Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

Part the First

Thursday, Jul. 13, 2006
3:48 p.m.
Thursday, July 6, 2006

We finally got away two hours after our ETD and met with Montreal rushhour on the bridge, the thing we had been trying to avoid. I get the willies in traffic like that, especially when Hubby is driving, practically kissing the bumper of the car in front of us. Not to mention the fact that I also get motion sick from the constant starting and stopping. However, we finally made it to our destination and found a parking spot under PIace des Arts, freeing us from worrying about where to leave the car.

Next we had to find the luthier exhibit, which, it turned out, was several luthier exhibits all over the building. Hubby got totally distracted with all the guitars on display. There were flat tops and arch tops, electric and classical, basses and weird hybrids, and there were guitars that looked like harps. They were all gorgeous, gleaming, freshly polished instruments. We had a great deal of trouble dragging him away and finding Oskar who had the little parlour guitar we'd left with him months ago.

This tiny instrument, just my size actually, was given to us by a Spanish prof at the university who had bought it in Madrid. Hubby taught Buddy Boy how to play on it, starting him with classical technique before buying him his electric guitar. In fact, this is actually Buddy Boy's guitar, and he was quite anxious to get it back. When we took it to Oskar in the winter, he had looked inside to see what was rattling, and discovered that it had been made without braces, an oddity, but it had a beautiful tone nonetheless. There were cracks in the table and the back, the tuning pegs were destroyed, and it needed a lot of work. He and Hubby worked out an exchange of one of those indestructible instrument cases of which we had somehow become unwilling owners (and which was worth a small fortune) for some modifications to his archtop and repairs to the parlour guitar.

The repaired instrument is beautiful. The cracks are filled in, the tuning pegs have been replaced, and it looks great. We put it in the car, found some supper in the international food court beneath the complex (I had Middle Eastern, Hubby had Italian and Buddy Boy went for Mexican) and then wandered out into the crowds to catch the music. We saw two groups, one from Norway led by a singer/guitarist who calls himself Peer Gynt which performs blues/rock and was really very fine, albeit a little on the loud side, although I never needed to insert my earplugs. The second group was a cool jazz band from Amsterdam which incorporated lots of percussion as well as guitar, bass, trumpet and saxophone. The leader was very chatty with the crowd, commenting that he really liked Montreal, it reminded him a lot of Amsterdam, in fact, it even smelled like Amsterdam! This, of course, was a propos all the marijuana being smoked freely around us (I had forgotten how much I dislike that odour), and beer wallas were moving through the crowds with plastic cups filled with whatever was on tap.

At 11 p.m. I dragged Hubby away (he would have stayed there all night) so we could retrieve our vehicle and be on our merry way to the motel we'd booked on the other side of the city in order to shorten our trip. Just getting out of the downtown area was insanity, and we were able to check in around 12:30. It didn't help that the directions I got from the reception weren't very good when I made the reservation, and we got a little lost. Hubby did, to his credit, ask for directions at a service station.

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Today was extraordinarily hot. I took Buddy Boy to buy lighter gauge strings for my old guitar, which he's taking with him tomorrow when he goes off to The Great War, as well as a military-style haircut. He looks very handsome in the short hair. I also did two enormous loads of laundry (there are enough darks for yet another load) and have promised Little Princess and her BF that I will take them to see Pirates tonight (my menfolk got to see it while we were away, more on that later). I am looking forward to a cinema where "it's cool inside".

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