Passers-by, not passer-bys (& Stevie Wonder)

Our street sees a reasonable amount of through-traffic considering that it runs for only about 3 blocks.


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Avenue Melville runs between Rue Sainte-Catherine O and Rue Sherbrooke O (the O stands for "ouest"), which are two major east-west (est-oueste?) streets in Montreal. Several of the local universities are located along Sherbrooke
and Sainte-Catherine runs parallel to it, and has a lot of entrances into the underground city when you get downtown. When I walked to meet Ben at work the other day, I went straight down Sainte-Catherine for maybe 40 minutes and I was there.

We sit on the eastern side of Westmount Park, which means that if someone wants to cut between Sherbrooke and Sainte-Catherine, Melville is either the last street before the park or the first street after the park. This means that a lot of people use my street to cut through, and they drive down it at a million kilometers per hour despite 2 or 3 speed humps (I wish I knew the word for that in French).

So, for whatever reason, this results in a lot of running-of-red-lights and squealing-of-tires. Maybe the idea of having to wait for several blocks to cross from Sherbrooke to Sainte-Catherine is enough to test the patience of a Sainte and people just lose control. Most people who cruise through, however, obey the traffic laws. Since we're right on the corner, we can see the traffic light through our window, resulting in strange red and green reflections. Luckily we are a bit above ground-level, so occupants of cars can't see us and we can't see them when we are sitting in our living room.

What does filter up, however, is noise. Our old bedroom window faced out onto Route 50, so we got a reasonable amount of road noise in Arlington. It was mostly white noise, though, and we often used it to tell what the weather would be before we got out of bed--wet roads sound different than dry ones. Since we're right next to a school, sometimes louder school buses come by, but I don't find that to be particularly distracting.

What IS distracting is the music. People cruise by my apartment blasting their jams all the time, and the angle must be such that the sound waves go right into our windows.

What really gets to me about the music, though, is the fact that I can't recognize most of those songs. I've always been relatively skilled in playing name-that-tune, but as time has progressed I've paid less and less attention to popular music and mainstream hip-hop. It makes me feel old and out-of-touch, which I am--in just a few more years, we will buy a house that will have a lawn that I will yell at kids to stay off of, and I'm looking forward to that.

Anyway, the whole point to this long story was simply to tell you that I finally heard a car blasting a song I knew, and it was Stevie Wonder's "Cherie Amour."



See, it's kind of funny because the title is in French. And it's a song about someone never noticing you. And who the hell blasts, "Cherie Amour?"

Stevie Wonder songs I would not blast:
"That's What Friends Are For"
"I Believe"

Songs I initially put on the above list and then removed:
"I Just Called to Say I Love You""

I am embarrassed to say that I remembered this as a Stevie Wonder song: