Home again, briefly, until I rush out to fetch the dog from the kennel and the milk from the store. I'm sure my green-bean patch is overflowing, but at the moment it's raining, and I can't say I'm sorry to be forced to avoid picking vegetables. Instead I will spring my overjoyed dog from jail and then come home and do laundry and make bread and possibly edit some educational-textbook chapters. Or possibly not.

In Montreal, I managed to buy only one book: a yard-sale copy of Pablo Neruda's collected 1958-67 poems. I was tempted to buy Finnegan's Wake in French, but I refrained.

And in case you're interested in our Osheaga review: we attended day 1, though James regrets missing day 2, which featured Snoop Dogg and Weezer. He was definitely bitten with the festival bug, and perhaps will grow up to be one of those twenty-year-olds who crowd into borrowed vans with their friends and drive for hours and hours to stand in the mud, only to find out that the featured band is stuck in an airport in Munich. Fortunately, Montreal weather was perfect, and the Canadians were friendly and polite. There was just enough public pot smoking and cheerful boisterousness to make the show exciting, but no brawls or vomiting drunks. And his parents weren't the oldest people there.

So we arrived in the late afternoon, just in time to see Jimmy Cliff, who was without doubt the best moment of the day. This will make the third famous reggae performer I've seen (the others were Burning Spear and Toots and the Maytals), and all three were outstanding live, in a way that their albums just don't prove. When Jimmy sang the first words of "Many Rivers to Cross," I immediately started to cry, which I haven't done since I stepped into Canterbury Cathedral sixteen years ago, and simultaneously into a dress rehearsal of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. There was a pause, and then then the chorus burst into the "Gloria," and my mother and I both started weeping uncontrollably. But Beethoven and Canterbury is one thing. Who knew that old Jimmy Cliff in a dusty field at the Parc Jean-Drapeau could make that happen again?

Anyway Pavement was a sloppy joy, and watching Arcade Fire was like attending a giant happy Montreal youth-group singalong (did you know that 25,000 semi-intoxicated Quebecois kids can actually manage to stay in tune together?). Plus, by chance, there were fireworks going off over the river during most of the Arcade Fire show. Not to mention that, even with a sixteen-year-old son hanging around us constantly, going to a rock show with Tom always entails a certain amount of je-ne-sais-quoi romance.

But still. Jimmy Cliff. He was something else.