yourlifeisatrip

story and photos by Rachel Dickinson

Fairmont le Chateau Frontenac, Quebec City.A week before what would have been my parents sixtieth wedding anniversary I found myself heading to Quebec City and the Fairmont le Chateau Frontenac, the very hotel my parents stayed in on their honeymoon. I believed, at the time, that this was strictly coincidental, for I had no desire to recreate the beginning of a failed marriage, but a part of me also strongly suspected that there was no such thing as pure coincidence.

My father was straight off the farm – had never been anywhere or done anything – but he was a young man with the good looks of a B-movie star. My mother led a more sophisticated life as the daughter of a speechwriter for President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II. She had grown up in Washington, DC, which she believed was like being at the center of the universe, especially during the war. When my grandfather was sacked by Truman, he retired to his family home in Upstate New York, bringing along his wife and youngest daughter and four house cats. Even though my mother had just graduated from high school, when the school year rolled around she decided to take another senior year at the little rural school near her new home primarily because she didn’t know what else to do. That is how she happened to meet my father.

Sixty years later as I stood in line in Montreal waiting for the train to Quebec City, I stared at the art deco bas relief covering the end wall of Central Station. Stylized stony figures doing the monumental things that needed to be done in order to create a civilization silently encouraged Canadians to take pride in whatever they were doing. My parents could have stared at this same wall, I thought, for the station was completed in 1943. As I looked at that hopeful frieze – and it was hopeful, for what is more forward-looking than a tribute to a country’s settlement and industrialization – I wondered if my parents saw that same hopefulness when they stared at the frieze. Because they were about to embark on their new life together, in some ways, they must have been filled with hope and plans for their shared future.