Memories of Chocolate and Love

A recent story in The New York Times Travel section about Brussels and its history of chocolate making brought me back to my first heavenly encounter with real chocolate and the man who introduced me to it.

I called him Uncle Shamsheh but, in fact, he was really my mother's first cousin. Shamsheh had emigrated to Brussels in 1932 in hopes of a better life than the one he had left behind in Chrznow, Poland. In Brussels, he fell in love, married, and had a daughter. Then Germany invaded Poland and, in short order, The Netherlands and Belgium. One day, while he was off working to earn a little bread, there was an aktion. When he returned home, a neighbour intercepted him with a warning not to return home. He never saw his wife and daughter again.

She was four years old the last time he saw her.

I was four when Shamsheh arrived on a visit to Canada with the thought to moving to Montreal. After all, he was without family in Brussels, spoke French and, from the first sight of each other, we were madly in love.

I had been having a difficult time following the birth of my brother. His arrival forced me to face a terrible truth - I was no longer the centre of my parent's universe. But Shamsheh showed no interest in the baby. He had eyes only for me. And to prove it he brought me two amazing gifts: a large walkie-talkie doll and chocolates, delicious creamy chocolates.

It took me some forty years to learn that the explosion of flavour that had melted on my four-year-old tongue was a Godiva confection. It tasted nothing like the Cadbury Milk chocolate bars my mother would bring home as a treat. Absolutely nothing tasted as good. But it wasn't until 1990 when I went to visit Shamsheh in Brussels (he never did move to Canada) that the memory of that first encounter came flooding back.

We were taking a walk after a lovely lunch of osso bucco in one of those tiny little restaurants that no tourist could ever find. Shamsheh lived in the heart of the city, around the corner from the Place de la Monnaie, and just blocks from Brussels' impressive Grand-Place. Our week together was almost over and Shamsheh seemed a little agitated as he steered me through the narrow streets that eventually spilled into the Grand-Place. He stopped to catch his breath and then, smiled proudly as he took me by the arm and led me towards a store. The awning read: Godiva Chocolatier 1926. I was unfamiliar with the name. 

On our wanderings during that week, we had passed several chocolate shops.  They had names like Leonidas and Neuhaus, and front windows that slid open onto the street so you needn’t enter the shop in order to indulge yourself.  Buying chocolates this way was infinitely more elegant than ordering frites and a hot dog from a chip wagon.    

The Godiva shop, however, had no open window onto the street, only a door to enter.  Inside, as a scintillating aroma insinuated itself, a fastidious woman wearing white cotton gloves stood behind the counter delicately transposing perfectly-formed chocolates from a tray in her hand onto a tray under a glass counter display. Everywhere I looked, chocolates were lined up as neat as regiments of soldiers. Beneath the glass counters, tray after tray after tray were laid out with such precision, you could practically hear the marching band.

While I was busy gaping at the luscious layout, my uncle had taken on the air of a man who knows what he wants.  He pulled himself up to his full height of 5’7” and in a voice deeper than I was accustomed to, addressed the woman who had deigned to put down her tray and acknowledge us. 

Shamsheh instructed the woman to fill a two kilo box with pralines, pralines simplement. He pointed at a section and she began to fill the bottom of the box.  Then, placing a foil on top, she moved to the next counter, to add a new layer. 

Non, non, non.  S’il vous plait, madam, said Shamsheh, a rigid index finger directing the woman to another counter.  Under his watchful eye, there were no further transgressions and I was presented with a two kilo box of Godiva chocolate to bring home to Montreal. But not before my uncle had the woman offer me a choice from the still open box. I hesitated until the woman delicately nudged me on with an Ahem. 

I placed a chocolate on my tongue and as it melted, it sent out little waves of pleasure. For a moment I was a little girl again.  And I needn’t have fretted over what to choose.  These were real Godiva chocolates hand-picked by my Uncle Shamsheh. How could I go wrong? 


http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/travel/brussels-the-chocolate-trail.html?nl=travel&emc=tda1

About a Murder of Crows

Recently, as dusk lengthens in the lower Laurentians, I’ve spotted large numbers of crows flying over the house. This murder of crows, maybe as many as a hundred of them, comes in waves that blacken the sky, their incessant cawing urging each other on to return to their roosts before sunset.


The next morning, just before sunrise, a cacophony of crows rising up from somewhere in the woods behind the house, rudely rouses me from dreams. I think about getting out of bed to see what all the ruckus is about. Are they flying back over the house to some appointed spot? But following through would mean opening my eyes, putting my warm feet on the cold floor and going into the kitchen to look up at the large transom window over the back door.

My curiosity has not yet been moved to such extremes. But it has been sufficiently piqued to explore why we called it a murder of crows. Is it because of their annoying voices and how we’d like to still them?

No one has a definitive answer but the term goes as far back as the 15th century. Maybe it’s because crows feed on carrion and are seen picking at the dead after a battle in short, crows follow murder.

Crows and their larger cousins, ravens, are also called other words we associate with nastiness - scavenger, schemer, trickster, and omen of death.

I have to admit, seeing them fly over the house every night gives me a shiver. This reflex is not learned but drawn perhaps from some collective memory because I’ve always found crows and ravens really interesting.

Visiting the Tower of London a few years ago, I found the six ravens that are kept captive but well fed and cared for by the Yeoman Warders. There is a belief (no one is sure when it started) that should the ravens ever abandon the Tower, the kingdom will fall. Do these watch over Britain?

Crows watch us and have been doing it forever but, for the most part, we don’t return the compliment. Maybe we should. Here’s what I’ve learned about crows:

There are parallels between crows and humans in as much as they are omnivorous, problem-solvers and prefer living in cities. In fact, they’re found on every continent except Antarctica.

Like us and other great apes, they not only use tools but can fashion them. And they’re quite clever about it. They will use a tool to acquire a tool. That’s complicated thinking.

A young crow may stay with its family up to five years, mate for life and that’s saying something since they can live 20 years. They might have humans at a disadvantage there as currently I don’t know many marriages that have lasted that long.

They can pick a face out of a crowd. Research has shown that not only can they remember the face of someone who's done them wrong but can pass on that knowledge to their offspring.

That voice of theirs is grating but that’s not the voice they use to speak to each other. Amongst their ‘family’ members, they speak in a trill-cum-burr sort of way, totally disassociated with anything crow-like.

Finally, they are exceedingly social and seem to need affection and the closeness of other crows. Close is warm and fuzzy but last December in Ottawa, a murder of crows was some 20,000 strong. The sight of them peppering the sky like swirling oil on water forced people to take notice and watch their step.

Conclusion: Since crows have been observing us and follow us into the urban areas where we have paved over nature, perhaps we should rethink whether a crowd of people might be called a murder of people. The crows, after all, are just there to help us clean up the mess we leave behind.

For more, check out this wonderful Nature of Things episode: http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/natureofthings/2009/murderofcrows/


And an interesting concept on developing a symbiotic relationship with crows: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows.html

Review of "Anatomy of a Disappearance"

Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar
Hamish Hamilton Canada

“There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest.”

With this tender opening sentence, Hisham Matar begins to weave a subtle pattern of absence and loss that defines the emotional territory of Anatomy of a Disappearance, his second novel.

The narrator of this beautifully paced story is Nuri el-Alfi, who at 14 loses his father when he disappears from an apartment in Geneva, likely the victim of a political kidnapping. The loss is unbearable yet even before his father’s disappearance; we discover that Nuri is no stranger to the subtractions of life.

At birth, Nuri had already lost his native country because his father, a close advisor to the deposed king, had been forced to flee to Egypt when a military regime took power. Safe in Cairo, the small el-Alfi family lives in a quiet luxury that belies the friction Nuri, an only child, senses between his parents. Nuri’s mother is habitually withdrawn, wrapped in a self-imposed silence, and his father travels often on business. The only constant in the boy’s lonely life is Naima, a young servant girl who is devoted to him in a way neither parent can seem to manage.

When he is ten, Nuri’s mother dies suddenly of an unnamed malady that the narrator, in retrospect, believes was the result of deep sorrow. “So old and persistent did Mother’s unhappiness seem that I never stopped to ask its true cause. Nothing is so acceptable as that which we are born into.”

Although in the end, Nuri will have three mothers, this is a story about the complicated relationship between fathers and sons. Like an insatiable thirst, Nuri craves an intimacy with his father that their love for each other fails to summon. He yearns “...for an easy sympathy... a kind of emotional eloquence and ease.”

Instead, his father unwittingly becomes Nuri’s rival when they both fall under the spell of the sensuous Mona whom they meet poolside at a resort in Alexandria. Mona is half-English, provocative and quickly, inspires a new nexus of desire in Nuri. The triangle – father, son and Mona - grows more brittle and difficult when Mona becomes Nuri’s stepmother despite his insistence that “I saw her first.”

Soon after the marriage, Nuri is sent off to a boarding school in England where he concocts schemes to steal time with Mona. As is often the case, you must be careful what you wish for. After his father’s disappearance, the relationship with Mona unravels as his father’s secret life is slowly revealed and Nuri learns what most children rarely acknowledge, that we really know little about the lives of our parents.

This is semi-autobiographical ground for Matar who was born in New York City to Libyan parents and raised in Tripoli and Cairo. His father, Jaballah Matar, was an influential businessman and a Qaddafi opponent, who was disappeared from Cairo in 1990 and interred in Libya. It is not known whether he is still alive as no one has seen him since 2002.
Now a resident of London, Matar’s first novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2006. It also was narrated by a young boy growing up in Libya with an unhappy mother and an absent father. Yet knowing how closely his fiction runs to Matar’s life in no way undermines the power of his writing - the aching simplicity by which he builds mood and pitch.

“Relatives and neighbours who might have filled the chairs in the hall if Father had died were silent in the face of his disappearance...A great emptiness began to fill the place of my father. It became unbearable to hear his name...At times it was almost possible to imagine he never existed. Yet every morning, when I opened my eyes, I believed he was there, that I would find him sitting at the dining room table, holding a cup of coffee in the air as he looked down at the folded newspaper in his lap.”

In passage like these, Matar limns the borders of loss with a fine, delicate hand and reminds us that not knowing can be the heaviest burden to bear.

Country Roads

This morning, sitting on the deck, I watch a chipping sparrow, a tiny thing with a red cap, drift down from the clothesline onto the lawn. The movement is as effortless as a leaf floating off a tree. The bird disappears into the grass that goes to meadow mere days after being mowed.

In truth, it’s hardly grass at all but a pasture rich with tiny wild strawberries growing close to the ground among sweet pea, wild carrots, Queen Anne’s lace, daisies and black-eyed Susan. If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t mow it all but let it grow into what Axel calls a biotope.

Like many people, we live in the country for the nature and yet, most people cannot control their desire to shape the land, bend it to their will. There is this desire to create a fiefdom that would was unaffordable in the city. These 'castles'are surrounded by immaculate front lawns and constrained flower beds heaped with red cedar chips to prevent weeds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said that a weed is a plant whose virtue has not yet been discovered. But this virtue is rarely recognized by those tending country lawns.

Birch, aspen, maple and pine are some of the many trees I can name in the deep wood that edges our backyard. I peer in amongst the trees to see if there is an opening. I don’t hear the digger today but that doesn’t stop me from worrying again about the road.

When Axel asked me if I could live anywhere in the world where would that be, I answered, “Right here” meaning Montreal. Then he asked if we could live in the suburbs and I looked at him oddly. Then I realized that in Europe, the suburbs are the small, often ancient towns that circle a large city. In short, Axel wanted to live in the country and that matched my own long-held desire. Give me trees and I’m the happiest of campers.

We bought the house in St-Colomban partly for its open airiness – a cathedral ceiling and windows everywhere – as well as for the tiara of trees that circle the property. Sitting at the dining room table, we can barely see our neighbour through the thicket that separates us. And the view out back through the glass sliding doors and onto the deck, is of forest and marsh where toad lilies and trillium grow in early spring. A hare lives there (or nearby) and four kinds of squirrels – pine, grey, black and a huge mottled fellow. Of course, there are raccoons and a dazzling array of birds from pileated woodpeckers to nuthatches. They visit my feeder every winter.

On the other side of the wood, our closest neighbour, is a farm with a few dairy cattle. It must be large because we only occasionally hear any lowing but just last week, driving along the road perpendicular to ours, I was thrilled to see two cows munching grass by the fence.

Now the wood is in danger. They’re building a road between us and the farm. That can mean only one thing, they’ll be cutting down trees to build houses to generate more tax revenue to build more roads and make the little town of St-Colomban which already has 90,000 people spread over a wide tract of land, become engorged with more box stores, more roads and less trees.

Since we’ve moved here, I have seen houses pop up like mushrooms in areas that had been forested. And with them, more little dead bodies on the side of the road.

And I wonder, where are all the animals supposed to go? And where will those country roads lead us next?

The Disclosing Animal

The Disclosing Animal