Today is Canada Day, and also Moving Day in Montreal. For most of the country it’s the holiday which celebrates the founding of the nation in 1867. There will be some festivities here too, but the biggest activity will be moving.
About 60 per cent of Montreal households are renters, a proportion which is decreasing with the increased availability of condos. Still, the fact that the standard lease expires July 1 means that thousands of people move on or around that day. Our family is touched this year. The reason we took Elin to CAMMAC on Sunday was because Emmanuel is deeply involved in boxing his marvelous stuff in preparation for their move into a large duplex next Sunday. Today Lukas and Sophie are helping a friend move, and for the last week or so Lee has been clearing out his office at McGill.
That last move is involving getting rid of many things. He’s been in the same office for 38 or 39 years, and the wall hanging—an interesting piece of fabric I found for him years ago—has not been washed since Lukas was born, I’m pretty sure. We brought two car-loads of books and papers home last week, but there’s still another load which we’ll pick up sometime in the next few days. His project for today is to do more work on the bookcase extensions required for all the stuff he thinks he’ll still want to have around. Of course, all this is a way of saying that July 1 has another meaning for us this year: after 40 years at McGill, he’s officially retired as of today. For a job that he took on a three year contract back in 1968, it turned out pretty well.
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3 comments:
Marvelous!
Best of the best to you both.
--ml
Thank you. As my mother used to quote Mrs. Casey Stengel: "I married him for better or for worse, but not for lunch." Actually he has a huge pile of woodworking and other projects lined up so I imagine he'll be spending a lot of time in his basement workshop!
M
Then I hope it is a daylight basement.
--ml
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