Boreal

FADE TO BLACK

Triumph of the Irrational

Dedication

It was shortly after 9/11 when I walked into my local Chapters and noticed a pile of Korans stacked near the entrance. I purchased one, took it home and started reading.

I had always dreamt of writing something more useful than a User’s Guide for a Management Information System or a proposal on how to fix a broken system.

I told Lucette that I would like to write about what I had read and would re-read many times over in my attempt to use my years of experience as a systems analyst to bring order to the chaos that British historian Thomas Carlyle [1795 - 1881] described as “a confused, jumble, crude, incondite, endless iteration.”

I expected it would take me a year or two, three at the most to complete a sort of layman’s guide to the Koran. Ten years was more like it. Ten years that turned out to be some of the best years of our time together.

Most days began with the buzz of the alarm clock; my signal to get up and go downstairs to make the coffee. Ten minutes later, a warm cup of coffee in each hand, I would make my way back up the stairs, leaving one cup on the desk in my home office, and the other on her bathroom vanity. Back in the bedroom, I would open the curtains and then walk over to the bed to kiss her good morning.

She would shower and get dressed and I would drive her to her job on Parliament Hill—a five to ten minute drive depending on the traffic. For 35 years, she was one of the fifty or so elite professionals who provide translation and simultaneous interpretation to the House of Commons, the Senate of Canada, Parliamentary and Cabinet Committees and Party Caucuses.

After a hurried goodbye and "have a nice day"—Wellington Street, in front of Parliament, is a busy street in the morning—I would make my way back home and begin my day’s work, bringing order to the Koran.

When she got home at the end of the day, depending on the season and the weather, we would sit on the front porch with a glass of wine and some munchies and she would read and comment on what I had accomplished that day. I always had a copy of Fakhry’s interpretation of the Koran on my lap ready to answer her questions. This was when her Masters in Linguistics - Specialty Translation came in handy.

Sipping her wine, she would patiently explain some of the nuances of Fakhry’s translation that I had failed to grasp or that I might have misunderstood. We agreed on most things when it came to Islam and the threat it posed to Western Civilization, except, she believed it would all come to pass, that the moderates would win the day and the March of Civilization would continue and we would not see the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which ushered in the Age of Reason, undone.

She was always the optimist. As our layman's guide to the Koran grew from a few hundred pages to encompassing the entire book, her optimism was severely tested, but her dedication to what would become our project to make the Koran accessible to the layperson never wavered.

Lucette passed away on July 5, 2019.

To my beloved spouse of 38 years to whom I dedicated my first book, I dedicate my last. See you soon.

Bernard Payeur