Shawville

Last Wednesday, we went to a bar in Shawville to watch the third period of game 7 between the Habs and the Pens (our set was fuzzy). What an exciting game! It was pretty interesting to find a bar full of English-speaking Habs fans. It was also interesting that the 3 women from our group were the only women there, but that odd discomfort is a completely separate issue.

It was nice to be in a small town full of Anglophones: although the town I grew up in has a decent-sized group of English people, there was never any question that we were some sort of equal partners in suburbia. When I was in elementary school, kids from the nearby French high school would pass behind our yard on the raised train tracks during lunch and throw rocks at us because we were English. I got whacked pretty bad in the knee once; bummer. The cops only came one time when this girl Stephanie got hit really hard in the head. Like she could pick them out of a line-up. This was part of the reason some people didn't want to speak French: Francophones were the enemy. The boys who lived behind us used to throw rocks at us, too. My conclusion is that French people like to throw rocks. Of course, now things are better, except for the odd spray-painted comment.

Anyway, the town of Shawville is famous for running a busload of inspectors from the OLF out of town. Here, the people banded together under the principle that merchants should be able to write their signs in whatever the hell language they want. Awesome!

In a lot of ways, I like small towns a lot better than big cities. I don't know why, really. I mean, there's a lot to recommend cities. When I first came to Montreal for University, I expected to meet more open-minded people, to find new ideas, new ways of doing things, and hoped I would fit in. I was right: there was more here than I'd thought possible. Even though I live only one train ride away from the metropolis, there were ways in which I felt safer, more at ease.

I got to go to lectures in astrophysics, and once went to a biomedical ethics conference at the medical school with all these experts (don't ask), who for some reason couldn't figure out why the control group in a study we reviewed was the control group.

There are so many churches in the city, and it allowed me a degree of freedom and experimentation I couldn't have imagined in a place small enough that everyone marks your comings and goings. If it weren't for Montreal, well, I don't think I'd have had the guts to do the things I've done, to step out of the role that was fashioned for me and into something vaster, wider, more. Something I can't see the bottom of. The courage to make decisions I don't fully understand.

But something in me still likes the little towns. Maybe because I often feel that I can't do what's asked of me, and so I look for a smaller place that would somehow demand less, be satisfied with less. I don't know if I can walk this road I've taken, this meandering road, this journey I can't fathom.

Caught between bigness and smallness, a big wide world and the world I come from, the longing and the fear. Two worlds, both complete. Two pieces of me.