A Constant Search for the Essential
Eileen Manion
“But something new is bound to follow,
as it always has.”
Olga Tokarczul Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead
In the midst of the June heat wave, I went into a fancy little store in Old Montreal to treat myself to soft ice cream. When I handed the cashier a twenty dollar bill, she shook her head from behind her Plexiglas barrier and pointed to the credit card gizmo. Can the virus really be transmitted on those green slippery cash surfaces? Should I disinfect my credit card after taking it out of the machine? Maybe we will soon be offered disposable plastic devices to cover our credit cards — flat little condoms?
As I paid for the ice cream on that hot June day, I wondered: what happens to customers who don’t have credit cards?
And what about the homeless?
There are about 4000 homeless people in Montreal.
Inevitably Covid-19 has a disproportionate impact on people who are already more vulnerable due to malnutrition, exhaustion, mental illness, other chronic health problems. Many counseling and addiction services are unavailable. Nor is the Maison du Pere accepting new residents. Though some new shelters have opened and some testing has been done, it is not enough.
Earlier in the week I decided to look more carefully at “Les Clochards Celestes,” the Pierre Yves Angers sculpture created in 1981 to pay homage to a nearby sanctuary for homeless men, Maison du Pere. Now, in the midst of the pandemic, the sculpture looks naively optimistic: three outsize white figures representing homeless people supporting one another, pointing upward.
The title is a translation of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, a novel that makes homelessness a religion, a quest in which the narrator seeks to turn material privation into spiritual growth, as did Jesus or the Buddha.
Its inscription says “A tous ceux et celles pour qui la realite quotidienne n’est constitue que de l’unlassable quete de l’essentiel.”
To those for whom daily reality is nothing but a constant search for the essential.
Like many of my friends, I’ve been buying groceries and most other things online, so I never have any change. When approached by someone holding out a paper cup, I have to shake my head, “Je suis desolee. Pas de monnaie.”
By disrupting our comfortable quotidian habits, the pandemic is also forcing us to confront problems we often prefer to ignore.
But homeless people live among us in Montreal; we see them congregating in front of Guy Favreau temporary housing, pitching tents on small patches of grass across from the Palais de congress, sitting on the corner of Viger and Hotel de Ville, waiting for cars to stop at the red light so they can attempt to wash the windshield.
The street where I live used to have several rooming houses that catered to those who needed a low-cost place to stay. Gentrification has eliminated every one of them.
How can the new provisions for shelter adopted to deal with Covid-19 promote policy changes that will make a permanent difference?
Affordable housing, for example?
Every time I check my email, I’m greeted with some unsolicited advice:
“Stay positive, stay sane, stay home.”
All very well if you have a home.
One day, as I was walking to mine along La Gauchetiere St, just east of Chinatown, where many homeless people gather along the sidewalk and in the alleys, I heard a man yell a jaunty greeting: “Hey old woman — stay strong!”
I hope he can do the same.
Making arrangements for health and well-being is necessary for all of us.
And not just during the pandemic.
