need it where she was going anyway.  As the sun rose, she talked about the slaughter of the buffalo across America and how her people (she was native) thanked the creature they killed and used the whole carcass of the animal.  We all began to cry when she described this because it felt like an ancient plea from someone who had ascended to our ancestors in this life.  The mind that took her daughter, her home, her career, everything that most hold dear, had given her a sight that allowed her to sing out in joy at 4am on Mount Royal while bare-footed, collecting bottles to pay for the necessities of the day ahead.  A mind that had brought her compassion and wisdom to the most abused and forgotten people.  That mind sang about the buffalo as a plea but did not regret anything.

She moved like all of my mothers.  Her expressions and gestures called forth my mom, my god mother Peggy, my adopted mother Georgette.  She looked at me with the same recognition and I knew she could see every part of me. Her words were the wisest part of every woman who had ever touched my life.  I loved her as I must love the one who first held me in her arms and loved me without condition. 

Maria called us angels with the matter-of-factness of someone describing the sky.  She left us singing, with a larger bag I had given her for collecting bottles and all the food we could fit into the front pockets of her red sweat-shirt.  I watched her leave, weeping I watched my own mother, Janis, become a small point of dancing red across a sunlit park. I wept as seagulls encircled the gazebo and the original clouds of that morning drifted past a nearly full moon.

This is Zil's account of meeting Maria:

I fell in love last night. In love with a person, a woman. A woman full of stories that flooded my soul that bled from one language to another.  Story into story. Poetry of a life lost. Poetry of a life lived. Poetry of a memory, of a self, that once was and couldn't be found anymore. Her eyes glittered with a light only she could find/capture, a light she found within us all. I could not tell how beautiful she was until the dawn of day broke upon us poor souls in a gazebo, in a park, filling with seagulls as the sky painted morning. I listened.  I listened harder, more intently than anyone ever listens. I became her stories as she filled me with the knowledge of a time lived and lost. A timeless time.  A time that was running though her bones and soul. A time she gave to us. This mystery being that laughed a t Kool-Aid packages and 7 years of no memories.  That laughed of beatings and lost children. That freed her soul from the bindings it carried by becoming the people she saw in us.