For two years, I looked at a brick wall from the only window
my room had. My room had a bed, a wobbly table, and a B&W TV I had bought with money
saved from my evening job. I was a student in Montréal and happy to share a
kitchen and the toilet with three others who lived in rooms similar to mine on the same floor.
More than 4 decades later, and after traveling and working in
more than 40 countries, I sometimes encounter a building, a street corner or a
peculiar architecture that reminds me of that room in Montreal which was
walking distance from the Olympic Stadium. I did indeed walk that road many
times just after Nadia Comaneci scored a perfect 10 on the parallel bars. The
world lost its head for a moment and so seemed the Olympic Stadium as the
builders had run out of time to finish its roof.
… As I was going through my unpublished or rejected (by me)
piles of pictures, this one made me stop and think again of the early 1970s. With
my eyes closed. I could smell the fast food grease on Rue Maçon
and the early spring muddy snow melt along the sides of Rue Dandurand. When I walked back to my room from College,
the owner of the corner Dépanneur smoked cherry flavored pipe tobacco that lingered
in the humid air of spring in Montréal.
This picture is from a small town in Maine. I was driving
through and suddenly all the above memories wrapped in sounds and smells of
more than four decades ago made me stop the car. First, I was not sure why I stopped,
as there was nothing unusual or picturesque. It was a small town with a few
blocks of downtown before I get back on the interstate highway. Yet, there was
something that I knew; something that had been part of my life once.
It was this building with its ubiquitous sign that rooms (or
at least one room) were for rent. The window did not look to a brick wall as
mine once did, but the brick side of the building reminded me of that wall.
So I took a picture, restarted the car and got back on the
highway.
… Today as I stopped to look at the picture, among the many
which sit forgotten in cardboard boxes here and there around my room, I finally
noticed what subconsciously had stopped me in that small town in Maine. It was
not the single window, nor was it the texture and depressingly monotonous
angles of the brick wall. It was the radio (and am assuming cassette player)
sitting at the edge of that window! I do not recall noticing that radio before.
But it was there and my mind had somehow made the connection.
Yes, the connection with the radio I had bought after buying
the B&W TV. It was a Zenith with bad speakers but it played cassettes!
Many today will probably not understand why a cassette
player was so important to me 40 or so years ago. Today cellular phones and the
Internet link us all, instantly. But then, as a lonely student in a room with
one window that looked over a brick wall on Dandurand street in Montréal,
my connection with my friends in countries where windows look over blue seas
and angry oceans was through cassettes.
We used to talk to the microphone of the radio and record
our feelings about our new life, loneliness, having spend Christmas alone,
about the cherry tobacco aroma of the corner Dépanneur’s owner, about those
we loved but who never knew, and about those we loved and who never loved us
back. Then the cassette went into the mail and I waited weeks before someone
sent a cassette back!
… As I type these lines, I know that when I post this page,
readers in many countries will see it instantly. Readers who perhaps never knew
how a cassette player kept lonesome students connected to those who spoke a common
language, and sometimes because of the safety oceans and continents separated
us, admitted on cassette, to loving the same person as others. But then only
secretively….
July 16, 2015
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015
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