By Laurie Dujardin

I have been inspired by the award-winning movie/documentary ALIVE INSIDE. The film was made in 2014 by Michael Rossato-Bennett. He follows social worker Dan Cohen, founder of non-profit organization Music & Memory as he demonstrates the power of music to overcome memory loss and restore a sense of self to those suffering from dementia. He wants to offer this service to nursing home residents. Frustratingly, the pharmaceutical corporations do everything they can to prevent this. Of course, THEY want to keep everyone on prescriptions drugs with all their attendant problems. I am really hoping that many others will take up Dan Cohen's fight.

First of all, we know that music bypasses the conscious mind and goes directly to the subconscious, and that it has the power to change or control our mood. I know this from my own experience as Salsa music, played loudly, is guaranteed to lift me out of feelings of sadness or exhaustion to the point where I can't help but dance. Hypnotherapists as well as marketers certainly know the power of music as they enclose subliminal suggestions within music.

To really understand my friend Lorna you have to know that she hails from Alberta originally. In the midst of all sorts of calamities she is the one who remains calm, quiet, helpful, methodical and kind. The thing that maybe stands out the most is her resourcefulness. She once whipped up a pair of luxurious drapes for her living room in a half an hour and I have the feeling that if she had to, she could figure out how to build a house!

Lorna has been teaching Communication at Universite de Montreal for the last 15 years. We recently sat down over dinner after I approached her with the idea of highlighting her unique desire and struggle to become a Francophone - that is, to live her whole life in French in a French environment.

I asked her if she would speak at length about her ambition and search to become a Francophone. I am going to quote her verbatim here, excepting the various um's and er's, as follows.

Q: What made you think of moving to Montreal, to begin with?

Lorna: I guess I was always interested in things that were different. I would spend hours looking at the Atlas and hours looking at maps and imagining places I could go and what it might be like there. Also looking at National Geographic magazines and imagining those places as well. I grew up in the time of Bilingual Policy and Trudeau's vision of a bilingual Canada and I really bought into that too and thought it would be a really good thing to be bilingual. I had my little French lessons at school, but I don't think I could actually say I learned French at school - it wasn't much and the teachers weren't Francophone. But I had this ambition and I was always hungry for something different, so when I was able, I moved away from Alberta and came east to Montreal. I was 21. In my high school there were also a number of teachers who'd come from Montreal to work there, so they talked to me about Montreal, especially one I was fairly friendly with. So the idea of coming to Montreal started to appeal to me and seemed fairly exotic, while not quite as exotic as going to China or something. So I got in my car with all my stuff and drove east to Montreal.