Saturday night we set out. Even though we were tired and some of us were cranky and we didn’t really know what to expect. Up a down-way street. Heads lowered, we leaned into the nickel and dime sized March wet snow. Down under the CN overpass, a right onto Bellechasse, and then east, east, east.
The best place for a Nova Scotia kitchen party in Montreal is the Petit Patrie. A dog, a trumpet and a piano. Two fiddles, a mandolin and a drum. Three accordions. Four small children. As far as I could tell… they were all moving so quickly.
I’m a big fan of dogs, fiddles and accordions. Less so of small children. But these were free-range kids, with little or no interest in adults and their goings on. They had their own party plans. They climbed the couch mountain. Waved their painted paper batons. Spun like tops, crouched like dogs, played dead on the floor. For twenty seconds or more. Then sprang up quite alive again to hunt down two-part piano harmonies and/or wheat-free cookies.
We random grown-ups were left to our own devices. We sat on the floor. Drank French wine from Beartrix Potter mugs. Read a How To Train Your Dog book. It’s too late, S. said. Our dog’s nine. Tunes unfolded. Keys were negotiated. Fifths were found.
Two smallish girls, aged five or six or so, discovered the hostess’s necklace collection hanging from a pegboard. I was enlisted. Because I was sitting right there. But soon turned double agent. For the hostess, supervising. For the girls, reaching, untangling and admiring. It’s hard to say what language we were speaking. French, English, Polish, Hand Gestures. A translator was brought in to invite me run up and down the hall with them. Someone, somebody’s mother perhaps, explained: She’s a big person, she might not want too. So they brought me the last wheat-free cookie instead. And later one of them hid behind me in a game of hide-and-seek. Surely, in little girl land, this is a huge complement. A great honour.
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