LIGHT TRAFFIC

Antoinette "Mimi" Godbout. © Carolyne Weldon

This morning very early, my cousin Andrée and I packed our still-sleeping bodies in the car, grabbed two lattes on the way and went to pay our grandmother a surprise visit. Our grandmother Antoinette (“Mimi” to us, “Nenette” to most her friends and in-laws), is ninety-two years old and lives in the neat bungalow our grandfather Alonzo had built for his family in Laprairie, one of Montreal’s South Shore suburbs. Full of pep and vigour (she’s the kind of person who only recently agreed to stop climbing on the kitchen counter to reach and clean inside the upper cabinets) she was already up having breakfast – a cup of tea with milk alongside a well-buttered homemade muffin – when we rang her doorbell.

Visits in Laprairie are always amazing. First, there’s always something delicious, and freshly baked to eat. The first thing anybody entering that house does, as if on auto-pilot, is walk straight to the kitchen, to that little section of counter between the stove and the wall, right behind the rocking-chair, and assess the offerings. Hungry or not hungry, that’s just what you do. This is where all Mimi-baked goodies are hidden; in complex assortments of metal cans (peanut butter cookies, ginger snaps, leftover biscuits) and tupperware containers (muffins, sliced Queen Elizabeth cake). If you’re lucky, and one often is in that secret little corner, you’ll find a stash of my grandmother’s infamous date-squares. When he was alive, my grandfather, a measured man with a sharp, sarcastic sense of humour, used to eat up the whole pan and then tell my grandma, “Yeah, well, they really weren’t that great, your date-squares,” as if he’d bravely sacrificed himself to spare others the disappointment. But of course what he meant was that they’d been as divine as last time. My grandma’s date-squares are invariably amazing. They always taste like you need another square.

Aside from the onslaught of sugary-buttery things that live in air-tight containers, a visit to my grandma involves copious storytelling. Some stories we’ve heard a hundred times (my brother Paul at around four years-old telling her, after a few visits to church, that it was no use going back because Jesus “was just never home”), some stories come out unexpectedly, as if she’d only suddenly remembered them.

Like the story she told Andrée and I last time we visited her. As we pored over some old photographs of her youth, in the Gaspé (“look how pretty I was,” she says, “I wasn’t always this old creased thing!”) she told us about how difficult it had been for her to let go of smoking when her husband decided they were both quitting, some fifty years ago. It’s not like she ever was a real smoker, she explained. But there was that one smoke a day she really enjoyed. With a nostalgic look in her eye she told us about the cigarette she’d have come night time, sitting on the front stoop, after having put her six children to bed. She would sit there, alone at last, slowly blowing her smoke into the evening breeze.  She says she would have one, sometimes two, but never more.  And then she was told she had to stop. “You couldn’t smoke if your husband didn’t smoke back then. He was quitting, so I had to quit,” she said. “But it was so hard. I truly missed that cigarette.”

And then my grandmother, mischievous as ever, looked at my cousin and I, sitting on both sides of her on the old stiff couch, and said: “You know, lately I’d been thinking I should take up smoking again. Such a pleasant thing to do! A cigarette here and there, when everything’s quiet at night.” Laughing so hard the photo albums were bouncing off our laps – nothing could be more adorable than our wise and pious 92 year old grandmother flat-out confiding she’d been jonesing for a smoke for over half a century – we asked her what on earth was stopping her. She was 92 and a widow now and couldn’t she finally do whatever the heck she pleased? She thought about this for a second and then said: “You know, I’ve thought about that, but there’s one thing stopping me. I find there’s nothing uglier than an old woman smoking. So unseemly. I don’t think I can do it.” Whenever I think about this little secret she shared, I love her even more. Grandmas are rebels too.

This morning, there was a special reason I wanted to go see her. I had to go thank her in person for having prayed daily, ever since I graduated from J-school, for me to find work. My grandma prays to God like any good Christian from her generation, but she’s also in cahoots with a number of saints, for whom she seems to have full backstage access. Among them are St.Francis of Assisi, the Iroquois St. Kateri Tekakwitha and the special weapon in her arsenal: St. Anthony of Padua. After a near century of devotion and special-address prayers, my grandma and St. Anthony are thick like thieves. It seems, indeed, he’ll do anything for her. Conveniently, St. Anthony is the patron saint of lost objects. So whenevers we lose anything, we call Mimi, who directly puts St. Anthony on the case. Soon after, the thing reappears. But St. Anthony’s powers, according to my grandma, aren’t restricted to turning up stuff; he actually can help you to find whatever. Like sleep in the middle of the night (on the rare nights insomnia keeps her up, Mimi fetches her plastified image of St. Anthony, shoves it under her pillow, and falls asleep before reaching the end of her prayer), and apparently, amazing summer contracts for young journalist granddaughters.

“Lord have Mercy, St. Anthony be blessed!” she exclaimed when I called to tell her I’d landed the gig. “St. Anthony got an earful from me this time, let me tell you! I knew he would find you something. I told him he had to.” She said she’d been praying even more fervently than usual, burning votives and displaying all the St. Anthony paraphernalia she owns on her bedside table. “I even promised him a gorgeous sanctuary lamp to burn in the church all week if he delivered. Well I guess he heard me.”

As I was leaving, she gave me this small piece of paper, which is said to have been in contact with both the Holy Cross and St. Anthony’s relics, to protect me on my trip. “I’ll try to find you one like mine before you leave,” she said. Hers is color and rigid plastic, and holds a flat metal medallion of our favorite saint in the bottom right corner. She carries it in her pocket at all times.

Andrée and Antoinette after breakfast.