Out and About
Just set off and see where you end up.
Meg has thought a lot about Parker’s advice since she agreed to follow it.
She’s also spent a lot of time hoping it will pour down rain this weekend, and give her an excuse to not follow it.
But Saturday dawns one of those breath-takingly gorgeous crisp fall days, and Meg, with a sigh, pulls together the things she needs for the adventure she’s agreed to try to have - a map of Montréal (allowed for emergencies, Parker said), the bus and Metro routes (also for emergencies), one of her ever-present blue notebooks (not previously used and already labeled “Around Montréal,” for note-taking), a small French-English dictionary (just in case) and two pens (one blue, one black) - and puts them in her shoulder bag.
She also resolves that she’s not going to let herself lapse into English today (though, like the maps, it will be allowed in the case of an emergency). She needs to practice. Meg is good with French, but it’s classroom French, and she’s still getting used to the way people actually speak and use it.
She tells her roommate, Carrie, she should be back before dinnertime, and shrugs into her green wool jacket. Meg is very fond of this jacket - she likes it so much, in fact, that she wears it even though it’s one of the things she bought shopping with Kim in Toronto in August. Most of the clothes she bought on that trip are in her closet at home, in the floor, still in the bags. Black gloves in her pocket, cream-colored scarf around her neck, and Meg Ford is as ready as she’s going to get for this.
She swings up to the library first, to return two books she’s done with, and then squares her shoulders and walks out through the gates, making a left onto rue Sherbrooke (recorded neatly on the first line of the first page of her notebook - she won’t use it to find her way back today, that would be cheating, but if she does see something worth visiting later, she wants to be able to find it again).
She’s seen the things along here before, of course, but she hasn’t really paid attention to them. She hasn’t made it far before she sees the sign Musée McCord de l’Histoire Canadienne. Meg hesitates. Parker is not the only person she’s recently talked to in . . . that place who’s given her something to think about. She turns and goes into the museum.
She spends an hour looking around, at photographs and old clothes, silverware and furniture, hunting knives and folk art, jewelry and beadwork. Hundreds of years’ worth of the artifacts of daily life. She leaves with silent apologies to Sam Winchester and a largely unchanged view on the interest of history in general and Canadian history in particular.
She could head up to the park on Mont-Royal from here, but instead she continues down Sherbrooke, stopping once to make notes in her neat handwriting about a café that looks promising. She keeps going until she reaches the Musée des Beaux-Arts and while that’s been on her To Visit list since before she arrived in Montréal, she really doesn’t think Parker meant for her to spend the day in museums. Another note, and then she turns to wander past the shops and restaurants on rue Crescent.
Over the course of the afternoon, she slowly fills nine pages in the notebook - what turns she took, where she stopped for tea and for a slightly late lunch (the first worth visiting again, the second worth avoiding at all costs), stores she wants to come back to browse in, the service times at Cathedral Christ Church so she can go one Sunday morning, the details on a gorgeous blue sweater she sees in a shop window so that she can look for a pattern to make one like it, the name of a bilingual bookstore with a good selection of English language magazines.
She wanders around a square, looking at the statues - a memorial to the Boer war and Robert Burns, odd bedfellows. She stops to ask a man sitting on one of the benches where she is (Square Dorchester, he says, and she writes it down) and gets a mini-lecture on the history of the building across the street (the Sun Life Building, he says, and she writes that down, too), where the Crown Jewels were stashed during World War II. (Meg writes that down with a note to check it, because it sounds like a very odd place to stash them, in her opinion.)
She gets stopped four times and asked to photograph tourists - twice in English and twice in French. Meg assumes she must look like someone who won’t mind being asked to photograph tourists. Or else she just looks like someone who is very unlikely to steal tourists’ cameras.
She stops in the tourist information bureau, spends fifteen minutes talking about hockey with the young man behind the counter (he is, unsurprisingly, a Canadiens fan), and leaves with a handful of brochures and pamphlets on other things to see and do in Montréal.
When she notices the shadows are getting long, she takes a turn that she thinks will get her back to campus and is delighted to find that she’s right. She’s almost back to the gates when someone stops her.
“Mademoiselle? Excusez-moi.”
Meg turns to find a young man about her age. “Oui?”
“Bonjour,” he says.
“Bonjour.” When he doesn’t say anything else, she continues, “Avez-vous besoin de quelque chose?”
“Ah, oui,” he says. “Oui. Ah, quelle heure est-il, s’il vous plaît?”
“Il est. . .” Meg checks her watch. “. . . cinq heures moins dix.”
“Merci.”
“De rien,” she says, and starts to leave.
“Attendez, s’il vous plaît,” he says, and she turn again.
“Oui? Voulez-vous quelque chose d’autre?”
“Non,” he says. And then, “Oui. Peut-être.”
No, yes, and maybe. That seems to cover all the options, if nothing else. “Monsieur?”
“Je voudrais . . . je pense . . . si vous . . . peut-être . . . I don’t think I know how to do this in French.”
“Maybe you should try English, then,” Meg says.
His smile is unexpected and, in a way, kind of dazzling. “You speak English.”
“Yes. Was there something you wanted?”
“Okay, look, I know how this is going to sound, and I really don’t make a habit of doing this, I promise, and it’s not some kind of . . . anything, but I’d really like to photograph you.”
Whatever Meg is expecting, that isn’t it. She’d been ready for him to ask her out (because that, at least, would have been a logical conclusion to his inability to get to the point). But this?
She laughs. “You should have stuck to French. Do you really think line is going to work?”
“It’s not a line. I’m a photographer, or at least, I want to be and you’re . . . you’re luminous, and I really want to take your picture. And I’m really not saying that to get you to do anything inappropriate or anything else, though if you wanted to have coffee or go to the movies or something, sometime, I can’t say that I-”
“Okay, you’re creepy and getting creepier. Next time you stop a girl on the street, you might want to try starting with the coffee and working up to the posing. But my answer to both is ‘no.’”
“But-”
“I’m leaving now. Don’t follow me. Au revoir, monsieur, et bonne chance.”
And she turns and escapes through the gates of McGill, heading for the library to record this, the final and oddest adventure of her day, on the tenth page of the notebook she started filling this morning.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Edward Marriner stands on the sidewalk outside McGill and watches her leave, and thinks that red hair and a green coat and late afternoon sun is a combination he should remember. Which is good, because it’s also a combination he’s not going to forget any time soon.
He stands there until she’s out of sight and then some, so she can’t possibly think he’s following her when he heads for his residence hall, and until a passerby stops to ask him if everything is all right.
“Yes, thank you. Everything is fine. I just met the girl I’m going to marry.”
Meg has thought a lot about Parker’s advice since she agreed to follow it.
She’s also spent a lot of time hoping it will pour down rain this weekend, and give her an excuse to not follow it.
But Saturday dawns one of those breath-takingly gorgeous crisp fall days, and Meg, with a sigh, pulls together the things she needs for the adventure she’s agreed to try to have - a map of Montréal (allowed for emergencies, Parker said), the bus and Metro routes (also for emergencies), one of her ever-present blue notebooks (not previously used and already labeled “Around Montréal,” for note-taking), a small French-English dictionary (just in case) and two pens (one blue, one black) - and puts them in her shoulder bag.
She also resolves that she’s not going to let herself lapse into English today (though, like the maps, it will be allowed in the case of an emergency). She needs to practice. Meg is good with French, but it’s classroom French, and she’s still getting used to the way people actually speak and use it.
She tells her roommate, Carrie, she should be back before dinnertime, and shrugs into her green wool jacket. Meg is very fond of this jacket - she likes it so much, in fact, that she wears it even though it’s one of the things she bought shopping with Kim in Toronto in August. Most of the clothes she bought on that trip are in her closet at home, in the floor, still in the bags. Black gloves in her pocket, cream-colored scarf around her neck, and Meg Ford is as ready as she’s going to get for this.
She swings up to the library first, to return two books she’s done with, and then squares her shoulders and walks out through the gates, making a left onto rue Sherbrooke (recorded neatly on the first line of the first page of her notebook - she won’t use it to find her way back today, that would be cheating, but if she does see something worth visiting later, she wants to be able to find it again).
She’s seen the things along here before, of course, but she hasn’t really paid attention to them. She hasn’t made it far before she sees the sign Musée McCord de l’Histoire Canadienne. Meg hesitates. Parker is not the only person she’s recently talked to in . . . that place who’s given her something to think about. She turns and goes into the museum.
She spends an hour looking around, at photographs and old clothes, silverware and furniture, hunting knives and folk art, jewelry and beadwork. Hundreds of years’ worth of the artifacts of daily life. She leaves with silent apologies to Sam Winchester and a largely unchanged view on the interest of history in general and Canadian history in particular.
She could head up to the park on Mont-Royal from here, but instead she continues down Sherbrooke, stopping once to make notes in her neat handwriting about a café that looks promising. She keeps going until she reaches the Musée des Beaux-Arts and while that’s been on her To Visit list since before she arrived in Montréal, she really doesn’t think Parker meant for her to spend the day in museums. Another note, and then she turns to wander past the shops and restaurants on rue Crescent.
Over the course of the afternoon, she slowly fills nine pages in the notebook - what turns she took, where she stopped for tea and for a slightly late lunch (the first worth visiting again, the second worth avoiding at all costs), stores she wants to come back to browse in, the service times at Cathedral Christ Church so she can go one Sunday morning, the details on a gorgeous blue sweater she sees in a shop window so that she can look for a pattern to make one like it, the name of a bilingual bookstore with a good selection of English language magazines.
She wanders around a square, looking at the statues - a memorial to the Boer war and Robert Burns, odd bedfellows. She stops to ask a man sitting on one of the benches where she is (Square Dorchester, he says, and she writes it down) and gets a mini-lecture on the history of the building across the street (the Sun Life Building, he says, and she writes that down, too), where the Crown Jewels were stashed during World War II. (Meg writes that down with a note to check it, because it sounds like a very odd place to stash them, in her opinion.)
She gets stopped four times and asked to photograph tourists - twice in English and twice in French. Meg assumes she must look like someone who won’t mind being asked to photograph tourists. Or else she just looks like someone who is very unlikely to steal tourists’ cameras.
She stops in the tourist information bureau, spends fifteen minutes talking about hockey with the young man behind the counter (he is, unsurprisingly, a Canadiens fan), and leaves with a handful of brochures and pamphlets on other things to see and do in Montréal.
When she notices the shadows are getting long, she takes a turn that she thinks will get her back to campus and is delighted to find that she’s right. She’s almost back to the gates when someone stops her.
“Mademoiselle? Excusez-moi.”
Meg turns to find a young man about her age. “Oui?”
“Bonjour,” he says.
“Bonjour.” When he doesn’t say anything else, she continues, “Avez-vous besoin de quelque chose?”
“Ah, oui,” he says. “Oui. Ah, quelle heure est-il, s’il vous plaît?”
“Il est. . .” Meg checks her watch. “. . . cinq heures moins dix.”
“Merci.”
“De rien,” she says, and starts to leave.
“Attendez, s’il vous plaît,” he says, and she turn again.
“Oui? Voulez-vous quelque chose d’autre?”
“Non,” he says. And then, “Oui. Peut-être.”
No, yes, and maybe. That seems to cover all the options, if nothing else. “Monsieur?”
“Je voudrais . . . je pense . . . si vous . . . peut-être . . . I don’t think I know how to do this in French.”
“Maybe you should try English, then,” Meg says.
His smile is unexpected and, in a way, kind of dazzling. “You speak English.”
“Yes. Was there something you wanted?”
“Okay, look, I know how this is going to sound, and I really don’t make a habit of doing this, I promise, and it’s not some kind of . . . anything, but I’d really like to photograph you.”
Whatever Meg is expecting, that isn’t it. She’d been ready for him to ask her out (because that, at least, would have been a logical conclusion to his inability to get to the point). But this?
She laughs. “You should have stuck to French. Do you really think line is going to work?”
“It’s not a line. I’m a photographer, or at least, I want to be and you’re . . . you’re luminous, and I really want to take your picture. And I’m really not saying that to get you to do anything inappropriate or anything else, though if you wanted to have coffee or go to the movies or something, sometime, I can’t say that I-”
“Okay, you’re creepy and getting creepier. Next time you stop a girl on the street, you might want to try starting with the coffee and working up to the posing. But my answer to both is ‘no.’”
“But-”
“I’m leaving now. Don’t follow me. Au revoir, monsieur, et bonne chance.”
And she turns and escapes through the gates of McGill, heading for the library to record this, the final and oddest adventure of her day, on the tenth page of the notebook she started filling this morning.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Edward Marriner stands on the sidewalk outside McGill and watches her leave, and thinks that red hair and a green coat and late afternoon sun is a combination he should remember. Which is good, because it’s also a combination he’s not going to forget any time soon.
He stands there until she’s out of sight and then some, so she can’t possibly think he’s following her when he heads for his residence hall, and until a passerby stops to ask him if everything is all right.
“Yes, thank you. Everything is fine. I just met the girl I’m going to marry.”