Come hang out in Montreal!

Friday and Saturday events in Montreal for The Social Safety Net

I’m finally getting to the end of my Fall travel schedule. I made a joke to myself about going from a hotel room in Victoria to one in Montreal, not realizing that Air Canada would stick in a room for me at Pearson Airport in Toronto last night. It’s wild how many hotel room beds I’ve slept in since September. From New York to Port Elgin, Ottawa, Winnipeg and Victoriaville, and then Hamilton, from Waterloo to Toronto and then Edmonton, back to Toronto and to Victoria, and then Toronto and tomorrow, Montreal, it has been an incredibly busy three months.

Twelve hotel room numbers to remember. Twenty-four keys to lose. Oh, except in Edmonton, where they gave me real keys and I had to take that very seriously. Twelve white bathtubs where someone with the level of vision I have cannot find anything that is white when dropped (soap, cloth, shampoo, etc.). Two rooms with automatic, card activitated lights, the kind I first saw in Asia in 2008 (but then unlike in Asia, the lights stay on for some amount of time when you take the card out and try to turn them off, and hope they will just go off as you’re drifing off to sleep).

One welcome desk with a crucifix hanging over head (Victoriaville), one in-room breakfast (I forget where), one beach view (Port Elgin, of course), one heart-attack-rendering bill (New York City, obviously). You have to love this stuff to do what I do and luckily, I very much love this stuff. Even the absolutely cheese-eating gingerbread house contest that took over the lobby of my Victoria hotel. Ok, I didn’t love that but I love the idea of it, now that I have been gone for 24 hours.

I do love to travel. When I was 19 and got a job as a tour guide, I loved being in a new hotel every week. When I got involved in the student movement and the campus press, I got used to strange hotel set-ups and sharing rooms (and at least one time a bed) with strangers. Fighting with my News Editor on the softness or hardness of the bed we had to share is a dear memory (before I knew it, he took captive of the remote and started making my side of the bed so soft, I sank into the box spring). I especially love meeting people in my hotel rooms — something I’ve done more and more since COVID started — just as an option to not have to buy anything to sit and visit with someone who I haven’t seen in ages.

But there is a limit to these things and I have perhaps hit mine. It’s been a lot of travel. And it’s about to come to an end, for 2.5 weeks anyway, this weekend. Yeah, I can’t avoid travelling for the holidays.

Tomorrow night, at 7:00 at Librarie Argo Bookshop, come and celebrate the Quebec launch of my new book, The Social Safety Net. We will be lucky to be graced by the presence of Chris Curtis from The Rover who will ask me some questions but hopefully will let me ask him just as many.

And, if you can’t make that, you can catch me here at 2:00 on Saturday …

I will be happy to see you but honestly, happier when it’s all done. I’ll be heading home on Saturday via the Orléans Express to hopefully land in Quebec City in time to be at a friends’ dinner at the new Maurice. That probably means nothing to you but that’s ok. If the evening is transcendant, I’ll write about it.

In an episode of Murphy Brown that I watched on Montday, Murphy and Jim are trapped in a Kansas hotel for the night due to a snowstorm. It kills the next leg of their trip, which was supposed to be Hawaii. The two wander into the hotel bar and Murphy, upon seeing a mostly empty space, yells out, “an empty bar in a hotel the night of a snowstorm? I hate the nineties!” I hear that. It should be the place but it never is.

But there is also a wonderful calm in that emptiness too. The silence of travel. The introspection. The time spent staring at strangers, cursing strangers, meeting strangers. Me skipping past the shoe shine guy because I know he’s right, I could use a shine. I’ll do it the next time I have a longer connection, I promise (and it is a great service, do it some time if you have the time and money). The call of the hotel bar until you remember that it’s late and you have nothing to read and no one to talk to and you don’t feel like a drink. Then it becomes the call of the bed, which is pretty good too.