She who bumps into things

 Yesterday I bumped into an old friend on the bike path. I had been thinking of him just then -- we were at university together and worked on the student newspaper in 1969 during the famous Computer Centre Crisis- we both got fired for supporting the black students but more importantly he got arrested and beaten and jailed, and also expelled. Three years later I testified for him in court where he was given a suspended sentence. Ten years later I used to babysit his three-year-old son, while he joined the Maoists and became a junkie. Our paths drifted apart.

In 1998 I ran into him by accident but didn't at first recognize him - I mistook him for a panhandler asking for change.

Yesterday he popped into my mind as I cycled past the place I had last seen him. I wondered if he was still around or had he left town? What had become of him ? And suddenly up ahead crossing the path, there he was.

A man of few words, long ago he wrote a haiku:

Moccasins on Concrete

I have come to avenge 

The amputated trees

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It was the perfect time to meet. That's all for now.

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I'll just add that I find it odd that they tried to arrange a marriage for Kateri Tekakwitha when she was 13, as was traditional back then (1669) among the Mohawks of New England and New France. When the boy sat down beside her (the customary approach) she got up and ran away and hid in the forest - 

She rejected marriage in favour of something else. Did she aspire to sainthood?  Perhaps she was ashamed of her disability and disfigurement due to the smallpox that wiped out her village. I can relate.

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As usual, I am in shock from bumping into more strange things. The weather has been unusually warm and summery for late October, so I decided to cycle to the village of Sainte Catherine, about 18 km from here, where in 1980 I bumped into Kateri Tekakwitha's original tomb completely by chance, on the day she was beatified in Rome by Pope John Paul II.

It was just one of those coincidences that began with a bike ride. After pedaling for an hour or two, my companion and I stopped to rest in a small park next door to a depanneur where we bought two bottles of spruce beer. While we were drinking them in the shade, I noticed the inscription on the concrete slab my bike was leaning against. It said something like "this is the burial site of Katherine Tekakwitha, Lily of the Mohawks 1656-1680" - after whom the village was named. It took me by surprise to realize I was sitting on her grave -

I had read about her in Leonard Cohen's BEAUTIFUL LOSERS, one of my favorite novels at the time because I resonated strongly with its wild depiction of Montreal's underground history.

But imagine my further astonishment when that evening I hears the news about the ceremony at the Vatican. Kateri was on her way to being canonized as a full-fledged Catholic saint.

Her canonization finally came thirty-two years later, on October 21, 2012, which was the day I happened to be standing in front of a gaggle of mourners at a private ceremony at Ile aux Herons, downriver from Kahnawake. We were celebrating my brother Donald (Sandy) McLean's life by fulfilling his wish to have his ashes thrown into the rapids near Lachine. Hurricane Sandy was blowing up from Florida that day so the ashes scattered straight upward and dispersed in the wind. 

Once again, I only learned later that we had been standing on the shore across from her village conducting a mass on her special day -- she must have been present among us helping to see my brother off.

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So this has made me feel my life has an unsuspected coherence that has both haunted and evaded me all along. I find it hard to put into words that don't sound too incredible or even laughable - 

I have to remind myself that the last time I cycled to Sainte Catherine, my outlandish journey was just getting going. I'd been to Greece the year before, and spent a mind-altering summer on Hydra, sometimes courtesy of Leonard Cohen, early chronicler of Saint Kateri --  I'd spent time in his house, experienced strange and stunning events from which I ran for my life --

I'd seen my mother off to the next world six months later in February 23 1980 --

I had no idea what lay ahead, six months later when I landed back on Hydra in late November, a few days ahead of John Lennon's death on 12/8/1980 -- or how the rest of my life would continue unraveling to the present as I cycle through my 72nd year...

I realize now that all this is a much bigger story than I would ever have imagined, and can only be viewed from a rear-view mirror using a map that extends so far backwards it almost disappears... 

But at least I can now guess what happened and how and why it all happened...

It's about my mother, standing in the shadows, and so much else that travels the female line of ancestors- of which I am the last left standing since I have no daughter. This means my vision is all in the past and it falls on me -- the "vessel" as Leonard once called me -- to wrap it all up in its own container, take it down to the river and release it to the wind