"Please stay on the sidewalk. The street will be reopened."

It's cold today--glove, scarf, and wool coat cold. Despite this, I wander up north toward Mile End. Today I take Durocher Avenue. I get lost again. But I find Lester's Deli, a 1950s diner-style cafe supposedly famous for its dried-meat sandwiches. I write down the store's hours on a piece of scratch paper, and return home on Hutchinson Avenue. I follow a small Jewish woman dressed in black with a Jackie O cap resting on the side of her head. She flies down the sidewalk, pushing a double stroller, a young girl trotting behind her, scarf blowing in the wind. I invent some fantastic explanation for her urgency; I think of postcard images from New York circa 1920. But I too become urgent, noticing a circle of police cars at the corner of St-Viateur. A crowd of mothers and similarly-dressed children have gathered on the four corners of the intersection; I see then a horde of Jewish men flooding the street from the west, tiki torches in hand, following a white truck piping out traditional Hebrew music from giant speakers in the back. A chuppah emerges from the throb of the dancing crowd, apparent only when the dancers radiate away from the center; disappearing again as they rush toward the canopy, hands in the air. Red christmas lights coil around the poles, a garish (and slightly kitschy) crown, lit with similar lights, graces the top. I inquire if it is a wedding, unable to see anything but a man holding a bundle of roses in the center of the chuppah. The woman I ask responds curtly: "non." But it's a regular procession, a parade in black, serenaded by the music that dominates the sonic landscape more and more as the van approaches, a festive event with the men dancing and the women and children watching on the sidewalks. And we walk collectively, following the movement. And I understand nothing, but I'm in no hurry; I walk at the pace of the women pushing strollers, at the pace of the event's members, despite my obviously accidental presence.

The streets are lined. Faces, young and old, hang out of windows, stare from stairs leading up to second-story entrances. I climb up to a high point to separate myself from the throngs; I lean into the ear of a Gentile woman and ask what's going on. "Aucune idée" [no idea] she responds. Moving farther down, I stand next to a PhD type of the British variety--the kind of person one sees and immediately knows the intonation in which they will speak. Authoratatively he responds that it is a ceremony celebrating the arrival of new Torah scrolls. The procession arrives in front of the synagogue, halfway between Fairmount and St-Viateur. I stand on the sidewalk, waiting for the mass to slowly dissolve into the building, for the music to die down--my cue to disband. I walk down the leaf-pressed street, the sound of the truck's generator fading.

"Please stay on the sidewalk. The street will be reopened," a cop behind me yells over a megaphone, in English, curiously bookmarking the near-magical experience.