Oh, au Québec

A year-and-a-half into the pandemic, with Maryland’s endless summer steaming into autumn, I needed a break. Grace à Dieu, one of my favorite destinations is open again, and it proved worth the trip. COVID, combined with the off-season and my husband’s trip-planning savvy, made for our best adventure yet.

We arrived at Quebec City on Tuesday evening, found on-street parking, and breezed into Aux Anciens Canadiens, for a terrific meal with no wait at the door other than to flash passports and vaccination cards. This is the new normal up north, a requirement so ubiquitous that Canadians store the document as a QR code on their phones, which prompted us to likewise photograph our documents. For roughly $40 apiece CA ($32 US) we dined on pea soup, meat pie, duck salad, bison bourguignon, maple sugar pie, and wine as the start of our gastronomical tour. Then we strolled the cobbled old town under a full moon that sparkled on the St. Lawrence beneath the Promenade du Château Frontenac

Whale watching in Tadoussac, three hours northeast on the Gaspé Peninsula, was our prime objective. The nutrient-rich Saguenay Fjord, continental America’s only one, is the preferred picnic grounds for four species throughout the summer and early fall. With fewer boats plying their feeding grounds post-season, the whales were not shy about showing themselves and putting on a show. One female humpback with her calf repeatedly breached, waved her giant pectorals like the Queen, and slapped the surface to stun her prey. The numerous fin whales, minkes, and belugas we also saw were a bonus.

Ordinarily, reservations are recommended, and the grand hotel was full despite the absence of the usual tourist hordes from France—because Canadians who normally would vacation in the US are rediscovering their own country while our border remains closed. Still, with one night’s notice we discovered a gîte so sweet that we extended our stay. Auberge Maison Gagne  closes after Thanksgiving (our Columbus Weekend), so hurry.  

Our coastal ramblings includeded historic chapels, patrimonial farmhouses, and a poisonnerie in Les Escoumins, where we sampled seafoods new to even this native New Englander—char (cousin to the salmon) and an astonishing ceviche of clam strips, whelks, and turbot. We also learned that porcupine can swim! One waddled past us to pick his way across a boulder-strewn beach, dip his paws in at a couple of entry points, and then porky-paddle(?) across an inlet to scramble out the other side like a rock climber.

From Tadoussac we circumnavigated the fjord as far north as the bridge at Chicoutimi and back down the opposite side, stopping to hike several trails. Halte du Beluga featured interpretive panels about a turn of the century logging community that boasted steam-powered electric lighting. In Chicoutimi we discovered cretons, a subtly spiced pork spread for toast, at a neighborhood grill. Then we toured La Petite Maison Blanche, the sole house to survive two historic floods, and saw a glimpse of what life was like for the Depression-era bride who still lived there in 1996 when the inundation wiped out 108 of her neighbor’s homes. You can see it at the 30-second mark of this French news clip.

Everything was great until Saturday night when we drove around Malbaie for half an hour looking for a place to eat. Staffing shortages—from the service industry to construction and sales—appear to be as prevalent in Canada as at home, if not more so. Two hours for a mediocre meal at family-style chain called Mike’s should have taught us a lesson, but I haughtily refused the Holiday Inn breakfast and ended up waiting 90 minutes for Sunday Brunch at the fabulous Cochon Dingue.

Finally, we lost the better part of the morning chasing down a thank you gift for my brother who is cat-sitting. He likes cigars, and we’d read that thanks to Obama, we could import Cuban cigars, but apparently, Trump overturned that order. Fortunately, two of the four weren’t labeled as such. The US customs officer made us turn around to drop them off in Canada, and the Canadian officer refused to touch them, instructing my husband to drop them in the trash in the men’s room. So now that you know the protocol, if you’re a smoker, check out la poubelle at the border next time you go.

The online paper work enabling our trip was a hassle, and we had to get a negative PCR Covid test within 72-hours of crossing the border. But by all means go if you can. Just limit your stay to weekdays.

Rivers West – Louis L’Amour

. . . a mill does not turn upon water that is past, nor does a ship sail with the winds of yesterday. I had my own name to make. The story of that pirate Talon—well, that was his story.

If you know the name Louis L’Amour, you know he is arguably the most prolific author of Westerns, having sold over 200,000,000 copies of nearly one hundred titles from the Forties to the Eighties. If you know me, you know that formulaic fiction is not my usual fare. But I’m on vacation, and this book was free for the taking.

What makes it unique, in my mind, is the fact that despite it’s being a western, the action never moves further west than St. Louis, the frontier of the 1820’s. When a Pittsburgh-bound Quebecois shipwright discovers a murder near the American border, and is befriended by a pirate, adventures ensues as they make their way through New England for the first half of the book. Despite the many fisticuffs, the sassy ingenue who is especially fetching when angry, and the treasonous villain who covets the entire Louisiana Purchase, this is fun historical fiction. I enjoyed the tavern scenes, the sensitive portrayal of the Indians and pioneers, and the sprinkling of French. This is a quick read (151 pgs.) that would appeal to all ages.

To learn more about Louis L’Amour, watch this brief author interview

In Cold Blood

Of the people in the world, the Clutters were the least likely to be murdered.

I’m not one for mysteries or true-crime dramas. I generally skip the gruesome news stories. But Truman Capote’s 1966 ground-breaking news report cum novel(?) is considered a classic in the nonfiction world—something I felt I had to read in order to be educated. Let me save you the time; in November of 1959, a respectable Kansas family was brutally murdered in the dead of night. We know this and the identities of the perpetrators from the start, but Capote takes 343 pages, or 14 ½ hours of narration, to take us inside the heads of the two cons who did it, the victims (adults and children alike), their friends and neighbors, the investigators, and possibly the arguably in the pasture. The only puzzle piece missing is the motivation and method. All of which is to say you might find it tedious midway through. Add to that the frustration of numerous attestations to creative falsehoods embedded in the account, and the work’s sensationalism outweighs its journalism.

What I, as a graphologist, found most compelling was the psychological profiles of the killers, complete with detailed descriptions of their handwriting. This account is detailed to the Nth degree, which is both its strength and its weakness.

For a summary of the crime, watch this brief Newsweek documentary. Then check out Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Academy Award winning performance in Capote (2005), the biopic of the investigative storyteller.

The Moor’s Account – Laila Lalami

We marched into the unknown led by a governor who, though he retained the use of one eye, was the blindest man I ever met.

This 2015 Pulitzer nominee is a fictional retelling of the ill-fated Navarez expedition of 1527, as witnessed by the slave Estebanico, born Mustafa in Morocco. A reimagining of the true events otherwise recorded by one of three [biased] survivors, it recounts their six-year dissipation into ever smaller groups and their inevitable assimilation into the native societies they’d set out to conquer.

The Moor, Mustafa, despite his lowly position, proves to be the party’s most valuable and impartial member, acting as interpreter and medicine man. A trained scribe and devout Muslim, he punctuates his record of their adventures with commentary on the Spaniards’ brutality, ignorance, and misguided Christian principles.

I listened to the Audible version [13 h. 18 m.], narrated by Neil Shah, whose authoritative tone at times grew monotonous as the story at times seemed to retrace its steps like the lost explorers.  Still, it was an educational and entertaining story.

You can watch the author discuss and read from her work in this interview from the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Governor Andrew Cuomo - Handwriting Analysis

In a televised response to the New York State Attorney General’s conclusion that he harassed numerous female coworkers during his tenure as Governor, Andrew Cuomo claims he’s just naturally affectionate, that hugging and kissing are behaviors he learned from his Italian parents. “I do it with everyone,” he adds, conveniently ignoring further allegations of groping and inappropriate comments. “I am the same person in public as I am in private.”

To find out whether or not he’s telling the truth, I went sleuthing online for his signature in conjunction with his regular handwriting. If you read yesterday’s blogpost, you’ll recall that signatures are the outward sign of how a writer wants to be perceived. They may or may not jive with the rest of the writing, which reflects the person’s true character. There’s not much of his writing out there, but this brief salutation and short note [second item on the page] both indicate a match; he is indeed a forthright person.

What I find most interesting about Cuomo’s signature, however, is the half-bowtie formation at the top of his capital C. Graphologists call this a stinger, and it appears in the script of those who embrace a challenge. Cuomo’s is so large it looks like a capital A. Of course, a politician must embrace challenge in order to succeed in the public arena, but might such a risk-taker also enjoy the thrill of bending the rules of decorum in the guise of social cluelessness?  

Usain Bolt - Signature Analysis

If you’ve been watching the Olympics, you’ve likely seen Usain Bolt in an amusing Michelob commercial where he directs joggers into a bar by striking his double-pointing victory pose and mugging for the camera. Like the athlete himself, the Fastest Man in the World’s signature is speedy and impressive—from his outsized capitals that project his outsized image to the Zorro-like embellishment so reminiscent of his trademark stance. This pen-flair creatively serves to both cross his t and slash his name with an image of lightning speed. Such a signature makes a big impression, but it’s always worth bearing in mind that one’s signature is merely the sign of one’s nature as they wish to be seen by the world. “Behind the scene is where everything is done,” Bolt famously said, and this crossing out of his name, tantamount to self-abasement in handwriting analysis, tells me that he works every day to overcome some form of self-doubt. That’s how he got where he is. Whether or not his signature reflects the real man behind the image depends on whether or not it matches the rest of his writing. I haven’t seen it, and therefore I can’t say.

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir – by Natasha Tretheway

Even my mother’s death is redeemed in the story of my calling, made meaningful rather than merely senseless. It is the story I tell myself to survive.

Natasha Tretheway’s legacy is the guilt that “She [her mother] is dead because I am not.” By that, she means that her abusive step-father would have been imprisoned and therefore unable to shoot her mother had she not unwittingly deflected him from killing her first.

Here is the story of a mother-daughter bond so strong that she thought it could never break. Then divorce and a new man enter their lives, and her mother’s doting attention sours as she secretly endures a decade of physical and mental abuse. And the child, like a canary in the coal mine, is the first to feel his poison. But these are smart, strong women; it seems they will find a way to survive, even though we know from the start that they won’t.

The Pulitzer Prize winning Poet Laureate so adeptly weaves this memoir of her childhood as a biracial in the South during the Sixties and Seventies that one would never guess prose is not her main medium. I listened to her narrate her story on Audible [just over five hours], and no doubt will again and again. To learn more about her life and hear her read excerpts, watch this segment from the PBS News Hour

Notes on a Silencing – Lacy Crawford

“It’s so simple, what happened at St. Paul’s. It happens all the time. First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me.

The IT Lacy Crawford discloses in her memoir of sexual assault at one of the nation’s most prestigious boarding schools was so ruthlessly coordinated that the lingering physical and emotional trauma would plague her for the rest of her life. As I listened to her account of the attack in the opening scene of the audiobook, I seriously considered returning the title because I did not know if I had the fortitude to continue.

Consider the facts: a naive fifteen-year-old girl is lured to the room of two upper-class adults and forced to perform oral sex. As a result, she contracts herpes—a diagnosis the school learns of, shields from her, and shares with its male athletes out of an abundance of “caution”.

Crawford’s writing is so compelling that I kept with the story even as her nightmare stretched into years of shame, shunning, and dysfunction so intense that I felt physically ill. There’s a reason beyond the shockwaves that shaking her alma mater in the Me Too Movement that this story made Time Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2020.

To watch a brief video of Crawford summarizing her experience and her reasons for recounting it, click here.

Sugar - by Bernice L. McFadden

It don’t matter how old you are, you always need your momma.

Bernice L. McFadden’s first novel, written in 2000, was my introduction to this American Book Award winner [2017 for The Book of Harlan], and I will definitely be reading more of her work. I only hope that she doesn’t end each beautiful story with such a storm cloud. If I’d been turning pages rather than listening, I’d have hurled the book across the room—but as I listen on my phone . . ..

Set in 1950’s Arkansas, this is the story of an unlikely friendship between a matronly Baptist, Pearl and her new neighbor, Sugar, who is a prostitute. They have seemingly nothing in common and yet everything in common—though only one will learn of their greatest bond by the end of the story. Abandoned at birth to the care of three prostitutes, Sugar’s lack of motherly love has caramelized her to a brittle shell of a flashy woman. Pearl, on the other hand, has been an empty shell of herself ever since the brutal murder of her daughter twenty years before. As they find their ways into each other’s arms, there are hearty laughs and heartbreak aplenty. I can’t stress enough how much I loved this story for its compassionate portrayal of both characters as they help each other to understand and move beyond their pasts.

It took McFadden a decade to polish and publish this work, as she describes in this 3-minute interview about her writing career, yet she has since gone on to publish some twenty more.

Penguin, 256 pages—recently rereleased in 20th  Anniversary edition—or 8 hrs. 44 mins. on Audible.

Laughing Boy by Oliver LaFarge

. . . you are wearing moccasins that do not fit you. The sooner you both come back to your own people, the better . . .

Oliver LaFarge conceived this fiction about the Navajo and their dis-integration into white society while living among them as an anthropology grad student during the 1920’s. As he explains in the foreword, “The general scene, the appearance and behavior of those Indians, their dress, their camps, their games, their weapons, their land, were honorably set down as he had seen them. [It] was an age of innocence.” For some, he might well have added, for that is the crux of the plot recounting a tragic love story about the clash of cultures.

Laughing Boy is living in the traditional way when he is ensnared by the charms of Slim Girl, a beauty from the town with a mysterious double-life. He follows her, against the advice of family, to be tamed by the comforts of civilization: a stone house and chimney, canned goods, and fire water elixirs. Yet even as he enjoys prosperity silversmithing and trading, he converts her back to the old ways that the Indian Residential Christian Schools sought to beat out of her. In an effort to become a good Navajo woman, she learns to weave elaborate rugs based on the tapestry of her life. If only she can escape the monetary sway of her old ways before he discovers her secrets, they will be able to amass a fortune that will allow them repair to the reservation in style.

I found this 1929 Pulitzer Prize winner intriguing for language as sparse and poetic as the desert and Native dialect. As a singer, I appreciated Laughing Boy’s many impromptu songs expressing his daily thoughts and prayers. As a crafter, I loved Slim Girl’s reflections on the similarity of life to the loom with its many threads. Here is a romance and tragedy of epic proportions for the reader who aspires to glimpse the First Nations way of life from a lens closer to the truth than has been offered by Hollywood, though it was made into a film in 1934. To hear Oliver Lafarge’s progressive opinions on the state of Indian affairs in 1963, the year of his death, watch this brief interview.  (192 pages in Signet Classic paperback)