Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe - Je Ne Sais Quoi - Petit Lac Noir & Montreal

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

“Bonjour,” he said. “Je m’appelle Dave.”Stuart loved Quebec and was proud to have grown up there. That influence is apparent in so many of his stories. We’ll play one of them today. Plus one of his Postcards from Canada, from Montreal.Ad-free listening is here! Listen to the pod ad-free and early, PLUS a whole bunch of other goodies – like virtual parties, Q&As, listener shout-outs & more. Subscribe here: apostrophe.supercast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From the apostrophe podcast network. Hello, I'm Jess Milton, and this is backstage at the Vinyl Cafe. Welcome. Stewart had lots of little tricks as a writer. You do anything long enough, and you develop systems, tricks, even for something creative. One of his tricks, if he was stuck staring at a blank screen or a blank, page, wondering where to start. One of his tricks was to describe where he was and what he was doing. I'm writing this on a page in my notebook, he would write. I'm standing in front of the big window

in the kitchen. Or I'm sitting in the back of the bus with this computer in my lap writing to you. So when I sat down myself to write this week's episode, I was struck by a feeling. I don't often have. The feeling was, I have nothing to say. That's a feeling that's pretty foreign to me because I always have something to say. So I did what Stewart used to do. And I wrote this one single sentence.

I wrote, I'm writing to you from a cabin, perched at the top of a west-facing cliff, at the top of a hill in Valde-Demont, Quebec. And wouldn't you know it? That's all it took. One little sentence and, bam, an idea. It goes like this.

I'm writing to you from a cabin, perched on the top of a west-facing cliff at the top of a hill in Valde-Mont-Coubec. Julia, the woman who owns this place, and who bakes the most remarkable sourdough bread that I have ever had, just delivered me dinner. It came in small metal pots, one stacked on top of the other like school children's lunches in India. She dropped off my dinner, green beans and a salad from the farm next door,

fish from the Buccaneery in Chelsea, chocolate moose made from a family recipe. And when she did, when she dropped it off, we started talking. Within minutes, I knew that she had grown up here. I knew she was from Quebec. Not because of her accent, she's an anglophone, but because there was just something in her voice. Her voice sounded like a song. So much modulation and phrases used like punctuation.

That's something I love so much, and I find it so Quebec. She wasn't in a hurry, that's another clue. She moved through the conversation the way someone strolls through a market, picking things up, examining them, and then moving on. and when she described the food she was delivering, it wasn't just dinner. She made it sound like something you'd eat slowly with your eyes closed on a night you would never forget. All of this made me think of Stuart, and immediately I knew what I wanted today's show to be about. Quebec.

Stuart loved Quebec. He was proud to have grown up here, and he loved his place in the Laurentians, and he loved visiting us in Chelsea. And if you listen carefully, you can hear this love in his stories, too. So many of his side characters are Quebecois. Monsieur Boisle, the owner of La Vache Quiré motel near Riviere in the story, Christmas on the road. Or how about Jean-François and Mary Claire from Petitie Lac Noir? He nailed it with those double-barrel names. I mean, how many Anglophones do you know with double-barreled names. Do you know a lot of John Franks or just Jennifer's? Or one of my favorite characters, Gabrielle Dubois,

who lives in the hills on the far side of Macaulay's Mountain. We played the story about Gabrielle de Bois, the man who punched trees in last week's episode of the pod. Monsieur Bois-Claire, Jean-François and Mary Claire, Gabrielle Dubois, these are not the side characters you dream up if you grew up in I don't know, Maple Creek, Saskatchewan, or like I did, in Burlington, Ontario. Stewart's work was impacted by the place he grew up. No question.

Perhaps no more so than with this story. This story is set in Quebec, but more than that, it's full of these tiny little loving references to his home province. Things I know meant a lot to him and were part of his passion for this place. I wonder if you can spot any of them. This is Stuart McLean with Petit Lac Noir. No one ever gasps in awe when they see the wrenching mountains for the first time. Rather than awe, first-time visitors who've spent a morning being toured through Les Laurentides are more apt to turn to whoever it is that's been driving them

and ask that mortifying questions so many have asked before them. When do we get to the mountains? They are, admittedly, more hills than mountains. The Laurentians roll rather than tower, and they roll with a dignity that befits one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world. The Laurentians and the pleasing lakes that dot the hills make you feel that there is both comfort and constancy

to be had in this constantly changing world. Ah, all the lake de Laurentides, Lac Marois, Lac Saint-Amour, Lac de Sésie, and all the little lakeside villages. Saint-Sauvert, Saint-Rémy, Val de Bois, and of course, Notre Dame de Plain. Hardly a village, really.

One gas station, two general stores, a Catholic church, and a handful of cottages. Notre Dame de Plain and Petit Lac Noire. The little village and the little lake lapping just over the hill, just behind the church where Jean-Francois and his wife, Marie-Jose, have whiled away summer afternoon since, well, since before Jean-François was a boy. And before. Every Friday at 5.30 precisely, Jean-Francois closes his office.

He's a small animal vet. And if someone were to arrive at, say, 525, he would, well, I would like to help you, he might say. but the bureau is and he would give you or whomever it was standing there holding their sick cat or spastic dog directions to the nearest emergency clinic

he would incidentally mean it Jean Francois is nothing if not both earnest and honest he would like to help you but how could he at 5.30 on Friday 530 on Friday is when he picks up Marie Jose and they drive like his father did before

him to the cottage for the weekend, stopping on the way, of course, like his father did, at the boulangerie in Shawbridge to pick up a country loaf and a baguette. The idea of phoning Marie-Jose and leaving later wouldn't occur to Jean-François. 5.30 is when you leave. The cottage has been in Jean-François's family for five generations. For five generations, Clements have been learning lessons from the mountains, and what they have learned is to pray at the altar of tradition. The cottage and everything about it, the way you get there and the things you do when you arrive,

has been passed down like a religious relic. It is a cathedral of constancy. Nothing has changed since it was built. Now you mustn't get the idea that it's run down. It's been kept up perfectly, but not updated. It's one of those endangered species, the cottage of the old style. There's an indoor toilet now, but there's also a wood stove in a summer kitchen. Four generations of Clemens and now Jean-François, the fifth.

They've argued about this. He and Marie-Josei, they're all mort, your parents, your grand papa. It's your return. Jean-François will hear none of it. The wrenchins you might say suit him to a tea To put it precisely Like the mountains

He is not a man who embraces change For Jean François I'm Souvienne The words on the license plate of his Ford Station wagon The exact same car his father favored Aren't a political statement For Jean Frasois,

Je me sovienne is a way of life Every Friday at 5.30 precisely He and Marie-Jose drive north and every August, like his father and grandfather before him, they spend the entire month at the cottage. After all, is there anything more pleasant or more reassuring than an afternoon at Petit Lac Noir. Marie-Jose on the chaise-lange reading Marie-Claire and sipping homemade lemonade, Jean-François trimming the front lawn, the lawn his great-grandfather planted and cared for, keeping it up is Jean-Francois's pride in Joseph.

That's how they spent the last Saturday of this August, most of it anyway. Jean-François puttering with the grass, Marie-Jose reading magazines, though after lunch, Marie-Jose did set Jean-François to work in the garden, a huge bed of wildflowers that stretches right across the front of the cottage. I wanted looking its very best, she said. Hey, remember who's coming. They were expecting guests, a younger couple who, they befriended years ago, and they hadn't seen in could it be that long, don't a decade.

At five o'clock precisely, Jean-François came in, took off his gardening gloves, and said, Ebe, Marie glanced at the clock over the kitchen door. It was time for his Saturday swim. Jean-Francois has a dip every Saturday at five, until the Saturday after Labor Day, when he folds his trunks and puts them away until St. Jean-Baptiste. She smiled at him and reached out and touched. his face. The scars on his cheek were raised and a little inflamed. It was hot. He'd been working hard. The scars were one of the great lessons in Jean-Francois's life. He got them in an

altercation with a deranged cockatoo. For the first ten years of his practice, he didn't treat birds at his clinic. But after a protracted campaign waged by his receptionist, an impatient and flighty girl. He relented and agreed to treat the cockatoo, the first and the last bird he ever admitted. He had stayed late, as was his habit, on a Tuesday night. Tuesday night being the night he does the books. So he was, as fate would have it, without backup when he went down to the basement to check the assorted dogs, cats, rodents, and solitary bird, which appeared to be going bald, losing feathers to some unknown malaise. He was holding the cockatoo up to his face and whispering to it in that ridiculous baby style that birds seem to encourage, thinking while he did it that he might have been

too inflexible about birds, that perhaps his receptionist had been right all along, that that he should reconsider. He wondered what he might possibly say to her when the cockatoo abruptly turned and said something to him that sounded disturbingly adult, something that something that you would never hair in church. And then the bird sank his beak into Jean-François's cheek and wouldn't let go or maybe couldn't let go. Both Jean-François and the cockatoo panicked when they realized what had happened

and the two of them began flapping wildly, the bird shredding Jean-Francois's cheek with his claws until Jean-Francois realized panic wasn't going to get him anywhere. And he stumbled into the OR, grabbed a needle that he had prepared for the next day's teeth, surgery and plunged it into the bird's back, anititizing it. Then he drove himself to emergency at Hotel Zhu, with a drug cockatoo dangling from his face like an earring. This was over 30 years ago. The intern who removed the bird still tells the

story at dinner parties. I thought the guy was crazy, he had began. He was barely coherent. He was screaming, it's going to wake up, it's going to wake up. I said, that parrot isn't going to wake up, that parrot is dead. He said, no, no, it's just resting. Jean-François's wound got infected and healed poorly. And he learned his lesson. It wasn't a new one. More a confirmation than a lesson, really, but there you have it.

Plain as day, change never led to any good. From then on, he stuck to dogs and kids. cats. He went to the cottage on the weekends and to Old Orchard Beach in Maine every July. The scars slowly faded with the years, and these days only announced themselves when Jean-François is tired or upset, and he does his best to avoid both. Dave met Jean-Francois the summer after he and Morley were married. They met when Dave and Morley rented a cottage just down the road from him. the Climons. That was the summer Dave and Morley had already spent what little vacation money they had on a trip to Holland.

They had flown there for a weekend in February so Morley could fulfill one of her lifetime dreams and skate along the frozen canals. Dave heard about it, the cottage down the road from the Clement Place, from an old friend in Montreal. You'd love it there, he said. No one will bother you and it would be cheap. This was, as I said, a summer when cheap was important. His friend called back a week later. You can have it for free, he said. All you have to do is a few chores. Cool, said Dave.

They left at the beginning of August in Morley's old orange and white Volkswagen van. The trip took almost 10 hours. They went along old highway number 7, stopping every couple of hours for coffee or a cheese factory outside Smith Falls. for cheese burgers at a little stand in the middle of nowhere. They shared the driving, the way they shared just about everything in those days. They crossed the Ottawa River at Hawkesbury, and from there they rattled north onto Highway 329 and into the gray-blue Laurentians.

Morley was squinting at a little piece of paper. Okay, she said, reaching out and turning the music down, it says to make the following turns. Gosh, gosh, draught. Dave said, Huh? Morley said that means left, left, right. Right?

Right, said Dave. Right, said Morley, but not right away. Ghosh, gosh, then right. Right, said Dave. But first left, left, said Morley. Then right, right, said Dave. Right, said Morley. This went on for several more minutes than it should have.

and they were feeling pretty goofy as they passed the gas station and the general stores and the white church and eventually pulled onto a dirt road with a bunch of cottages. Dave slapped the steering wheel and cranked the music back up. This is going to be great, he said. They passed a few cottages and then they saw the lake for the first time in a small, neat cottage with pale blue tram. Well, that was easy, said Dave, as he pulled.

into the driveway? Easy until they lifted the welcome mat, and there was no key where the key was supposed to be. Morley stood there for a moment looking around, and then she slid her hand under a planter on the step beside the mat, and she smiled. There was the key. The house was in much better shape than Dave had been told. Old to be sure, but not run down like his friends had warned. It was clean and neat and just about perfect. There's a wood stove, said Dave. This is perfect. Dave's friend had sent them a note explaining what they were expected to do in exchange for their free rent. Take down a little wall between the kitchen and the living room and dig up the grass so they could put in a garden. You think this is the wall they want down? said Morley. She was pointing

at the door between the kitchen and the dining room. Dave shrugged. They had a week, time enough for work tomorrow. I'll get the bag, said Dave. They found a bedroom and changed into their bathing suits. They headed across the lawn to the lake. Morley said, that's where they want the garden, I guess. And voila, said Dave. They stood at the end of the dock gazing out at the lake, and then Morley touched him on the back, and she dove without testing the water. She dove clean and straight and flat. And when she came out, her long hair was floating behind her. It was the first time Dave had seen her in water,

the first time they had swum together. She turned and flicked her hair and looked back. It's beautiful, she said. Dave stuck his foot in the lake and yanked it out. It's freezing, he said. After supper, they went for a walk further along the road. That's the one that should be renovated, said day, pointing at a little bungalow with a sagging, moss-covered roof. I'm glad we're not there, said Morley.

On Tuesday morning, Morley made pancakes. They ate them on the porch, and after they had cleaned up, she said, we should get to it. Taking down a wood wall in an unfinished cottage shouldn't be too complicated. Certainly no more complicated than installing an electrical outlet in a kitchen wall. Dave began slowly and carefully, standing on a chair, gently prying the tongue and groove wallboards free. By late afternoon, covered in sweat, his patience bent, he was stripped to the waist, ripping down the wall with a crowbar he had found in the woodshed.

While Dave attacked the wall, Morley was working on the garden. How big do you think they want it? She said. Morley, remember, was barely more than a girl still in her 20s. She'd never done any gardening in her life in those days. She considered the lawn for a while, and then she marked out a rectangular bed that ran along the front of the house. She wasn't surprised they wanted the grass out.

It was so incongruous. The cottage had a woodsy feel to it. The lawn was as manicured as a putting green, flat, spun, and soft. She used an axe to hack out large hunks of grass. Then she pried the sod loose and stacked it at the end of the driveway. Morley was finished in a couple of hours. She put the axe down and she went inside and made lunch. They ate on the dock again. When they'd cleaned up, Morley stared at her garden and decided it wasn't big enough. She got the axe and ripped up another section of lawn. By supper, she had pulled up about a third of the grass. What do you think,

she said? Dave thought that she'd made the garden way too big. He didn't say that, of course. Good, he said. It looks great. Things were not looking great inside. Halfway through the afternoon, Dave had uncovered a brick chimney. He'd found a sledgehammer in the shed. He'd been going to the chimney for over two hours. Dave was spent. This wasn't the way it was described to me, muttered Dave, at 8 a.m. on Friday morning.

They had been up since 7. For the second day running, Morley had set an alarm. They were leaving the house the next day. It was only 8, and Dave was already sweating and covered in the brick dust that hung in the air of the cottage like smoke. But he was closing in on her. With any luck, the chimney would be down by noon.

This was the day they met Jean-François and Marie-Jose. As Dave and Morley hammered away at the kitchen in their rented cottage, Jean-François and Marie were driving up from the city to their place. As they crested the big hill and began their descent into Notre Dame de Plain, Marie-Jose was staring out the car window feeling a little damp. desperate. They were going to spend the rest of the month at the lake. The exact same month

that she had lived through every year. She knew exactly how it was going to go. On Monday morning, Jean-François would mow the lawn. The dandelions are terrible this year, he'd say. On Tuesdays, they would drive into

St. Sauvour for groceries. Wednesday was laundry. Thursday, they would barbecue. On Fridays, a bike ride up the old Locontre. At 2.30 each afternoon they would swim. At 9 o'clock their final glass of wine, at 11 o'clock lights out. It was like summer camp, except there wouldn't be one solitary surprise. Not one unexpected moment.

I should get him a whistle, she thought. Pardon, said Jean-Franc. And then he turned the station wagon right into their driveway. and Marie-Jose blinked. It was Friday, August 5th, 1979. And something was different. She looked over at her husband. Jean-François had gone completely slack-jod.

His mouth was hanging wide open. There was an orange and white Volkswagen van parked in their normal spot. There was a pile of rubble beside the van. And as they sat there, a guy stood up from Marie-Jose-Chaise Ches-Lange and was walking towards them. The guy was grinning from ear to ear. John Francois opened his car door and got out and stood there in an uncomprehending haze. And that was when he noticed their entire front lawn had been dug up. Well, okay, a third of the front lawn.

He reached absent-mindedly for his face and fingered his cheek. his scar was starting to throb. He was pointing at the disaster in front of him. The guy smiled and bobbed his head encouragingly and spoke the words he had been practicing all week. Bonjour, he said. Je ma'ampelle Dave. Jean-François didn't actually faint.

He did, however, sink to his knees, staring in disbelief at the pile of rubble and the ruined lawn. The lawn he had been weeding and spraying and mowing since he was tall enough to grasp the handle of a lawnmower. His pride and his joy. Dave was still beaming at him as he went down. Dave thought he was joking. His kind of guy. So Dave went down to his knees too.

And they kneeled there in front of each other for one long, silent, uncomprehending moment. And then Dave, who was thinking, how, happy the guy must be, reached out and grabbed his hand and shook it, and then put his arm around his shoulders and led him into the kitchen and pointed proudly to where the kitchen wall used to be. The kitchen wall at Jean-François had stared at all his boyhood years. He gasped in horror. Marie-Jose was outside. She'd got out of the car and surveyed the piles of ripped sod, the scar of dirt across her lawn and Marie Jose had smiled. Well, she said to no one in particular,

what I think we need is wildflowers. Then she saw Morley standing uncertainly by the dock and she pointed at the black earth and said, I love what you've done to the place. Who are you anyway? Morley said, we're the renters. And Marie-Josei said, what renters? Which is when Jean-François

burst out of the front door and Morley burst. into tears. It was Marie Jose who settled everyone down. Once she managed that, it didn't take them long to work out what had happened. Left, left, right, right? There had been just one too many rights. Dave and Morley were supposed to be at the little cottage down the road, the one with a moss-covered roof. They tried to clear out pretty quickly. It was Marie-Jose who insisted they stay for dinner. They ate on the porch. Before they ate, Jean-François kept walking into the kitchen and staring mutely at the place where the wall used to be.

Nothing this unexpected had ever happened in his life. But then he was standing at the kitchen sink, washing his hands. And for the first time in his life, he could see through to the dining room and the dining room window to the lake. Eh-bein, he said suddenly, What he was trying to say was, I like it. They opened a bottle of wine. By the end of the second bottle, they were laughing, and they moved right past it and beyond it, and every time they circled back to it, it seemed even funnier.

As they worked on dessert, Marie-Jose showed them her newest piece of blown glass, a piece that she'd picked up in Maine. It was a mobile, a clatter of little glass birds. Les Petitieuzee, said Jean-Francois, said Jean-Francois, rolling his eyes. Ha, ha, ha. It turned out she called him, Monsieur Wazzo.

The bird man. For his 50th birthday, she'd given him an antique birdcage with a stuffed parrot. It was hanging in their bedroom in the city. Where I have to look at it, said Jean-François, desperately. It was clear that his feelings for the stuffed bird were complicated.

by love. He hated the bird, but he loved her and you could see that. And he loved that she had given it to him. They stayed up much too late. They drank much too much wine. And Dave and Morley ended up staying overnight. And they visited each year for a couple of summers.

This August was the first time they saw Jean-François and Marie-Jose for almost a decade. When they saw each other, Dave and Jean-Francée. Francois both drop to their knees. It's a thing they do. And then they got up. Dave had to help Jean-Francois, who uses a cane these days. And they walked down to the dock together, past the wildflowers that Marie Jose put in.

There is no lawn left anymore. It's all wild and grassy now. So Dave and Jean-François walked along a path that goes through the tall, wavy grass. Dave trailed his hands along the lacy seed pods and said it looked very nice. I like it better, he said, that it used to be, than the lawn. And then he tried in French. He said, it's more savage. Yes, said Jean-François, plus wild.

Then he put his arm around Dave. Come the montagne, he said. We said, Dave. Wild come the mountains. Thank you very much. That was the story we called Petit Lec-March. We recorded that story in Quebec City back in 2007. I love all those Quebec references.

Saint-Jean being the kickoff to summer. The summer trips to Maine, which is such a Montreal thing. I just, I can really hear Stuart's love of his province, his home province, in that story. And it makes me so happy every time I hear it. We're going to take a short break now, but we'll be back in a couple of minutes with more from Stuart McLean, so stick around. Welcome back. Time for our second story now.

Actually, it's an essay, an essay Stewart wrote about his beloved hometown. This is Stuart McLean with Montreal. From The Theatre Maisonneuve, of La Place Tessors in Montreal. Here's the cafe vinyl with Stuart McLean. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you. The great British science fiction writer H.G. Wells, who wrote the time machine and the first men on the moon and the war of the worlds, and spent virtually his entire life peering into the future. And when he wasn't doing that, dreaming about perfect worlds, wrote that every time he saw an adult on a bicycle, he no longer despaired of the human race. Well, H.G. Wells would be happy to find himself in Montreal this spring. Because seemingly overnight, for those of us not paying attention anyway, seemingly overnight, like one of those of those spring flowers nudging its yellow head through a snowbank, Montreal has become the greatest bicycle city in North America. Okay, I know, that's a big statement, and I have no scientific proof.

these things are a matter of opinion, but that's my opinion, and I'm prepared to take it a step further. I'm prepared to say that Montreal can suddenly be ranked among the great bike cities of the world. Don't have to take my word. Last year, Time magazine rated urban bike rides, and they rank the 24-kilometer loop along the Lachine Canal and Rapids as the third greatest urban cycle in the world. Montreal's gone bike crazy. Probably the biggest thing that happened in Montreal last year was the arrival of the Bixie bikes. These are the community-owned bicycles that anyone can rent 24 hours a day.

The bikes are locked, unsupervised at corners around the city. Total of 5,000 bikes spread around 400 locations. An annual Bixie membership costs about $70. And with the membership, you have unlimited right to the use of the bikes. Anytime you want. Here's how it works. You simply walk up to one of the bike racks, and they are everywhere you look. You swipe your pass and you pull out a bike, and there is no charge for the first 30 minutes.

You can ride anywhere in this city, and you don't have to bring the bike back to where you got it. You can leave it at any of the 400 racks around town. So you take the bike, you drive to lunch, you lock it up. and when you've finished eating, take another bike and drive it home. If you're a tourist, and tourists love the bikes, cost you $5 for a 24-hour membership. The Bixie system was designed, built, and developed here in Quebec. They took money from the city's parking revenues

and from the major sponsor, the aluminum producer, Rio Tinto Alcan. And it is so successful, they've already sold the technology and the concept to Minneapolis, Melbourne, and London, England. And there are at least another 10 cities around the world who are showing interest. It's a staggering success story. But it's not only the Bixie bikes that have made Montreal so cycle-friendly. They're also the bike lanes and bike paths. There are 500 kilometers of bike paths and lanes in the city of Montreal.

700 kilometers on Montreal Island. The most impressive of them I would put forward is the Claire Morissette bike path. Morissette was a passionate bicycle activist who, along with bicycle Bob Silverman, founded Le Monde de Bicyclette. She fought with Montreal City Hall for 30 years about bicycles. She was once arrested, it's worth pointing out, for painting her own bike lanes on city streets. Well, times change, and sometimes profits get their job. you, the idea to name the bike lane in Claire's honor was endorsed unanimously by Montreal City Council and she died just before it opened. Claire Morissette's bike path runs along de Meza Nouve Avenue,

which is a major Montreal street. It runs from one side of the city right to the other, an entire lane reserved for bikes and set apart from the cars by concrete barriers. In the mornings and the afternoons, you can see 10, 20, 25 people on bikes waiting. at a stoplight. Some corners that can get so crowded, you see bike jams. So many bikes that everyone doesn't make it through a light. Seems everyone's on a bike in Montreal these days. People who used to hate bikes are on bikes. It is intergenerational and intercultural and interclass. There's no sense that the people in the cars represent the ruling class that's being confronted by rebels on bicycles.

Now, I don't want to give you the impression that everything's perfect here. If it's perfection you want, you can go to Holland, where bikes coast up to intersections as if they were choreographed by a Tai Chi master. In Montreal, people scream up to intersections as if they're auditioning for the Cirque de Soleil. And they're driving on sidewalks and going the wrong way up one-way streets. You watch in horrified wonder until you finally sponsor. a guy biking towards you in a helmet, and you think, okay, there's one sensible rider in the lot of them, and then he rides his helmeted head right through a red light, and as he passes you, you notice he has a cigarette in his mouth. Listen, I know there are problems. I know this isn't

some perfect bicycle world that H.G. Wells has imagined into existence. I know to belong to the Bixie program, you need a credit card, and that excludes a certain part of the population. And I know the bike paths drive you crazy in the winter when snow clearing becomes an issue. And if you happen to be driving your car along to Mazenov and you want to turn left, you can wait forever to find a clearing in the stream of cyclists. I know you sit in your cars, fuming, but the next time you find yourself sitting there thinking bad thoughts about bikes, and now probably me. Remember this. You are a citizen of the best bike city on the continent.

And know this too, when we come here from Toronto and Vancouver and even Ottawa, and we look around and see what you're doing, we find ourselves in danger of committing the mortal sin of envy. And if your contribution

is just to sit in your car and smolder, well, that's a contribution. Am I guilty of hyperbole? I don't think so. Having to be able to verify this, but I have been told, and I've been told this by more than one person, that the sale of bikes in Quebec makes up 40% of the bikes that are sold across Canada. Things are spinning in a wonderful

way here in Montreal. The rest of the country would do well to pay attention. That was Stuart McLean talking about Montreal and bikes. We recorded that at Place Desire in 2010. All right, that's it for today. But we'll be back here next week with two Dave and Morley stories. Dave ran upstairs and changed into his bike clothes. The whole kit. And he tip-toed carefully out to the alley in his cycling shoes the way the guy had showed him. He knew he had time for this.

Ted was inside having his coffee. Dave wasn't going to ride the bike. He just wanted to sit on it. So he walked out into the alley, and he climbed up onto the roof of Ted's car. He swung himself onto the saddle at Ted's pride and joy. And he leaned over the handlebars, feeling amazingly good. This was something he could do. He could totally do this.

He waved his hands over his head, just like the guys in the Tour de France. And that is when Ted walked out the back door of the restaurant. Dave holding his hands over his head, Ted with his head down, staring at a map. And Dave thought, okay, okay, I can get off the bike and slip down the other side of the car before Ted sees me. So he shifted all his weight onto his right foot so he could step off the bike. And there was an ominous click. The paddle grabbed the cleat of his shoe just like the man told him it would. Like a ski grabbing a ski boot.

And it wouldn't let go. So Dave pushed with the other foot. There was a second click. Then Dave heard the car door slam. And the engine started. And they began rolling down the alley. This was a Sunday morning. Ted was heading to the country.

Dave was perched on his roof. Dave looked like the space shuttle bolted on top of a 747. That's next week on the podcast. I hope you'll join us. Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe is part of the apostrophe podcast network. The recording engineer has wrestled his own share of cockatoos over the years, Greg DeClute. By the way, I'd take the cockatoo over Greg on that one. Theme music is by Danny Michelle, and the show is produced by Louise Curtis, Greg DeCloot, and me, Jess Milton.

Let's meet again next week. Until then, so long for now.