Mile Endings

Onward

2011-12-12T12:08:00.001-05:00

At noon every weekday St. Viateur St. is full of Ubisoftoids, packs of young game designers who pour out of the old Peck Building hungry for lunch, their appetites sustaining a dozen new local restaurants. Weekend mornings, the cafés are jammed with snaking lineups and fancy strollers, trikes and bikes parked three deep on the sidewalk.

Just when I thought Mile End couldn’t get any trendier, a recent study by Concordia and University of Toronto researchers set out to study its trendiness. For over a decade, such studies and cool-hunting articles have had the effect of changing the neighbourhood they’re observing. The result: life in Mile End gets more chic.

I may have been part of the hype.

For three years, I wrote this blog. I started when our daughter Amelia was tiny and I spent all my time pushing her around the block in the stroller. Strolling with my baby made me look at every fruit tree and old person in my neighbourhood with a new sense of wonder. I wanted to champion the details that fell through the cracks in media coverage of the area.

I’d lived here for 20 years and was obsessed with keeping track of what was lost every time a musty local business metamorphosed into something shinier. I wrote about Barry Shinder’s 80-year-old cap factory, Norman Epelbaum’s time capsule-like photo studio on Park Avenue, and the mysterious corsetières at Lingerie Rose Marie across the street. I was Mile End’s E.B. White, or at least the self-appointed hyper-local bard of the disappearing family business.

Yet every ending also promises a new beginning. I wrote about those, too. Who could object to gardening in the hard-packed earth around tree squares? Or urban beekeeping? Old people may be disappearing from the area but there are more strollers than ever and the next generation of neighbours is set to stay here for a while. The community-building group Ruepublique is full of committed people in their 20s. They seem to love the neighbourhood as much as I do and are working to improve the area’s public street space.

Then, I’m not sure when, or exactly why, but a sense of neighbourhood fatigue set in.

I still walk around, but Amelia is almost four now. She pedals her own bike, and has her own opinions about what we do: (“Mom, this is not interesting to me.”)

I look at the aqua storefront of the brightly-lit new David’s Tea chain on St. Viateur, or the shops on Bernard selling herbs and sea salt, or vintage glasses frames, and I think: “My work here is done. Everything has changed, there is nothing ungentrified left to keep track of.” (“Mom, this is not interesting to me.”)

But of course, cities and neighbourhoods are always changing. There is always something to notice.
My chronicle of mileendings may have run its course for now, but Amelia is alert to anything new that pops up on her radar, every string of Christmas lights, or the (fortunately brief) re-appearance of the gigantic Nokia-Virgin Mobile reindeer on St. Viateur.

I imagine someday in the faraway future, a thousand trends and changes from now, she’ll look back and remember how it used to be when she was a kid, the Mile End of the 2010s, back in the day.

P.S. To all readers of this blog: thank you.

Endings and beginnings

2011-08-13T10:00:00.002-04:00

"Manufacturing is a tough business," Barry Shinder told a class of Concordia design students who were seated around his old factory workshop on St. Laurent Blvd. north of St. Viateur.

Three years ago, Barry Shinder was still running the cap-making business his father had started in 1930. A year and a half later, he went out of business.

For months, the space was only sporadically occupied.

Then, one day in February, Anne-Marie Laflamme and Catherine Métivier happened by.

"The first time we came in, we felt it was like a museum," said Laflamme, 27. "We spent all afternoon asking Barry for stories. We fell in love with the space and the story."

The tattooed students took notes, sketched or recorded the talk on mp3 players. They were there as part of an open house hosted by Laflamme and Métivier. The young women are the building's new tenants and run atelier b., a clothing label dedicated to sustainable textiles and local production.

They plan on preserving the factory's history by keeping Shinder's massive cutting table, two sewing machines and the heavy cast iron button and snap-covering tools.

Most of the sewing machines they couldn't even give away.

"We saved a few," said Laflamme. "There was one we put out with the garbage. When the garbage truck came for it, Catherine was crying like a baby."

Shinder, who's spent his whole life working those machines, is resigned to them ending up on the garbage heap. He's glad, if a little surprised, that Laflamme and Métivier want to keep some equipment.

"I just hope they do well," he said.

Last year, when Shinder had to close the business he was so anxious his weight plummeted from 195 to 130 pounds. "I'll be 65 in January," he said. "I'm computer illiterate. I was good at one thing only. Production."

Some of the students examined their nails and closed their eyes.

Shinder took a job sewing for Magill Hat, the company that used to contract him to make caps. He decided to sell the building where he'd worked and lived for almost 60 years.

"I think I'm more relaxed now," he said, citing his current weight as 165 lbs. "Thursday I get a paycheque, and it's my money. I have an 8-4 job and that's it." Shinder now works in the Chabanel district and is moving to Little Italy.

Métivier and Laflamme plan to use the 1800-square-foot space as a store and a workshop for sewing samples.

"Just don't live to work," was Shinder's advice. "When you're in business you have no friends."

"But everyone is our friend!" said Laflamme. "It's important for us to work with people we like."

Two generations, two different business paradigms. Were the students listening?

"I still say I do the work of one and a half people," said Shinder, of his skill at producing caps for his boss. "But I only get $2-3 more than minimum wage, and I have 50 years of experience. Still, I'm probably making more there than I ever made here."

To the alley cat rescue

2011-07-31T22:34:00.002-04:00

They call themselves the Pussy Patrol. Together, Danette MacKay, Leni Parker and Zoï Kilakos have rescued 25 Mile End alley cats in the past two years.

They pick up strays, take them to the vet where they're spayed or neutered, and provide foster care until a home they deem suitable is found.

"They've got their fingers on the pulse of the local alleys, " said vet Judith Weissmann who charges the Pussy Patrol a special rate for the strays.

"We're crazy cat ladies," said Kilakos, who puts out food twice a day for the strays in her alley and has been known to spend hours on a rescue stake-out, waiting for a feral cat to approach. "We were each doing it on our own, then we merged. It's our vocation."

They each own four (or five) rescued cats and refer to the strays as "the boys and girls on the street." One recent rescue was Mad Max who took shelter in one of the insulated structures they put out in the winter.

"He showed up with his leg completely ripped open. I live-trapped him to take to the vet. He was there for a month," said Kilakos, a commercial and fine arts photographer, as well as a cat rescuer.

Danette MacKay is an actor and co-owner of the Arterie Boutique & Friperie on Bernard. She had the idea of offering the cats up for adoption through the store, where actor Leni Parker also works.

The current store cat is tawny Leo, who just a few months ago, had fur so dirty and matted he had to be shaved. "When he was freshly off the streets he would lunge at his food and drink all his water at once," said Parker.

Now he lounges around the boutique like a lazy king. A recent visitor to the store may turn out to be his "forever mom," but first she'll have to pass the Pussy Patrol's intensive adoption interview. There's also a $150 fee designed to cover the cost of neutering and to make sure future owners are serious about owning an animal.

Sometimes, the Pussy Patrol despairs about humans.

"Why is it not OK for dogs to be out on their own and it's totally socially acceptable to let cats roam around?" asked MacKay. "It makes no sense. Do we have a stray dog population problem in Montreal? No, we don't."

"People have this mentality that cats are solo creatures and autonomous and need to be outside in nature. That's not true," said Parker.

"Rescued street cats very rarely want to go out again," continued MacKay.

Kilakos points out that if cats aren't spayed or neutered they will produce several litters a year, as will their offspring, quickly resulting in an exponential number of animals. She gives out her vet's card to new pet owners, gently transmitting that message.

"Yelling at people doesn't work so I try to bribe them with compassion," she said.

To adopt a former alley cat, contact pussiepatrol@gmail.com

Sidewalk Gardener

2011-06-22T17:49:00.003-04:00

On a breezy Saturday morning, across the street from a looming factory building at the corner of Casgrain and Maguire, Diane Boyer gave out cotton gloves and advice .

"When you're an urban gardener you're also an archeologist," she told a small group of people. "You'll find glass, metal, plastic. The soil is compacted. So you take the hoe, remove the top 4-5 centimetres of cedar mulch. Set it aside on a groundsheet," she instructed.

"With a shovel or pitchfork, work the soil. Turn it," Boyer demonstrated. "It's a good opportunity to take out the weeds. We'll add a little chicken manure in there as fertilizer, then we'll put the mulch back on top."

Boyer was leading a workshop on her personal passion: tree square gardening.

Boyer first started planting flowers around the trees by her loft on St. Viateur East three years ago. She won an éco-quartier contest for her initiative. The following summer she took over more tree squares, and then decided to quit her job in film to study horticulture.

She finished her studies this year and started a new job as project manager at the éco-quartier du Plateau Mont-Royal. When she proposed using tree squares as a way to get more citizens gardening, her colleagues liked the idea.

Now Boyer is responsible for a pilot project that's put176 tree squares up for adoption in the eastern, semi-industrial portion of Mile End. In an area notable for its lack of greenery and large garment factory buildings, each tree has a numbered plaque strung around its trunk and instructions for adoption: call éco-quartier.

Residents, schools and daycares jumped at the chance to adopt these patches of dirt.

Plateau Mont-Royal horticultural department supplied the soil, hearty perennials and brightly flowered annuals. Boyer and her éco-quartier colleagues distributed them, along with planting tips, to willing gardeners.

Some people adopted the spots right in front of their homes. Others, like Deborah Kramer and her three-year -old daughter, Luna, have come from five or more blocks away, eager for the chance to garden.

"There are no tree squares on my block," Deborah said. "I saw the signs: 'Tree squares for adoption.' They provide tools, earth, a lesson, and there you go. It's cool. We live in an apartment so it's nice for us. We've adopted this tree. Now we have to take care of it."

Pushing a wheelbarrow of gardening supplies (donated by Rona at Parc and Bernard), Boyer answered questions from new gardeners. "Horticulture is trial and error," she advised. "There's nothing like trying."

"I've always wanted a community garden but the waiting list is four years long. Plus, this is more my speed. I'm a novice," said Deborah.

"One tree square is small but if we all get together we can make a difference and make things cleaner and brighter in the neighbourhood," said Boyer. "A garden is so much better than a piece of garbage."

Shop talk

2011-06-13T11:04:00.002-04:00

Near the Rialto Theatre on Parc Avenue, the curlicued white lettering of an oldsign reads, "Bijouterie Rothschild, Horlogerie, Objets d'Art." Fromthe outside, the narrow store appears dim and quiet, almost abandoned.

But inside, Moïse Rothschild is busy serving a steady streamof customers. People come in to browse for rings, get a watch, a chain, or anearring repaired, or to find out if a piece of old jewelry is actually gold.

Rothschild wears a jeweler's magnifying visor over hissilver curls, a dark jacket, and a copper-gold ring set with a bright greenoval of malachite from his native Iran. He gives his age simply as "over70," and says he'll keep working at the store as long as he has theenergy.

"I've known Moïse for twenty years!" grinned onewoman. Many of his customers have been coming to him, "the man on ParcAvenue," for decades.

"There's a difference between someone who's justinterested in business and someone who's studied humanities, who has a humanpoint of view and who won't let clients leave without a smile," reasonedRothschild who has PhD in comparative literature.

He brought his family to Montreal after the Iranianrevolution in 1979 and took over the jewelry store in 1980, running itpart-time while he worked as a French teacher and principal at a Hasidicschool. Rothschild sends out most of the repairs, saying it's his vocation tofind the best workmanship for his clients.

These days Rothschild opens the store from around 1 p.m.until early evening. He runs his business on terms some people may considereccentric.

"Sometimes I refuse to sell to people who buy a lot ofthings from me," he said. "If they're buying on impulse, they mightregret it.

"You have to be a psychologist," he continued."If somebody comes in to change a battery and watch band and I feel they're not able to paymuch, I ask very little. I don't lose money, because the same person comes backand brings other customers. And some people give tips."

A father and a little girl in search of a gift for Mom,examined the rings and earrings in one of the cracked display cases. After alengthy deliberation they chose a vintage amber pendant and to the girl'sdelight, Rothschild threw in a bracelet for her. It was stainless steelfiligree set with tiny bits of coloured glass.

"I've never seen a business person like you,"remarked Ginette Gauron, a long-time client and friend. She has stylish darkhair, black framed glasses and red lipstick. Her most recent Rothschildpurchase was a diamond, but today she came in just to chat.

"He feels sorry for people," she said. "He'snot a person, he's a soul. When he'sgone we'll have to put up a statue on Parc Avenue."

Desire lines

2011-06-04T09:44:00.004-04:00

Sasha Johnson stepped out his front door on Jeanne Mance shouldering a giant 35-pound backpack. He picked up a blue folding chair and set out toward the railroad tracks.

At the sculpture garden near Clark and Van Horne, he stepped through a hole in the fence and walked to a grassy spot along the tracks, well away from any rail traffic. He put down his chair, undid the pack and pulled out a gleaming tuba.

"I'm a little bit tucked away here," he said. "I'm between the St. Urbain underpass and the train tracks. The odds of someone telling me to be quiet are very small. It's not that I get a lot of complaints at the house, but I like to give the neighbours a break."

The light bounced off the golden bell of his tuba as he played scales. A breeze buffeted the music, carrying the low resonant notes down the tracks and through the trees along the chain link fence.

An orchestral tuba player, Johnson, 39, first fell under the spell of the instrument's breadth and power when he was 12.

"There are many more musical possibilities with the tuba than people think. Most people just know about Oompah and Oktoberfest but it can also sound very tender." To demonstrate, he sent a heart-rending passage floating over the tracks. It was the scene of Juliet's death from Prokofiev's ballet of Romeo and Juliet.

A few years ago, Johnson took lessons with the tuba player from the New York Philharmonic who encouraged him to play outdoors as a way of preparing for auditions.

"The tuba is designed to be the foundation of an 80- to 100-piece orchestra," said Johnson. "Auditions are in concert halls. Playing in a tiny practice room is nowhere close to that. Outside is the largest place possible.

"Now I tell my students to play outside. In fact, I teach out here sometimes," added Johnson who is an instructor at Schulich School of Music at McGill and the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. He also commutes to work in Toronto with his main employer, the National Ballet of Canada.

"I love playing outdoors and I love coming to the tracks, but it's no fun having to worry about getting a ticket," he said.

The Canadian Pacific police give $144 tickets to anyone they catch crossing the train tracks or setting foot in the green space along the railroad. People in Mile End, Little Italy and Rosemont are actively protesting the ticketing and lobbying for the establishment of a level crossing at the tracks at the spots where people want to cross the tracks, sometimes known as desire lines.

"I'm breaking the law just by being here," Johnson pointed out.

He stepped back through the hole in the fence to head home and a woman enjoying the sun on a bench in the sculpture garden said: "Thanks for the concert."

Urban barnacles

2011-05-13T16:09:00.005-04:00

Billy Mavreas walks down the street with his hands in his corduroy pockets, head swiveling as he scans left to right and up and down. He checks everything along the sidewalk and its periphery, the utility poles, bike racks, stop signs, walls and mailboxes, looking for new additions.

"People add things. They accrete like barnacles," he says.

"Corazon," he notes, as we pass a scrawl of graffiti on an alley wall. "That's some kid writing 'heart.' That person is looking for attention. There's the listen bird," he points to a spray-painted bird and next to it, the word listen.

I follow a few steps behind, trying to keep up with everything he's seeing.

"I'm like a camera-less photographer," he says. "It's all collecting whether it's in your pocket or catalogued in your brain."

Billy is a cartoonist, artist and collector. He and Emilie O'Brien run Monastiraki – a gallery, store, and collection of collections. Billy thrives on filing things away. He's been dowsing for found treasure since he was a kid in suburban Ville St. Laurent, who went out to look for interesting stuff, came across flat metal slugs and put them in boxes.

His website yesway.com features a quizzical, sentimental catalogue of 20th century litter such as wrappers, bus tickets and bits of zipper, along with irresistible stories of their origins. He recently started a new series of tiny flat things that he laminates in plastic: half a five dollar bill; a leaf; a torn photo, among other items. A mental catalogue of the graffiti tags, street art and changes in the neighbourhood is just another dimension of his capacity for collecting.

We keep walking. I'm out and about every day but when Billy points stuff out, it's like I don't even live here, there's so much I never see.

Billy refers to the absence of the giant poplar by the church on St. Viateur as if it's old news. What?! When did that happen? He draws my attention to the disappearance of the evocatively faded old Navarino sign outside the bakery on Parc Avenue. I'd noticed the new sign (sort of), but hadn't registered the loss of the vertical vintage girl with cake. (She has moved inside to the back wall of the bakery.)

"Attention must be paid! Even though it's free," says Billy. "I don't know why, but I get a kick out of 'Afrika Bon Jovy.'" Now that he mentions it, I have seen those mysterious words printed all over the place.

Last year, when I wanted to find out more about the "i love you..." grafitti, Billy was the first person I consulted. He didn't know who'd done it, but revealed that he'd been responsible for the small, happily waving creature on a low wall near the Collège Français. (It's gone now, and I miss it.)

"I was always subtle," Billy says as we walk. "I did it for people who are looking –there. That's one of mine," he indicates a stenciled sunburst on Bernard, a thing of the past for him.

When he became a local business owner he realized he couldn't in good conscience be the guy who was putting stuff on walls and getting mad at people for doing the same to his. Now he keeps an eye out for the writing on the wall without spray-painting other people's property himself.

Once Billy points out the corazon scrawl and heart, the little amoeba ghost stickers, the poles decorated in multi-coloured rings of duct tape, I start seeing them.

"I like these pills," he says, of an oblong-shaped blue and white capsule sticker on a pole. He has "harvested" one for his collection of paper ephemera. "What I don't like is scratchitti." Who knew there was a word for the scratched messages in the plexiglass of a bus shelter?

In the alley, Billy pauses at a garbage pile and lifts up a small cork bulletin board that someone has painted with red polka dots. "Because this is fun, I'm going to find a better place to put it." He carries the spotted board around the corner and props it by the sidewalk where it may find a new home.

"I'm not just pulling stuff off the street anymore. I stop myself. I don't want to be a hoarder. Or even a hoarder-lite," he says.

It's a constant battle for someone who notices everything.

Near my front steps he finds a rusty metal door part that he can't resist. He puts it in the pocket of his jeanjacket. "There are always found things in my pocket," he confesses as he repositions two chess pawns to make room for the new acquisition.

*

The collections of Billy Mavreas will be featured in the show Bits and Pieces at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts

Billy Mavreas Inside The Face
new pencil drawings

Monastiraki

5478 St-Laurent

April

2011-04-23T11:08:00.000-04:00

Everyone wants to get back on a bike again, even the pigeons.

In other news, I can't stop saying good things about local booksellers...

Portraits, Weddings, Passports

2011-03-31T12:37:00.002-04:00

In a turreted brick two-storey on Parc Avenue north of St. Viateur, Regent Photo Studio advertises portraits, weddings and passports in old-fashioned lettering on its glass door.

The buzzer blared while the door, with its faded hand-tinted photo of a bejeweled smiling woman, closed behind me.

Parc Avenue traffic grew muted as I walked down the narrow hallway of shiny gold wallpaper flocked with red velvet.

In the office at the end of the hall, I found a small white-haired man behind a desk and a younger man seated nearby. The walls around them were filled with graduation photos, family portraits and wedding pictures of big-haired brides and grooms with wide collars. All the images seemed to date from at least a generation ago, like the pale bouquet of silk flowers in the corner. It was extremely quiet in there.

"Can I get a passport photo?" I wondered out loud. Maybe I should just go get the clerk at Jean Coutu or Uniprix to do it, instead of bothering these people.

"Of course, of course!" said the man behind the desk, all gracious host.

Norman Epelbaum approached the small assignment with gravitas, getting out a comb to make my hair presentable. With a hand on my elbow, he ushered me to a seat in front of the vintage Polaroid MiniPortrait camera, accompanied by John Notte, his assistant of 32 years. John turned on the photo lights.

Norman touched my shoulders, lifted my chin and stepped back behind the camera.

"Steady, steady!" he instructed in a soft voice with an Eastern European accent and then there was a click and a flash.

Back at his desk, Norman set the red plastic Kodak timer and while the Polaroid developed, he made out a receipt for twelve dollars. The dated wedding portraits on the walls made me wonder if the marriages were still intact. I wondered about Norman's story, too. He didn't reveal much.

Later I learned that he was born in Poland and had moved to Montreal in the mid-fifties. During the war, he'd obtained a Russian passport and served in the Russian army in Siberia. He and his wife, Esther, had four daughters.

In Mile End he was known affectionately as the guy with the hat. He never went out without a fedora, or in the summer, a straw hat. He always wore a shirt and tie, usually with vest and jacket.

He owned a couple buildings, but had frugal tendencies, perhaps acquired during the war years. At Navarino on Parc, they joked about how he liked to appropriate the cafe's copy of the newspaper. He often went to St. Viateur Bagel Bakery where he preferred to get his bagels free of charge.

He was a mysterious figure. Some thought he'd worked with Karsh in Ottawa. (He may have.) Others said the woman in the photo on his door was his wife. (It wasn't.) No one knew how old he was. He recently said: "72."

photo: Andrew Gryn

Norman Epelbaum died on Sunday, March 20 at the age of 82. He'd been having heart problems. The previous Friday he'd gone to work at the studio, as usual.

"I will miss him a lot," said colleague John Notte who's keeping the studio open for business, which in recent years has been a handful of passport photos a day.

When Norman was in the hospital a few months ago, his youngest daughter Suzie called him up. He picked up the phone in his room and, out of habit, said: "Regent Photo Studio."

The name of the studio comes from the old telephone exchange for the neighbourhood. Norman greeted customers there seven days a week, for the past 47 years, when he wasn't doing weddings or insurance photo work.

John Notte

"He used to say that he loved photography so much it didn't feel like a job. That's why he could do it every day," said Suzie. "I grew up at the studio with him."

"He was very friendly. Everybody knew him," said Georgia Mangafas of Rodos Bay restaurant, his neighbour for 41 years. "He was at work until the last minute."

I have two passport photos by Norman Epelbaum: one current, one expired. As the Regent Photo business card says: "Photographs are memories."

St. Viateur Valentine

2011-02-14T11:33:00.001-05:00

In February, the light changes. The neglected geranium on top of my bookshelf notices, and buds.

The florist puts rose petals out in the snow. They freeze into bright eggshell-thin cups. Later I'll find soggy wads of them in my coat, as if I tried to pocket a snowball.

But for now, we scoop them up by the cold handful, valentine petals on the white sidewalk, something right out of Snow White.

Doorstep clothing swap

2011-02-01T10:36:00.001-05:00

The bulging bags appear on my doorknob with no note. The contents are like gifts from a very practical Santa.

Snowsuits, snow pants, boots, fleeces, all in exactly the right size! As the world's worst shopper, I'm dizzy with gratitude.

And the elves behind this useful stuff?

The moms on the block who keep track of my child's dimensions in relation to their own. "She must be 3T by now," they calculate and presto: we've got turtlenecks, flannel pajamas, coats and pants.

"From who?" Amelia now asks when she puts something on—because everything comes from someone! Dee-Dee, Lucie, Stella, Esme, Jesse, Dylan, Adam, Ella...

People I barely know have given us things by the bagful. Just living on the same street makes us eligible to win the jackpot.

If getting a bicycle stolen from in front of the house (2 bikes gone this winter so far) fills me with disappointment, the stream of neighbourhood hand-me-downs restores hope.

The givers of stuff just say: "We're happy to get rid of it. There's nowhere to keep it!"

A neighbour dad echoes this sentiment, waving to include the houses up and down the street. "This is my storage," he says.

It's true. The minute the clothes get too snug or the toys too babyish, I'm aggressively generous; on the lookout for some smaller, younger recipient, saying, "Here! Want these? Take them. Now!"

I leave bags on people's doorknobs with no note. It's like getting rid of surplus giant zucchini, but perhaps more appreciated on the receiving end.

So far, I've only heard about the bedbug epidemic in the media. However, our street was mentioned (ominously) by name in La Presse in connection with the infestations. If this stops people from accepting hand-me-downs, the whole perfect system will unravel.

Looking at the size of the shallow closets in our apartment (covered with strange and ancient wallpaper) reminds me that people must have had less stuff 100 years ago.

We need more now! Everyone around here seems to be building—adding onto the back of row houses, or onto the top, or digging out the basement. It's like magic, conjuring up space where there was none.

But when that's not an option, depend on your neighbours' space. The up-side of small. Pass it on.

It's so magic

2011-01-18T11:22:00.002-05:00

Maybe if I wait long enough everything will come right here to Mile End.

My sister gave me a book called Big Ideas for my16th birthday and I have loved Lynda Barry ever since.

Lovers of Lynda Barry are ardent, loyal and extreme. They're given to walking away in disgust from people who say: "Those aren't even comics"; "Terrible drawing"; "Too hard to read, too much writing!"; or: "They're not even funny."

Lynda Barry can tell a perfect short story in four panels. It sends you spinning back to an exquisite, forgotten moment of growing up, and is gut-punchingly sad, funny and true in the same instant.

A few years ago, her work became hard to find. The comics were in fewer and fewer papers and her books stopped appearing. Where did she go?

Every once in a while I would Google: Lynda Barry + new book.

Then, one day, the answer came back from the ouija board of the internet: Lynda Barry was back! In fact, she was practically moving into the neighbourhood. Mile End's own Drawn and Quarterly was her new publisher. I really felt like I was in on the action.

Last weekend, when Lynda Barry appeared in Montreal in person, there was a huge burst of adoring applause before she could even say a word.

She told jokes and stories, insisting it is our biological function to do so. It makes life worth living, she said. She talked about the power of images, busted dancercise moves and gave a slideshow. To quote her irrepressible character Marlys, she showed the audience "How to be an incredible #1 groover on life."

Mid-way through her talk Lynda Barry said, "In 2002 my publisher dropped me. It was over for me until Drawn and Quarterly came calling."

I looked around the packed auditorium of the Ukrainian Federation on Hutchison at Fairmount. Every (anglo) filmmaker, writer, artist and musician in the neighbourhood was there. It was a huge Mile End reunion and Lynda Barry was at the centre of it.

I hadn't known I lived next to hundreds of fans, people who would line up for three hours after the show to get their books signed. But it makes perfect sense. In a place where every other person has an art project or a film proposal in the works, a novel on the go or a demo in progress, Lynda Barry is the patron saint. And Drawn and Quarterly is the discerning, community-minded patron of the arts.

*

What it Is & Picture This by Lynda Barry
available from Drawn and Quarterly
211 Bernard St. West, Montreal
forthcoming, September 2011: the first in the new series EVERYTHING, previously published works and more, by Lynda Barry

Movin' on up

2011-01-10T11:45:00.025-05:00

Jeans Jeans Jeans has moved out of the cave and up to street level but Borys Fridman doesn't want anyone to think they've gone high-end.

"We kept the floor as is," he says, indicating the faded white lines on the concrete floor of what was once a parking garage. "Not too fancy!"

The new store still feels like a warehouse but it's 2500 square feet bigger than the old basement. There's actually room to move between the racks of jeans.

Borys has posted arrows around the block pointing the way to the new spot on Casgrain north of St. Viateur. The placards are like the signs for a special event, or a movie set.

Jeans Jeans Jeans is its own scene.

The place is full of shoppers and toddlers, babies, boyfriends, moms and dads. The staff is running in all directions carrying armloads of jeans to customers and Borys seems to be everywhere at once, talking to everybody.

"It's crazy," he says happily. He finds my dad the perfect pair of jeans in 30 seconds.

"They're the best. They always come up with what we need," says one woman who's here from Laval with her husband on their semi-annual JJJ shopping trip.

There are more fitting rooms now, including a mom-sized one big enough to accommodate a stroller. There's an efficient new ticketing system for picking up your hemmed jeans at the circular counter where the cash register is.

But there's still nowhere to hide. There's the same stark fluorescent lighting and you still have to step out of the fitting room to see your jeans in the mirror.

And when you do, Borys and the Jeans Jeans Jeans staff will still look at you and declare: "You need to go a size smaller in those."

And, if you disagree, they'll still smile and shrug patiently, as if to humour you, even if they know better than you ever could about what is what in the world of jeans.

New place, same assertive service.

*

Jeans Jeans Jeans
5575 Casgrain

see original post on Jeans Jeans Jeans

On ice

2011-01-03T12:09:00.001-05:00

I love finding something where I wouldn't expect it.

Like the lemon tree in the alley, the tiny backyard rink tucked in behind a row of greystone apartments on Clark Street is a perfect surprise.

The ice glows blue and smooth. Kids whirl, totter and scrape around the rectangle. The sound of skates slices the air.

"I'm like the Italians with their tiny gardens," says Tommy Groszman, master and creator of the rink. "I used to wonder, 'what are they doing with such a little space?' Now I'm like that with my little piece of ice."

Tommy built the rink for the kids, Ella and Adam, and also as a way of working through some ideas for a screenplay he's writing about hockey.

He figured out how to pack and water the snow at the edges of the rink so that water wouldn't run off. He created his own contraption for flooding the ice after consulting Home Zamboni videos on YouTube. His special rig involves a bucket fitted with a nozzle that attaches to a perforated tube. Bungee cords hold a square of carpeting in place for ice-grooming.

Some nights he gets up two or three times to make ice.

"It's addictive. My ice has to be perfect!" he says with a laugh. "I don't know if I should tell you this," he confesses, pointing to his boots. "But I'm not wearing any socks right now."

He is one with the ice this way, his feet alert to any stray bumps.

His perfectionism does not go unappreciated.

Ella, who is nine, can skate for hours on the rink right outside her back door. She zooms around in her hockey skates until bedtime.

"I'll miss it when it's gone," she says, projecting herself into the future and imagining her wistfulness, the way we do when something is truly special.

Page Turner

2010-12-08T12:05:00.006-05:00

S.W. Welch is the oracle of St. Viateur Street.

Behind his counter stacked with books, he issues pronouncements: "Rebus will be back. I'll tell you that right now," he says of the detective retired by author Ian Rankin. He also declares: "Harry Potter will be back."

Does he know something we don't?

The answer is, yes.

He keeps a luminous crystal ball on his countertop, but he doesn't need that to make his predictions.

On a recent weekday, the phone kept ringing and callers pressed him into instant evaluations. "I find it unlikely that that book would have much value," he tells one.

"It kills me when I tell someone their book is a piece of junk and they don't want to listen. I'm not the God of all bookselling but my opinion is that of one who's been interested in books for 30 years and has a fairly good idea of how much something's worth. It's a gut feeling based on years of experience. Then they'll say, 'is there anyone else I can call?'" S.W. Welch scoffs and shakes his head.

"I possess a certain amount of hubris and ego," he adds, with a smile.

"The general problem with being a used or antiquarian bookseller is that people's books are infused with love and personal interest. Let's say you have a lot of books but you are, unfortunately, deceased. Your daughter calls me to look at the books, thinking, 'This one was on mom's bedside table for years. She loved it, she traveled to Egypt with it!' And then S.W. walks in and says, 'I don't pay for sentiment.' "

Stephen Wesley Welch often refers to himself in the third person, as if to lend distance to his appraisal. At 6 feet 6 inches tall and 340 pounds, his physical presence adds gravitas. "As a young man I was 165 pounds. You turn into a fat guy," he shrugs, blaming his sedentary occupation for his weight. "Once I started gaining weight I got more respect."

A customer who's been wandering around asks to see some art books from the window display. (Another S.W. decree: "Booksellers live by their windows.")

"We enjoyed our meal last night, Leo," S.W. tells him, after retrieving the books. "Next time, just maybe not so much oil on the octopus." The bookseller and Leo the restauranteur, trade goods for services, books for meals.

"You know how to be a millionaire as a bookseller?" Leo jokes. "Start with two million."

S.W. counters, "You want to run a small bookstore? Start with a large bookstore."

That's what he did. The old S.W. Welch store on the Main was wider and deeper, with more room for books. But the Mile End space seems warmer. Three years after the move it feels like Welch's has been here forever, along with a permanent bunch of quiet browsers and a couch potato or two on the soft old sofa.

Someone comes in looking for Yann Martel's "Life of Pee." A student in search of The Magic Mountain finds it on a table. Someone else inquires about a particular Asimov and someone else asks for Kitchen Confidential from the window. Shoppers pay for paperbacks of Carl Hiaasen and Saul Bellow and a hardcover edition of George Steiner.

S.W. gets up to get books from the display, sits back down in the small space behind the counter and brews an espresso using the tiny machine wedged in at his elbow.

The countertop is littered with the tools of his trade: a box of wipes, a mug of pencils, utility knives and brushes; a bottle of Elmer's glue.

The squeaky door admits a collection of regulars, including a boozy smelling guy who wants to sell CDs someone was probably throwing out. S.W. buys 20, saying, "I hope that's pure profit for you," even though he doesn't sell CDs in the store.

"He's one step away from being homeless," says S.W. who likes to support people who exist outside of the traditional economy, such as the pickers who comb garage sales and church bazaars for books to bring him.

Every customer through the door comments on S.W.'s recent short haircut and beard trim. As a large white-whiskered man, he claims he sought it to avoid seasonal comparisons to Santa.

"I enjoy meeting people. But I'm actually quite shy," S.W. says.

Beany Peterson, S.W.'s wife of 35 years, confirms this revelation. "Stephen is shy to the point of..." she pauses as she searches for the right word. "He won't go to a party. He hates social functions."

She explains that the only way she got S.W. to agree to a party for her 50th birthday was to let him be the bartender. "If he can sit behind a counter with something to do, where people can come up to him, he'll have fun."

Behind counter at the store, S.W. says, "I'm in my comfort zone here. I'm in control."

In his zone he chats amiably about Beany, a librarian at the Montreal Neurological Institute and a partner in the store; about their sons, Andrew and Patrick; about his family's house in New Brunswick; his grandfather's sardine cannery; his preferred grocery stores and restaurants; how he's lost 80 pounds in the past year; what he's making for dinner (mussels tonight, slow roasted pork for tomorrow); fat-free Greek-style yogurt; photos he's taken lately; his camera; and, of course, books.

"I'm interested in every little tiny detail of every book," he says, pulling out a recently acquired, century-old paperback called: Kenya: Britain's Youngest and Most Attractive Colony. "This is just a goldmine of interesting stuff."

Yet, when someone comes in with a stack of books to sell, S.W. goes silent. All expression drains from his face. There are certain tricks to this trade.

"There's plenty of bluffing," he concedes. "The first thing about buying books is to show no interest whatsoever. The books are just widgets you're selling to widget buyers."

Of course this isn't true. It's the paradox of the whole enterprise. As S.W. himself knows, people invest books with feeling. Sometimes books may be the only thing that makes life interesting.

One time, S.W. went to the small basement apartment of a man who'd worked in the laundry room of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. He'd died and his mom was selling his books.

"This guy had everything," recounts S.W. "A complete set of Jung, Freud, Shakespeare. Everything. Every wall was shelved. He never cooked. He had a dictionary stand in the kitchen where he read his dictionaries. I told his mother I didn't have much money, that it wasn't enough, but I could give her $5,000 for it all."

At the store, a client pulls Dorothy Parker, ee cummings and Langston Hughes out of a knapsack. "Twelve dollars for these," is the verdict from behind the counter.

The shelves are packed, there are loaded carts of books and boxes on the floor, but the stock keeps coming in. "I'm not complaining," says S.W. "I'd spend my last penny on books."

What else is new?

2010-11-03T13:18:00.001-04:00

From my front steps I can see someone dangling from a crane way high up, above St. Michael's highest cupola, easily eight stories high. They must be working on the very tip-top.

There was scaffolding up all summer as they restored the ribbon of copper edging on the west side of the church. A few years ago workers replaced the copper on the biggest dome, turning it into a giant peach that filled our front rooms with a rosy glow.

Already the big dome has dulled to the brown of a middle-aged penny. Before long, it will return to the pale lichen green of oxidized copper.

The other evening, the setting sun hit the church just so, lighting it up against a charcoal sky.

Every single person on St. Viateur seemed to pull out a phone or a camera to take picture. One man stopped, camera in hand, at our front steps and said, "Look at that. It's enough to make you religious."

I could have countered that a friend of mine once referred to the protruding shapes of St. Michael's as "the tit and the prick," an association I've never been able to quite forget, no matter what the light is like.

This week on every block the roofers' tarry vats boil away, filling the air with thick smoke like something out of Dickens. All the leaky roofs are being re-done before winter really hits.

At last, the sounds of construction pour out of the scuzzy bar at the corner of St. Viateur and St. Laurent. Sometimes, when you wonder how long something can stay scuzzy, the answer is: longer than you might expect.

Walking down Casgrain from Bernard, I discover a giant new building adjoining a factory warehouse. I open the door. Inside it's thronging with Hasidic boys. Although I hadn't ever noticed it before, I asked and found out that the Académie Yeshiva Toras Moshe has been open a year already (and has lately been in the news).

I try to notice everything and remember it all. But I drift into my routine and daydream as I walk the same route everyday. Then, when I go out of my way by even one block I notice whole buildings have been razed to the ground since the last time I looked.

I happened to see the wrecking in action at the old chicken parts processing centre on Maguire St. A bulldozer pulled metal window frames from the rubble and placed them in a pile. Good bye chicken parts. Hello condos.

Salaison Moe is also gone, the storefront kitty-corner from Wilensky's Light Lunch now for rent. What exactly did they did season behind the wicket in that mysterious place full of plastic barrels? Once I got a couple of used buckets for my compost there. They smelled of pickles.

Garage Bill on Clark Street is nothing but a hole in the ground. I'm sure it's better, fume-wise, not to have an auto body place on a residential street, but I had a soft spot for Bill, who once told me that wasn't actually his name, it belonged to the previous owner, he just used it for business purposes. But his wife had adopted it, and yelled out "Bill!" to get his attention and sometimes even called their son "Little Bill!"

At Riddell's on Bernard, renovations are underway. The hand painted sign, with the totemlike lure, the watery blue and the floating red maple leaves, is gone. Whoever moves in next it'll still be Riddell's to me.

Years ago, I went to Managua where directions were often given in relation to landmarks that had disappeared decades earlier. It was disorienting trying to find someplace that was supposed to be near the Cine Dorado which didn't even exist anymore.

I guess that's one way of preserving the past. These directions were like postcards from another time.

So, some things aren't the way they used to be. But certain spots are more vital now than within recent memory (see the tiny little falafel place or the itty bitty new fish and chip counter on St. Viateur). Some places seem like they're about to change, like Cabaret Bar EXXX otica, on Park Avenue. Then it turns out they're just changing the lightbulb. And then, some things, like the giant shapes of St. Michael's, remain as vivid as ever.

Gone Fishing

2010-10-18T14:09:00.014-04:00

On a recent rainy Friday, the door stood open at Riddell's Fishing Tackle at 55 Bernard St. West. People carried bags of lures and armloads of mounted fish heads out of the musty store.

I hadn't expect Mile End's most eccentric storefront to stay intact forever, but at the same time, it sort of seemed it should. It was a neighbourhood fixture, a dusty shrine to fish and fishing.

Just the other day, I'd walked past to see if the window display was still there. A young couple was looking at the spill of sand studded with lures and driftwood, and the mosaic of yellowed photographs and clippings taped to the glass.

"Wow!" they exclaimed at the discovery of this strange museum.

The store's owner, George Riddell, died in June at the age of 82.

Riddell taught himself to fish as a hungry kid during the Depression. He started his business on Bernard Street in 1960. The rent was $50 a month. For the next fifty years, it was his lair. There he sat, with an ever-present bottle of beer, making his lures, holding forth on fishing, and, after he'd made a big catch, it was where he dispensed free fish to neighbours who needed it.

Since the mid-seventies, it was his home, too. Rumour has it that one night when the store was broken into, the white-bearded Riddell, naked and yelling, chased the robbers out into the street.

Inside, it was obvious that I wasn't the only one who'd been keeping an eye on the place for the past few months. There were Riddell family members; friends, neighbours, and former customers; and a few wild-eyed collectors who used flashlights to comb the store's stock for treasure.

"We have to clear it all out by Sunday," said George's nephew Michael who'd flown in from England to help sort things out. "What could a dusty stuffed fish sell for?" he mused , shaking his head at a large specimen on the wall.

"He wasn't supposed to live here," George's niece Linda told me. She pointed to the store's tiny back room, the walls yellowed with half a century of cigarette smoke. "But he lived the life he wanted, and died the way he wanted."

She described her uncle as a loner, camper and fisherman who had a tough upbringing, and only completed grade two in school. As a kid, she saw him as a hero on a motorcycle. "He was artsy and had a sense of humour. You can tell by the stuff he made."

On the walls, George's hand lettered signs announced his handmade lures-cum-folk art: "Super Spin by Riddell" or "Blade Silver Old Time Troll by Riddell."

"We've all taken a few lures," said Linda. "Everybody in the family wanted one."

Riddell collected Asian and African face masks, possibly as a source of inspiration for the lures he made. He also stocked commercial lures.

"He made all the crazy looking ones," said Ottoleo who was wearing a necklace made of silver lures. "They're one of a kind. You'll never find them again. They have little fishy moves to them, he tested them in this tank."

A tank labeled "Riddell Lure Testing Tank" ran along one of the store's walls.

"He made that one out of a toaster," said Gaetan, Riddell's upstairs neighbour and friend, pointing to a squiggle of chrome.

Ottoleo, 23, said he caught his first fish at the age of three and used to come in to swap stories and tips with George. "He taught me how to make my own stuffed fish for mounting. You pack it with salt, set it in the sun. It works! I was going to bring mine in to show him, but he passed away. "

He filled up his knapsack, from which two newly acquired fishing rods protruded. "I'm so excited. Two hundred dollars worth of Riddell lures. This will last for the rest of my life!"

"He's a real fisherman so we're giving him a much better price than those guys," Michael told me, in a low voice, referring to the collectors. "Notice the fervent interest in the stuffed fish," he added dryly, as they remained unsold on the walls.

It seemed everything else was likely to be snapped up, including a press to make sinkers or weights for lures and old packets of made-in-France fish hooks.

This was a lot of activity for Riddell Fishing Tackle. The dark interior had attracted few visitors in recent years although one neighbour told me that despite his failing health, Riddell had opened the store on Saturday mornings until the end.

When I walked past the store, it never occurred to me that he was living in there, behind the closed door, in the dark.

Things have a way of changing, or disappearing, when you're not looking. That's when you realize you never paid enough attention while they were there.

I should have ventured in more than one time, on a summer afternoon about 17 years ago, when we bought lures to bring along on a camping trip.

A few days after the closing-out sale, the store windows stood empty except for a few pieces of wood. A new piece of paper taped to the window said: "Uncle George Riddell, 1928-2010. Thanks for the memories. Gone Fishing."

A couple days later, that too, was gone.

For more on George Riddell, see Alex Roslin's interview with him here.

Bees in the hood

2010-09-16T15:16:00.021-04:00

When Kathryn Jezer-Morton put up a beehive in a vacant lot (aka le Champs des Possibles) she wasn't sure what would happen.

She surrounded the hive with a small chicken wire fence and posted a sign introducing the hive's inhabitants as "peaceful, hardworking bees" with a caveat: "If you disturb them, they will sting you." For more information she provided an email address: mileendbeehive at gmail.com.

"I wanted an address without my name in it, in case of fines from the city," she laughs.

"My husband and I weren't sure how it would go. We thought, 'it's not on our property; it's a liability; people will get stung; vandalism will occur; it'll be removed by the city. But let's do it!' We put the little fence around it to deter dogs and night-time tagger kids."

After they set it up, Jezer-Morton worried about the hive getting damaged and about passersby getting stung. That night she couldn't sleep.

"Then I got a bunch of email – all from people who wanted to help!" she recounts.

"There was a bit of vandalism, people stole a few fence stakes. But I realized a hive is pretty much a self-protecting thing."

Walking down St. Viateur, Jezer-Morton manages to look light on her feet, even glamourous, at 40 weeks pregnant. She's on maternity leave from her job as an editor at an online men's magazine that she describes as "laddish" – nothing to do with nature.

It's a little hard to believe she's a beekeeper. Except she must be, because she says things like: "Working with bees is so calming. You have to be calm so they'll be calm."

Her grandfather kept bees in Maine, and she grew interested in keeping her own when colony collapse disorder first appeared in the news. She was living and volunteering in New Orleans where there was a post-Katrina renaissance in urban agriculture.

After moving back to her native Montreal and taking a beekeeping course in Mirabel, it made sense to find a spot for her hive near her apartment.

Two days past her due date, Jezer-Morton traipses through the hot field. She puts on her long sleeved gear and her bee veil and, in a move that seems like it might be one quick way of triggering labour, she opens up the hive.

She says she hasn't been stung once all summer, even though bees repeatedly got tangled in her long hair as she walked away from the hive and took off her bee veil.

In the shade of a factory building, in front of a wall covered in graffiti, her hive is filling up with honey. The bees have been working.

"I'm so excited this has worked out," she says. "Bees in a vacant lot. It's utopian!"

A few blocks away, not far from the railroad tracks, three more urban beehives are thrumming with activity.

Francis Miquet has been keeping bees in Mile End for five years, and first started beekeeping 15 years ago when he apprenticed with a beekeeper in Papineauville.

Since I happen to live with this particular beekeeper, I'm used to stepping around his box of bee stuff, the smoker, the scraper, the bee suit, and the extra empty hives. I admit, he's the one responsible for any preconceived notions I had about Mile End beekeepers (big hands with fingernails banged up and dirty; an old station wagon for hauling hives; a kitchen sticky in the fall from honey extraction).

I personally didn't used to believe it was a great idea to have a beehive in a neighbourhood packed with row houses and pavement and kids and only tiny gardens.

But I found out that cities are full of advantages for bees. They have a wider variety of trees and flowers than rural areas which are often dominated by one kind of crop and treated with pesticides. Bees can do well in a city as crowded and polluted as Paris and even manage to produce untainted honey.

I was also persuaded that honey bees are not aggressive and, unless you open up their hive, rarely sting. Unlike the wasps they're often confused with, bees aren't interested in people's food, or people.

People though, are definitely interested in bees. Due to popular demand, Projet Montreal is planning a pilot project for several Plateau beehives. Like keeping chickens, it's a form of urban farming that's capturing the imagination of city-dwellers all over the place.

At the edge of the vacant lot, Jezer-Morton's hive attracts spectators.

"We'd noticed honey bees in our garden and wondered where they came from," says Julia from nearby St. Dominique Street as she watches the action.

If you look, you may see them, too: bees on the job, they've been criss-crossing gardens of the neighbourhood, visiting the pear trees on Esplanade, the ferny plumes of cosmos on Waverly, and the Queen Anne's lace and clover along the railroad tracks.

see my other story on city bees, here.

Old school

2010-08-18T12:15:00.008-04:00

This time of year, the shelves of Papeterie Zoubris are crammed with school supplies stacked as high as the towers of lemons at Fruiterie Mile End.

The stacks include fifteen thousand back-to-school scribblers that Jimmy Zoubris says he'll sell in the next few weeks.

I want one. I want them all. I feel the nostalgic pull of back-to-school Septembers. Fall doesn't offer the same kind of brand new beginning anymore, but at least there's still the fresh promise of an untouched notebook.

At Zoubris, alongside the piles of books and packs of pens, there are relics from another time. Racks of old transfer lettering to press onto paper, yellowing boxes of Ko-Rec-Type ribbon, and manual typewriters in a display case.

When I went away to university my parents gave me a new typewriter. It was an Olympia Report Electronic. Black and sleek it weighed as much as 10 laptops and purred when I turned it on. Its most amazing feature was a "correct" button that would lift errors off the page, collecting them on a spool of sticky white tape. If only all my mistakes could be so neatly gathered up and contained. Maybe I could find a spool of that correcto-tape at Zoubris.

There used to be more strange old things there. It was a sort of stationery museum. A friend of mine used to spend ages perusing boxes of archaic items such as assorted paper price tags on strings.

Jimmy Zoubris says now that the store occupies less space than it used to, they don't have room for much old stock, although he still likes to buy what he can at going-out-of business sales.

I say I miss seeing the older stuff on the shelves and Demetra Zoubris says: "You should see the basement!"

"You can't go in there" Jimmy says, reading my mind.

So I imagine it, a dim cave-like cellar packed with old ledgers, stacks of carbon papers, purple mimeograph ink and vintage Liquid Paper. There are floppy disks and dot matrix printer ribbons and the tiny doughnuts of reinforcements for looseleaf holes. It's a time capsule of all those little things we don't need anymore, things we barely noticed at the time, now obsolete.

my other story on Zoubris:
http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Going+extra+mile+with+service/3352455/story.html

Cymbals and pinwheels

2010-07-08T12:51:00.023-04:00

At 9 o'clock on Sunday morning I heard the fanfare, loud and slightly wonky. It was coming closer.

They were back.

The Complesso Bandistico Italiano was marching along St. Viateur in honour of San Marziale.

I first heard them on my very first morning at the corner of St. Viateur almost 20 years ago after a long hot day of moving and a late night of unpacking. As it was then, the recurring crash of early-morning cymbals and the honking brass remained impossible to ignore.

Back then I looked out my window and saw a band made up of old men in uniform, with gold braid on their hats. The trumpet and trombone players had music clipped to their horns. Where did they come from? What were they doing here? And how much longer were they going to be making this noise?

While I still don't know all the answers, over the years I became familiar with the festival of San Marziale, the patron saint of Isca Sullo Ionio, the Calabrian birthplace of many Italian Montrealers who originally settled in Mile End, and then moved north to St. Leonard and Laval.

I learned that the early morning marching band was a prelude to the disco hits and Italian classics that another band would blast out from the stage on my corner. The decibel level of their renditions of "I Will Survive" and "Volare" was floor-shaking and ear-splitting, even with all my doors and windows closed.

There was always a ceremony in Italian for the saint, a blessing by the priest; folk dancing, and free pasta cooked up in huge vats on the patio of Café Olimpico.

The morning after San Marziale the street would be adrift with saintly raffle tickets that losers tossed to the wind late at night, once the winners of bikes and trips to Italy had been announced.

I turned into Old Sneep, the grumpy lemon-sucking character in the children's book Lentil who frowns on the festivity of a marching band. In my case, it was the throbbing sound system of the Italian wedding band that made me ornery. I would slam out of my door during "Dancing Queen," stepping impatiently around the families sitting on my steps eating pasta. I'd escape to a movie, careful not to come home until it was all over. Sometimes I went out of town to avoid the whole thing.

But this year, as I ate breakfast and heard the first faint oompah-pah it was different. My two-year-old daughter looked at me and said: "I want to go see the music."

So we went. There was a day-long spectacle on our doorstep, the perfect way to occupy a toddler from morning until night.

Was it just me, or was the disco band less deafening than usual? When we came inside for a break, I sang along to "Besame Mucho" and "Guantanamera." It was just one day, after all, why be annoyed?

We went back outside and in a thick cloud of smoke in front of The Social Club, we got a grilled Italian sausage. We ran into all kinds of neighbours and friends. We watched the final round of the marching band and then clapped and waved a pinwheel as kids whirled through Italian folk dances in bright vests and skirts.

The night was warm and gusty – made for pinwheels – and the street looked different. For a moment, old Italians had taken back the neighbourhood. They sat in lawn chairs, and observed the festivities, outnumbering groovy young Mile Enders.

As it grew dark and her bedtime came and went, Amelia kept looking at me. "Not go inside! Not go home!" she insisted, as if I were about to whisk her away from all the fun.

She was right, I might have, except there was no point trying to go to sleep at our place.

We lined up for the last batch of free penne with tomato sauce at 10:30. We ate it on a neighbour's dim stoop, half-way down the block where things were a little quieter.

Full of late-night pasta, she fell asleep during the raffle, the last event of the evening.

The next morning when we looked out the window, the Fernand Femia electricians were already pulling down the festive strings of coloured flags and lights. The Ville de Montreal was hauling away the portable stage. Festa di San Marziale, finito for another year.

I had a newfound appreciation for the marching band and blaring disco tunes, for the lights and crowds and vats of pasta. So the morning after felt a little like the day the Christmas decorations come down, the end of something special.

Mile End Line

2010-06-30T12:04:00.051-04:00

At the north edge of Mile End a web of footpaths leads to the railroad tracks.

If you follow the paths to the chain link fence there's a hole, and if you step through that, you end up someplace else.

It’s quiet and the air smells sweet. Pink blossomed milkweed plants and a tangle of purple wildflowers mix with Queen Anne’s lace along the tracks that stretch into the distance.

It's a big, wide-open space –the opposite of an underpass. This is the scenic route to the other side of the tracks.

I used to haul my bike over the tracks all the time. I admired the way gaps in the fence always opened up, no matter how many times Canadian Pacific mended them to keep people out.

Then I heard about people getting tickets.

I sit down on a bench in the sculpture garden north of Van Horne, not far from the hole in the fence.

I meet a friendly dog, Kismo, and his owner Vito, who says he stopped crossing the railway when he heard about the ticketing. Then Vinnie and his young daughter Gabrielle wander by, but steer clear of the railroad. Vinnie got a warning from the CP police about crossing the tracks and says that’s enough to keep him out.

Mary was walking her dog Maggie across the tracks when the CP police stopped her. They said it was illegal, and that she could get killed.

"They did this whole what-if thing," she says. "'What if you tripped and hit your head, and a train comes. Then they gave me a ticket for $140."

Somehow, despite the ticket, she can’t stay away.

"It's a great walk, away from the sidewalk and I love the solidarity with other people who walk there. It's a little anarchist."

Some of the anarchist walkers are organizing. A group of citizens recently papered a section of the fence with signs that say: "Open/Ouvert." And now there's a petition demanding an end to ticketing and safe level crossings at the tracks (http://www.petitiononline.com/ouvert02/petition.html).

As I walk alongside the tracks, I don't run into any CP police, although I do see their signs. Danger. Private Property. No Trespassing.

There's not a lot of traffic on this line now, maybe a couple freight trains a day. I don't see any during my walk but I find a pigeon sliced in two by an earlier train. A reminder: if you’re going to be here you better watch out.

The sculptor Glen Lemesurier has a workshop that backs onto the tracks and he nods when I point out the bird. "They fall asleep in the sun on the warm tracks and don't wake up when the train comes," he says.

"Off the tracks, off Augie," Glen tells his son as they walk along the track with Bonnie Prince Billy, a husky-chow mix who's as energetic as his owner. "I don't want you ever to get in the habit of walking on them."

Augie is 10 and his dad has been working in his rail-side studio since before he was born. Augie has already spent years train spotting with his father's binoculars.

For his part, Glen seems to have reached an understanding with his neighbours at CP. He advises people to watch for the railroad cops and to not cross if they see them. But since he's not one to keep a low profile, his personal method of dealing with the rail authorities is based on a love of trains.

"The chef du chemin is pretty cool," he says. "I used to go down to the Outremont rail yards before they closed to get parts from old engines, brake pieces, nuts, bolts. I did 30 sculptures made from train parts."

Some of these are on display in his sculpture garden near the tracks, a Mile End landmark at Van Horne and Clark.

"The engineers used to stop the train and come into my workshop for a break," Glen says. "I'd talk to the switcher when there was one here. He was great, he gave me a lot of parts."

Striding through the tall grass along the tracks, he moves past the trees he's planted in the past few years. Forget about private property, he's a proud gardener as he points out willow, aspen, chestnut, sumac, white pine, poplar, pear, hemlock and cedar trees.

"In 10 or 15 years it'll be a forest," he says, picking a strawberry growing in the grass and popping it in his mouth.

His tree planting along the tracks makes me think of the parks some cities have made on old railway lines, like la Promenade Plantée in Paris or the High Line in Manhattan. But Glen's not waiting for the trains to stop running.

I sit on the bench in the sculpture garden in the shade of some poplars. A train thunders by with a long rumble. After that there's just the whoosh of traffic from the underpass and the sound of the breeze in the leaves.

Then, with a rustle, a person pops out of the hole in the fence, like a deer, or a rabbit. A few minutes later someone else comes through. They startle when they see me, but I'm not giving out any tickets, so they take the path by the sculptures made from the gears and rods and bits of old trains and continue on their way.

A line of poetry

2010-05-31T13:05:00.021-04:00

On a warm breezy spring morning François Pilon heads out to the back lane. This is where he works, in yards and alleys all over the city.

"It's another world," he says of his alley turf. "The back lane doesn't appear on any map. There are no laws in this territory."

The way he talks about it, he sounds like an outlaw, but he's no criminal. He's a superhero of the Right to Dry movement.

He's Monsieur Corde à linge: Mr. Clothesline.

He wears blue work clothes, bright red suspenders and a headset so he can answer calls while he's two or three stories up his extension ladder.

His constant companion is Ricky, a quiet Doberman who waits in the truck or sniffs the perimeter of the yard while François works.

In the back balcony of a 15-year-old building in Villeray, Mr. Clothesline looks around, sniffs and nods. "Condo lifestyle. No clotheslines, except for the person with young kids," he says, pointing to a line full of diapers.

He installs posts, ropes and pulleys all over the Montreal neighbourhoods of Mile End– where clotheslines are part of the landscape, Outremont, Villeray, Rosemont, Ville Emard, NDG, Montreal Nord, Ahuntsic, and even in Hampstead, where clotheslines are technically illegal because they're deemed unsightly.

Websites like laundrylist.org oppose municipal restrictions on line drying and advocate clotheslines as a way to save electricity and reduce emissions.

Last year, Monsieur Corde à linge put up 550 clotheslines.

It all started in the mid-80s, when he was working for a cable company and damaged a few clotheslines by grazing them with his ladder. He had to buy a length of rope and a few pulleys to repair the damage. That's when he noticed how precarious the laundry lines were. He'd found his vocation.

Before long he quit his day job. "I didn't want to die a cable TV guy. The pay is low, the hours are long and there's no security."

Today, as Monsieur Corde à linge, he works under essentially the same conditions, except he's his own boss.

"If I were doing it for the money, I'd do something else. I do it because I love being outside and I love clotheslines. The clothesline is my baby."

Francois Pilon's other baby is The Green Party. He's run in the Outremont riding in the last three federal elections. He was motivated by what he saw as collusion between government and the forestry industry.

"I got upset," he says. "I thought, OK. What do I do about it? Keep bitching? Or get involved." He doesn't expect to ever get elected, but says it's important that someone run for the Green Party in every riding, partly to push the other parties on their environmental agendas.

In the Villeray backyard, Caroline is happy to be Monsieur Corde à linge's first client of the day. "It's my third time using him over the years, because we keep moving," she says. "He's really busy! I called him weeks ago but he was booked up until now."

François installs a five-foot post on her second floor balcony. Then he goes down the back spiral staircase and climbs his ladder to attach a hook and pulley to the Hydro pole in the corner of a yard. He dismounts and climbs the ladder again with a silvery clothesline in tow.

The day is perfect, the small orderly backyards are still, except for a few gardeners, a pregnant woman and the spinning drift of poplar fluff from a towering tree that provides a high canopy over most of the block.

"For me it's important to have a clothesline," Caroline says. "It's ridiculous to use a dryer when it's 30 degrees outside. And I love the poetry of a clothesline; there's something I like about seeing the diapers of the baby next door.

"Today I'm paying $250 for the best quality line and a good post on my balcony. Worth it! That's two hockey tickets and it will be good for years!"

While Monsieur Corde à linge goes out to his truck to write her bill, Caroline scrunches up her shoulders in anticipation. "I can't wait to do a load of wash. All I need is clothespins!"

She can't contain herself. She steps out on her front steps. "Hey!" she calls out to a neighbour. "I got a clothesline!"

A young guy, wearing New York T-shirt, looks at her and gives a blank nod, indicating that not everyone understands the poetry or the point of a clothesline.

"Women are my bread and butter," François has told me, and judging from this exchange I can see why.

He hands Caroline her bill, and with it a complimentary packet of clothespins. "You've made my day," she tells him.

You might think a single guy in this line of work would get a lot of dates. But François says he maintains a professional distance and is careful not to mix business with his personal life. He always vousvoyers his clients. A bit of a performer, he likes to joke and do the odd stunt on a balcony railing (he says he only takes calculated risks and almost always wears a safety harness).

In a different yard a few blocks away he works with a helper, Gerald, to dig a hole for a new steel post to replace a rotting wooden one. The afternoon is boiling hot and François takes a break, instructing Gerald to "keep digging!" (-continue à creuser, toi!)

Out in the alley, he notices something and points. Behind the leaves of a climbing vine, it's his red and white sticker, two doors north of the yard he's working in today.

"I've been here before," he smiles with recognition. He's put up so many clotheslines in the past 18 years that the jobs and alleys all blur together.

"There's another one!" he pulls aside a leafy branch to show a pole across the alley bearing another one of his stickers: Montreal Corde à linge, with his telephone number and email.

As Caroline said, there's poetry in a clothesline.

Each one is particular, but somehow they all offer a ripple of hope.

Undershirts. Bras. Pillow cases and flowered sheets. Diapers and tiny socks. Enormous panties billowing in the breeze.

Now when I see clothes waving on the line in my alley, I look for Monsieur Corde à linge's stickers. There's one now.

Monsieur Corde à linge Montreal
514-731-7261
email: francoispilon at sympatico.ca

Outside the box / hors de la boîte

2010-04-23T11:44:00.032-04:00

There's something strange going on at the Videotron on Parc Avenue near Fairmount.

It's the people who work there, behind the mustard coloured counter, in their black Videotron Super Club polo shirts with gold nametags pinned to their chests.

They seem happy.

They open the doors for customers with strollers, look up a half-remembered title on the computer without condescension and then sprint out from behind the counter to show you exactly where to find it on the shelf.

They love movies. And, in contrast to the miserable, alienated employees in Clerks, or the music geeks in the record store in High Fidelity, they actually like working with the public.

"I love it when people ask my opinion," says Vincent Labrecque, 26, a budding director who watches two or three movies a day and can often be heard at the counter, rhapsodizing about a favourite, as customers punch in their rental code.

"The social part of the job is the best, talking to customers, recommending films," agrees Noémie-Anaïs Guichard, 27. She's worked at the store for 6 years and is the assistant manager.

"If she goes away for a few days, everything just falls apart," Vincent says.

Noémie-Anaïs shrugs modestly. The store may soon have to survive without her, as she hopes to get a job on a film shoot this summer. Her long-term goal is to find work as a script supervisor or camera assistant. "This store is a great place to make contacts. A lot of people in the neighbourhood work in movies," she says.

"The other day, our late list was like a Who's Who," echoes Vincent, who said he had to phone Denis Villeneuve (Polytechnique, 2009); Isabelle Blais (Les Invasions Barbares, 2003); and comedian Pierre Brassard about overdue DVDs.

Not that the movie rental business is all glamour. At the store they have to deal with shoplifters, and customers who want to fight instead of paying late charges. Vincent says he doesn't mind, the director in him likes learning the psychology of people, even if they get madder and madder.

He and Noémie-Anaïs have both had to deal with guys getting naked and whacking off in the adult video section. "We tell them to get out of there and go do that at home," Noémie-Anaïs explains calmly.

And still, they like their jobs.

For fun, and perhaps to expand the cinematic horizons of their clientele, Noémie-Anaïs and Vincent play obscure or forgotten films in the store and wait for customers to ask about them. Then, they make a pitch about why a certain film is worth seeing. "It's a classic of Québec cinema," she tells me while Les Ordres (Michel Brault, 1974) plays on the screens behind her.

Another day, Vincent exclaims, "It's beautiful! You can really see the influences of Truffaut and Goddard, and it's amazing to see Montreal at that time. Just look at the cars and there's Andrée Lachapelle, incredible!" He points to a blonde in a stylish convertible in YUL 871 (Jacques Godbout, 1966).
"Mine rented in 20 minutes!" the former film students will say to each other afterwards, competitive about how quickly they can get customers to fall under the spell of the footage and their spiel, and decide to take the film home.

You'd think cinephiles like this would want to work at a boutique video store like La Boîte Noire.

"The people who go to La Boîte Noire are already sold on what they want to see. I like seeing a wider spectrum of people watching films. I like finding out what people respond to," says Vincent.

He and Noémie-Anaïs take it upon themselves to watch kids' movies so that they know what to recommend to ten-year-olds, or parents. "Part of the job," they say.

They even have a relationship with some of the neighbourhood Hasidim. Really? "They rent kids' movies and comedies," Noémie-Anaïs reveals.

Less surprising than Hasidic Jews renting comedies, are the directors that Vincent and Noémie-Anaïs tell me are the most popular in Mile End: "Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Gus Van Sant, Almodóvar. " Right. As a typical neighbourhood resident, I've rented films by all of those directors from that store myself.

With all their passion and expertise, Vincent and Noémie-Anaïs will likely move on. They will be missed! But rather than dispensing movies, they'll be making them. They'll move way beyond nametags, and someday, we may find their names in a cinematic Who's Who.

Hors de la boîte

Il se passe quelque chose de pas ordinaire au club Vidéotron de l’avenue du Parc près de la rue Fairmount.

Ce qui est extraordinaire, ce sont les gens en polos noirs qui travaillent là, derrière le comptoir jaune moutarde.

Ils ont l’air heureux.

Ils ouvrent la porte aux clients encombrés d’une poussette, ils cherchent sans condescendance un titre à moitié oublié et se pressent de vous montrer où exactement le film se trouve dans les rayons.

Ils adorent le cinéma. Et, contrairement aux employés malheureux et aliénés du film Clerks, ou des mordus de musique du long métrage High Fidelity, ils aiment vraiment travailler auprès du public.

« J’adore quand les clients me demandent mon avis », dira Vincent Labrecque, 26 ans, un réalisateur en herbe qui visionne deux ou trois films par jour et qu’on peut entendre au comptoir faire l’éloge d’un film pendant que le client tape son numéro de code.

Le plus agréable dans ce travail, c’est la partie sociale ; parler aux clients, recommander des films… », renchérit Noémie-Anaïs Guichard, 27 ans. Elle travaille au Superclub depuis 6 ans et occupe à présent le poste de directrice adjointe.

« Si elle s’absente pendant quelques jours, tout s’écroule », nous confie Vincent.

Noémie-Anaïs hausse les épaules avec modestie. Le magasin devra sans doute survivre bientôt sans elle, car elle espère travailler sur un tournage cet été. Son but à long terme est de trouver un boulot comme scripte ou assistante à la caméra. « Cet établissement est un endroit fabuleux pour nouer des contacts. Beaucoup de gens du quartier travaillent dans le cinéma », nous dit-elle.

« L’autre jour, notre liste de retardataires ressemblait à un bottin du cinéma, ajoute Vincent en écho, lui qui a dû téléphoner à Denis Villeneuve (Polytechnique, 2009); Isabelle Blais (Les Invasions barbares, 2003); et le comédien Pierre Brassard pour des films en retard.

Mais l’industrie du DVD locatif n’est pas tout glamour, loin s’en faut. Au magasin, ils doivent aussi s’occuper des voleurs à l’étalage et des clients belliqueux prêts à se battre pour se soustraire à une amende. Vincent dit que ça ne le dérange pas, le réalisateur s’intéresse à la psychologie des gens, quand bien même ils deviendraient agressifs. Lui et Noémie-Anaïs ont tous les deux eu affaire à quelques occasions à des types qui se faisaient une branlette dans la section pour adultes. « Nous leur disons de quitter les lieux et d’aller se branler chez eux. » explique calmement Noémie-Anaïs.

Malgré ces incidents, ils aiment leur travail.

Pour s’amuser et peut-être aussi pour élargir l’horizon cinématique de leur clientèle, Noémie-Anaïs et Vincent font jouer des films oubliés ou méconnus et attendent que les clients se piquent de curiosité. Quand un client vient s’enquérir, ils leur expliquent pourquoi tel ou tel film vaut la peine d’être vu. « C’est un classique du cinéma québécois », leur dit-elle tandis que Les Ordres (Michel Brault, 1974) joue sur l’écran.

Un autre jour, Vincent s’exclame : « C’est magnifique ! On peut vraiment constater l’influence de Truffaut et de Godard. C’est étonnant de voir Montréal à cette époque. Voyez simplement les voitures. Et regardez Andrée Lachapelle. Incroyable ! » Il pointe du doigt la blonde en décapotable dans YUL 871 (Jacques Godbout, 1966).

« Le mien s’est loué en 20 minutes ! », dira l’un ou l’autre de ces ex-étudiants en cinéma qui font des concours pour voir combien de temps ça leur prend avant qu’un client tombe sous le charme et qu’il décide de ramener le film à la maison.

On pourrait penser que des cinéphiles comme eux préféreraient travailler dans une boutique comme la Boîte noire.

« Les gens qui vont à la Boîte noire savent déjà ce qu’ils veulent voir. J’aime voir un plus grand éventail d’amateurs. J’aime découvrir ce qui fait réagir les gens », dit Vincent.

Lui et Noémie-Anaïs visionnent même les films pour enfants afin d’être en mesure de faire des recommandations. « Ça fait partie du travail », disent-ils.

Ils ont même créé des liens avec certains membres de la communauté hassidique. Est-ce possible ? « Ils louent des films pour enfants et des comédies », nous révèle Noémie-Anaïs.

Ce qui surprend moins que des Juifs hassidiques amateurs de comédies, c’est le palmarès des réalisateurs les plus populaires du Mile End : « Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Gus Van Sant et Almadóvar », ont constaté Vincent et Noémie-Anaïs. Rien pour surprendre, car moi aussi j’ai loué à cet endroit des films réalisés par ces mêmes cinéastes.

Étant donné leur passion et leur expertise, Vincent et Noémie-Anaïs vont probablement se retrouver ailleurs d’ici peu. Ils nous manqueront ! Au lieu de louer des films, ils en réaliseront. On oubliera l’épinglette qui les identifiait. Un jour, c’est plutôt dans un dictionnaire du cinéma qu’on risque de retrouver leurs noms.

Exposure

2010-03-31T20:53:00.008-04:00

This time of year, the days are longer and the extra light is surprising.

Winter ends, I go outside, and all of a sudden, I'm surrounded by neighbours. Spring conjures them up on the sidewalk.

I'm in my bathrobe, putting out the bag of dirty diapers, the green box full of wine bottles, or, later in the season, waving a shovel crazy-lady style at a cat defecating in the garden. Oh, hi.

In the winter, the cold makes everyone scurry home where long hours of darkness insulate us. Now, walking down the street is as revealing as taking a shower at the Y. Oh, hi, here we are, completely exposed.

It takes some adjustment.

In the face of all this light, I don't wear my glasses. Instant privacy. If I can't see the neighbourhood, it can't see me! I am regularly proven wrong, when blurry people wave at me and I wave back without knowing who they are.

But this willful myopia keeps the buzzing café across the street in its place, at a fuzzy remove.

That is – until I catch a glimpse of something interesting – like a couple actually getting married on the terrace outside Open da Night, or Thomas Fersen lining up for coffee, or neighbours I didn't even know were pregnant, out in the sun, with a brand new baby.

In that case, I run for my glasses and peer out the window, or better yet, rush right outside to get a good look.

Because, of course, I don't want to miss anything.

February

2010-02-28T15:21:00.014-05:00

This time of year, it feels like there is only slush and garbage and plastic bags windsocking in the trees.

Inspiration is hard to come by.

Last week I went to another city, another country. They do things differently there.

I felt like the world's last pedestrian, wandering through webs of parking lots, malls and chain restaurants. The emptiness was huge. No row houses, no stroller jams on sidewalks, no one flying through stop signs on bike.

It just wasn't crowded or dirty or slushy enough, either.

Good to be home. Even in February.

End of an Era

2010-01-27T11:39:00.020-05:00

The sign in the window of Maple Leaf Hat and Cap Company reads, "Closing. Everything Must Go."

I can't believe it. I was in here just a month ago. Barry Shinder was sewing caps and telling me that business was slow.

He's being saying that since I first met him a year and a half ago, so it's a scenario I could comfortably imagine repeating itself for years to come. I would go in to buy gift caps and visit my favourite piece of living history (see original blog post) and Barry would be there, sewing away as he's been doing for his entire life.

But he's closing up shop.

The little factory on the first floor of the St.-Laurent triplex is more chaotic than usual. Bolts of fabric are heaped willy-nilly on the cutting tables next to half-sewn caps, boxes of brims and big juice jars full of snaps. Orange For Sale or Sold! stickers dot the old metal shelves and cabinets.

Barry Shinder's manufacturing costs became too high.

Last week his main client, the garment company who contracted him to make their caps, said they couldn't afford his prices anymore.

They offered him a job. So now, instead of sewing caps in the business his father started on the Main 80 years ago, Barry will commute to work in the Chabanel district and get paid a wage. No overhead, no staff (for years he's employed three workers during his busy season).

"I'll be a worker instead of a boss," he says. "I'm losing money here so anything I make will be better. It'll be money with no headaches!"

Barry Shinder doesn't look like a man without headaches. He's losing weight and sleep worrying about how he'll manage to get rid of everything, rent out his 1800 square feet of factory space, pay off his debts and change his life.

"I've never worked anywhere else. This is my whole life." Then he pauses and adds optimistically, "At least I'll get up in the morning knowing I have work. And imagine, an 8-4 job! Instead of seven days a week!"

He'll be bringing his dad's old Singer sewing machine with him to sew caps. "That is one thing I'd never sell," he declares.

While we're talking, the owner of a hat shop in Côte de Neiges comes in to scoop up some stock at reduced prices. Usually, he goes to a wholesaler where all the hats are made in China and sell for a maximum of $5 each. "Five dollars, and that's top quality!" he tells Barry. "A simple cap, like this," he says, picking up a cotton flat cap, "20 cents."

"But the plastic in that brim costs me 45 cents!" Barry objects. He turns to me and sighs. "There you have the whole story."

A triplex in Mile End is valuable real estate these days, yet Barry says he can't imagine selling. So at least there's that. The rows of sewing machines, the stacks of caps and the dust from decades of fabric-cutting will all be gone. And what will become of the shelves of old blocks he used for shaping caps? At least Barry will still be around.

"If I had to move out of this area it'd kill me," he says of the block where he's lived since 1953 when he was six years old. "I could walk around here blindfolded."

As I leave, wet snow is falling and I notice that just north of Barry's place, in what used to be a neighbourhood tavern full of battered wicker chairs, a fancy new bar has opened up. Change is everywhere. Everything must go.

link to original blog post on Maple Leaf Hat and Cap

Ode on a City Wall

2010-01-19T13:36:00.027-05:00

I came to Montreal for the first time when I was 21. It was summer and I'd just spent a season planting trees in the bush, getting sunburned, blistered and bitten by blackflies.

The city was hot and steamy, full of traffic and bicycles. People crowded the parks and sidewalks and ate in restaurants that opened onto the street as if there wasn't enough room inside to contain so much life.

I ran through a sprinkler park wedged into the middle of a block of rowhouses, walked up and down the Main, bought beads in a shop by the bus station, drank the best coffee I'd ever had and ate things I'd never tasted before – Chilean avocado sandwiches and heart of palm salads. I was so hungry for all of it, for the whole city full of languages, the clatter of old Portuguese guys playing dominoes, the cold beer for sale at every dépanneur on every corner, the way people looked and talked and danced. I was in love.

I came back a year later. It was November. The city was frozen, snowless, bleak and ugly. I walked all over looking for traces of the things I loved. There were only grey streets, à louer signs in storefronts, barren rings of hockey rinks waiting for ice. Montreal was on the skids and I was without prospects, but somehow it was all exciting.

I got a job as a waitress and then as a reporter for a tiny newspaper that paid me by the column inch. At the top of my stories they misspelled my name. My roommate and I lived on reduced price cheeses from Vielle Europe and frozen perogis.

Our landlord controlled the heat in our cheap St.-Urbain apartment and it was the warmest place I'd ever have. I slept with my window cracked open; swaddled up in bed I could feel feathery snowflakes kiss my nose. We lit our kitchen and its ugly linoleum with a desk lamp and a string of fairy lights. Though the green shimmering Montreal I'd first met was nowhere to be found, it was still the early days of love. Nothing could get me down.

The "i love you..." graffiti makes me think of all this. The first time I saw it, I crossed the street to get a better look. It was on the no-man's-land of St.-Viateur East, low-down, close to the sidewalk. The writing was loopy, the way a schoolgirl would write in a diary. Later I saw that sometimes the i was dotted with a heart. The words are always followed by a pensive dot, dot, dot.

I ask people in the neighbourhood if they've seen this writing and they nod and smile, saying, "Oh yeah..." as if it reminds them of something, too.

A note scrawled on a garage door or on a bit of stucco close to the ground. It's like a little valentine. The words are seed bombs that guerilla gardeners throw into fenced-off vacant lots, planting flowers in the cracks in the concrete. Like the hearts that someone (the same someone?) is putting in the stop lights, the messages are surprise gifts, company in an unexpected place.

But who is this, "I", this "you" ? I wonder.

There's something wistful about the loopy writing. Maybe it's the dot dot dot that sends me back to that time back when I first loved the city, before I ever got my bike stolen, or my brakes stolen off my bike, or my handlebars stolen off my bike, before I ever got sick of bagels and waiting for the bus. Back when I used to go out late and come home later and we seemed to subsist on beer and ginger candies; when our Greek landlord greeted us shouting, "Beautiful girls! Beautiful girls!" The way he pronounced girls made it sound like he was complimenting us for having breathing organs like fish.

I take pictures of the graffiti, which really seems too sweet and gentle to call graffiti. I start a small collection.

But after a while the writing on the wall turns into one more familiar thing that I actually know nothing about, like the mystery of so many of my neighbours. Where does he go every day? Why does she leave the lights on all night? What are their actual jobs?

Then I notice the i love yous are fragile. When I go back and try to find them again, I discover they've been scrawled on top of or painted over.

That's to be expected, not much stands still, untouched. Bikes get stolen and my giddy infatuation has turned into something more complex. Yet in the noisy blur of snow plows and bike thieves, someone is out there, writing love on the wall, surprising us and triggering a thousand different thoughts with the words and the dot dot dot...

The Big Picture

2009-12-18T13:20:00.038-05:00

Maclean stands on St.-Viateur with a clipboard and a pencil, peering across the street. He's an artist, but at the moment he's not making sketches, he's on a reconnaissance mission for Car-Free Mile End.

"I'm taking down the names of all the stakeholders," he says, as he notes the name and address of each business for future reference.

The sun is starting to go down, the light is bouncing off the buildings and seems suspended in the heavy air. It's warm for late November and there's been a smog warning every day this week.

The mild, sluggish quality of the day dovetails with Maclean's project, a community initiative designed as a local response to global warming and peak oil.

"I'm motivated by big picture issues," he says of his plan to get cars off St.-Viateur between Parc Avenue and St.-Urbain. "We have to do something."

Maclean is soft-spoken and never seems rushed, even though he's the father of a two-year-old son, paints in his studio three or more days a week, works at an art auction house, transports his family's laundry and groceries on a bicycle cart, plays ball hockey religiously on Sunday mornings and, now, spearheads a grassroots community group dedicated to opposing car culture.

"I used to want to design cars," he admits. As a kid in Winnipeg, he wanted to be an engineer. Although he's since changed directions, he never left behind the question, or the problem, of the car.

Maclean first started re-directing traffic on St.-Viateur about 9 years ago.

One summer morning we woke up to find the stop signs at the corner of Waverly transformed from "ARRET" to "ART."

Alternating letters were blocked out with red tape. It was so simple and striking that it was surprising no one had ever seen the art in the stop signs before. "People don't think about what surrounds them because they see it so often," Maclean told the newspaper at the time. "But my altering a stop sign just slightly makes them think twice."

Friend and fellow artist Billy Mavreas is prompt and pithy when asked to describe Maclean's work: "It's constantly evolving around a constellation of central themes – the Canadian landscape and road system."

In 2007, as a response to global warming, Maclean launched the satirical website kyotomotors.ca. He made tiny chrome magnets, perfect replicas of the "Legacy" or "Denali" tags on SUVs, except the names he covertly stuck on the backs of neighbourhood vehicles spelled: "Excess"; "Denial"; "Obligation"; and "Kyoto."

"I thought I could be the cheeky artist and put these Kyoto Motors magnets on cars and then say, 'OK, I've done my part,'" he says now. Over time, he realized that if he really wanted to close the gap between SUV drivers and cyclists, cynical gestures weren't helpful.

"Matt helped me see that," he says, referring to Mathieu Vick, cofounder of Car-Free Mile End.

At Café Olimpico on the first snowstormy morning of December, he and Matt talk global as well as local and vent their frustration over climate change deniers.

"Ultimately, peak oil will change things, whether people accept global warming as real or not," says Matt who is finishing a PhD in Astrophysics on the evolution of stars. "Instead of wasting 10 years debating whether it's real, we should act now! If we get cars off St-Viateur, it's going to help." Matt gives an edgewise glance and smiles, shaking his head at the notion of this small project as a remedy for a potentially doomed planet.

"It sounds ludicrous," concedes Maclean. "But the best case scenario to come out of Copenhagen is for people to ask, 'What's going to happen on the ground?' It's people who decide what their communities are going to do."

In the five months since they formed Car-Free Mile End, which has a core of six active members (including Zvi Leve, an urban transportation expert) and hundreds of fans on Facebook, they have created a blog, carfreemileend.blogspot.com, and a website, carfreemileend.com.

If you think the idea of getting cars off St.-Viateur is dreamy and unrealistic, have a look at the website FAQs: carfreemileend.com/faq.html. The answers are detailed and grounded in research. They explain the draw of a vehicle-free area for local businesses; make provisions for commercial delivery vehicles during certain hours; and cite the importance of avoiding a tourist-trap atmosphere.

And, if the notion of getting cars off a four-block stretch of one street seems like a local drop in the bucket, think about how cities will need to be rebuilt to adapt to life after peak oil. This is one of Nik Luka's main areas of study. He teaches architecture and urban planning at McGill. Matt and Maclean met with him to make their case and Nik Luka liked the idea. He's assigned a group of graduate students to study the potential of a car-free St.-Viateur and help survey locals.

Maybe this century-old, high-density, foot and bike-friendly neighbourhood can set an example and un-pave the way to carless, or at least car-light future.

To begin with, Car-Free Mile End plans to organize several festive, temporary street closures in summer 2010.

"It's not enough," says Maclean. "What's enough requires dismantling industrialized civilization. Rant, rant, rant," he adds, self-mockingly.

It may not be enough, but Maclean believes in the repercussions of individual actions. He refuses to own a car. He observes a self-imposed ban on flying. He dreams of putting "delivery by artist" in the contract so that when his dealer sells one of his paintings he can wheel it to the buyer by bike. And, he is "very much against pens" since finding out about the huge plastic (including disposable pens) trash vortex in the ocean.

In his studio full of tools and canvases and road signs, there are globes; the earth, the moon and stars. He's been painting the heavens, piercing vivid blue and orange tarps with grommets to form the shape of constellations.

He finds some solace in the grand scheme of the cosmos and the cyclical movement of planets around the sun.

Today, as snow whips by the window, he'll be working on one of his Dead End paintings, inspired by the black and yellow checkered sign that denotes the end of the road.

"It's the ultimate human predicament," he says, as he considers the checkerboard grid. "Whether it's personal, or the end of a whole civilization, it's like, Whoa. Slow down! a) you're going to die, b) you're part of something bigger."

The artist is here to signal us: our lives, our neighbourhood streets are part of the big picture. Stop. Proceed with Caution.

Links:
carfreemileend.com
carfreemileend.blogspot.com
kyotomotors.ca
rogerbellemare.com/maclean

Titles of artwork by Maclean above (not including work in progress in studio):
Untitled (ART - Hutchison and Van Horne), 2005
Northern Landscape, 2007
Winter Dead-End #1 and #2, 2005

Subterranean Blues

2009-11-24T13:28:00.031-05:00

When you step down into the cavernous basement warehouse of Jeans Jeans Jeans, owner Borys Fridman is there to greet you, like a maître d' at the front of a crowded bistro.

"How we doing?" he says, and to his legions of returning customers: "Good to see you! What can we do for you today?"

This is no generic Gap-style greeting. Borys gives you his full attention, pinpoints your size exactly, and with his jeans ESP, reads your needs.

Then he calls out to his staff: "Maria/Vanessa/Fatima, can you show her something dark and simple, no bling on the pockets, straight leg?"

Here your eyes widen and he tells you, "I also read minds."

And this is how, from the fluorescent-lit cave of a million jeans, they bring you the ones you'll probably want.

"He's the Jeans Guru!" says my friend Merrianne, a long-time customer. "At first you don't understand why this older mustached guy is telling you what jeans to wear – but then you realize, he really knows!"

People come in and ask for him by name. One customer says that if she went into the store and Borys wasn't there, she'd come back later. As she puts it, "You want his stamp of approval on the jeans you buy."

Borys seems to know all there is to know about his chosen field. He started the business 35 years ago, when he was 21. In the 80s, he had 16 stores all over the city, including this one that he's kept, in a rue de Gaspé warehouse at the east end of St.-Viateur.

The garment district is being redeveloped and with plans in the works to extend St.-Viateur East, it's not yet clear what the future holds for Jeans Jeans Jeans. Borys, who grew up on Durocher and Van Horne, and has seen the neighbourhood through plenty of changes, says with a shrug, "We'll deal with what we have to deal with."

Once he announces your requirements to his people, Maria, or one of her fleet of helpers, squeezes between the racks of jeans and hops on a stepladder to pull down the right size from colour-coded hangers.

If Jeans Jeans Jeans is a three-ring circus with ladders, acrobats and jeans in every ring, Borys is the ringmaster. He juggles a dozen customers at once, reading their perfect and not-so-perfect bodies with his mind, funneling them into fitting rooms, chatting, charming, and kneeling at the foot of strollers to talk to toddlers.

"I multi-task," Borys says, as his eyes dart around, tracking clients. "I pay attention, make sure everyone is taken care of, that customers are happy, having a good time."

His father, Izak Fridman, who is 82 and works in the store five days a week (dressed not in jeans but in dress pants), says proudly, "He's very good with people."

"It's just a matter of paying attention," says Borys.

When he notices a red-headed employee searching through the racks with an energetic focus, he calls: "Talk to me, Vanessa!"

For a minute they confer about a customer who has so far rejected all the jeans she's been offered. "Try Miss Me," Borys suggests, naming a brand. "It's a little bit louder but it'll be nice on her." Vanessa climbs the ladder to do his bidding.

Most of the time, Borys gravitates to the front of the store where he can keep an eye on all comings and goings. The cracked concrete floor is covered with a strip of indoor/outdoor carpeting duct-taped at the edges. Overhead, a sign explains that zero spending on carpets and fixtures keeps prices low. All the jeans here are heavily discounted, often selling for half of what they'd go for in other stores.

It's not fancy, but the service is attentive.

"It's the opposite of the uninterested fashionistas at a posh place," says Merrianne. "You feel special the whole time!"

This kind of attention can be disconcerting if you're used to regular store clerks who traffic in indifference or the other extreme – the hard-sell. At his place, Borys insists, "We don't sell jeans, we make customers." You can try on jeans all day if you want, leave without buying, and come back the next day to mull over the decision some more.

The store is open six days a week and Borys is there every day. Mornings he visits suppliers to get the brands customers are asking for that week. At night, he's a barfly with a purpose.

"I go out to see what's going on and what people are wearing. I drop in or stand outside to get an idea of trends, of what moves the market."

Wherever he goes, Borys is recognized. He once ran into customers on a beach in Mexico. "They said, 'Hey, it's the jean guy!' I always get a little embarrassed. Outside of business, I'm a shy person."

I notice that he doesn't want to talk about himself. He would rather talk jeans, and this he does with moxie and innuendo:

"You try on a pair of jeans that's right for you, you come out with a little smirk on your face that says, 'Yes, I'm hot!' When it's right, it's right."

"Your assets are perfect," he says, when a guy turns to check the view in the mirror. To a woman, he'll say: "Your attributes look great," or, "You need to go a size smaller in those;" or sometimes even, with what he refers to as 'tactful honesty': "They don't look good on you."

People value his frank response – the confidence he's acquired through years of experience tends to give him the last word on the subject.

Borys tells me about Nudies, the expensive "dry denim" jeans you're supposed to wear for six months before washing (!) and True Religion, another pricey brand, with a Buddha on the label. He says his own personal preference runs to Rare Jeans or Edwins made with Japanese denim. "Guys are touchy-feely about that perfect pair of jeans. They're also brand-whores more than women."

All this makes me reminisce about the bygone era when all anyone had to do was buy new Levi's once a year.

Borys tells me that Levi's are back, big time, with young hipsters.

I get excited. "Really? Levi's are back? Can I get some?"

"Hm. Not at your age," he advises gently.

What?!

"You've done that," he tells me. "It's like old boyfriends. You see them, you want to be with them again, and within 30 minutes you know why you broke up. It doesn't work to do it again."

I try to argue this point, but he is unmovable, even smug, as if to say: go against my advice at your own peril, you'll only embarrass yourself.

On a grey Saturday afternoon at Jeans Jeans Jeans, the women's changing rooms are full. A small crowd is lined up and waiting as more people clomp down the stairs. The woman hidden at a sewing machine behind a clothes rack hems jeans non-stop.

Girls rotate in front of the mirrors, trying get a good look at their backsides.

"Tu les aime pas?" a slender young woman asks her boyfriend as she revolves in a skin-tight pair of dark jeans that are sparkly with rococo stitching.

The radio blares "Young Hearts Be Free Tonight," and I watch the teenagers with the dazzling back pockets. I imagine a day in their far-off future, when they ask about the jeans with bling and Borys, still on the job as the denim authority, tells them: "You can't go back. It's time for something different."

p.s. November 2010
Jeans Jeans Jeans moved out of the basement and around the corner to:
5575 Casgrain
Montreal
514-279-3303

Live Forever

2009-10-28T13:32:00.040-04:00

Lana Kim McGeary

My grandmother Adele grew herbs in her Vermont garden and hung bunches of comfrey, red clover, sweet cicely, lovage and lemon thyme from her kitchen ceiling to dry. Rosehips tangled by her back door through which the resident garter snake slithered often enough to be named Henry/Henrietta. Adele used to serve nasturtiums in a salad bowl the size of a baby's bathtub and was fond of saying, in reference to the healthy habits she energetically espoused: "You'll live forever if you're not careful!" and "Everything in moderation, including moderation!"

When I hear about a woman who gives walking tours of edible herbs in Mile End and on Mount Royal, of course I think of Adele.

A friend points out Lana Kim McGeary to me at the Social Club on St-Viateur. She's an herbalist who enjoys strong coffee. I sidle up to her and mention that my grandmother Adele Dawson was an herbalist. She says, "Of course I know Adele Dawson! She's famous!"

I love that she says this, and that she uses the present tense. It's as if Adele is right here, even though she died 17 years ago.

After meeting Lana, who says that Adele was a pioneer in bringing back the tradition of the Wise Woman or village healer, I go home. For the first time, I Google my grandmother –someone who never heard that term. It turns out that Adele is alive on the internet. I have a copy of her book Herbs: Partners in Life, but I didn't know it was in its third printing and available for sale online. There are even customer comments on Amazon that say, "I liked Dawson's voice," and "her writing style is friendly and wise."

This makes my eyes sting, although it shouldn't surprise me that Adele is still making herself heard. A few years ago, I transcribed some of my favourite passages from her book because I liked the way her personality bubbled off the page.

"No one wants to take a chance on having a parsley shortage," she writes, making me think I've been remiss not to have ever worried about this. In an assertion that sounds counter-intuitive, she says: "Another healthy and appetizing addition to the salad bowl is the stinging nettle." (That's if you get to the plant before it grows too prickly.)

She provides a recipe for a summer drink made with comfrey, violet and raspberry leaves and mint, and then advises the reader to "wait smugly for the inevitable delighted comments of your guests."

That's Adele –waiting smugly for the inevitable delighted comments of her guests! She was always so confident and satisfied with her efforts, it only made sense for everyone else to appreciate them, too. She liked to say she was a NBEOE –a Natural Born Expert on Everything– and, after a Vermont newspaper once referred to her as a state treasure, she often shamelessly augmented her status, declaring, "I'm a national treasure, you know!"

So, it's because of my grandmother Adele, herbalist, national treasure and NBEOE, that I find myself sitting on a sunny slope at the base of Mount Royal with Lana, who's leading a Mountain Herb Walk.

I've met Lana a few times by now and talking to her always feels like a little trip to Vermont somehow, or, as if Adele is making an appearance in my neighbourhood. Lana pays attention to the plants that grow in the cracks in the sidewalk and was able to identify the sprawling green overtaking our infinitesimal yard: "Ground ivy," she noted. "Very good for kids, for fevers."

Now it's early October and the leaves on Mount Royal are just starting to turn. It was a weekend like this, 24 years ago, back when I was a teenager, that I went to Adele's 80th birthday party. It was two days long, with guests spilling out of the house into the garden. There was a pig and a lamb roasting outside, and cake, and 80 bottles of champagne. Friends and family members from all over had every motel from Marshfield to Plainfield booked solid.

On the mountain, I feel the sun on my back and wonder how many people throw themselves a party like that at 80.

Lana is talking about the pharmacopoeia that is the dandelion. She mentions eating the tender greens in the spring and using the root for tinctures in the fall. "Some say there is nothing the dandelion can't heal," she says.

Her language is familiar to me and so are the names of the other plants she points out on our walk, not that I could recognize them growing. Burdock, wild ginger and stinging nettle –that healthy and appetizing addition to the salad bowl!

Further up Mount Royal the city recedes, the birds are more audible under the canopy of maples, the traffic fainter; it's more like Vermont.

I've been wondering about it and I realize I don't know exactly when Adele became an herbalist. I consult with my mother and my aunt.

They say that it was after she moved to Vermont, adding that it may have been inspired by a life-changing remedy of boneset tea that cured her of Dengue fever while she was in the West Indies.

Adele was almost 60 when she started a new life. That's when she planted a garden and threw herself into learning about herbs. She collected a library of books on the subject, studied hard and figured out how to use them.

"She would give out herbs, but also advice, " my Aunt Susie remembers.

"I never knew how much to take seriously," my mother says. "We were never sure. She had such utter confidence about everything. I do remember being impressed that she was able to identify so many wild plants."

Our family tended to see Adele as an unreliable narrator because she'd always been an extravagant storyteller, an instinctive embellisher, the ultimate self-appointed expert.

But as Lana points out, part of herbalism is learning as much as you can yourself so you don't have to rely on healthcare experts. It's DIY, and Adele was a natural on that front.

Of course, I'm only scratching the surface here. Many may want to weigh in, family members included, or especially. While I'm at it, maybe I should confess that I still have Adele's copy of Culpeper's Herbal that I borrowed from her library of books on herbs (a collection that really should stay intact) approximately 13 years ago. I may be unreliable myself.

Birthday parties aside, there were always people at Adele's. Artists, potters, dowsers, woodworkers, writers, travelers. She had housemates like a college student. And she had followers. I remember being surprised by the reverence they sometimes displayed, as if they didn't know she was a whole person with a sense of humour and mischief, a stubborn side, and a temper like a sudden hailstorm.

One time one of her admirers asked me, "How does it feel to be Adele's grand-daughter?"

How to answer a question that was not really about me? I felt too dull, quiet and shy to be the granddaughter of a natural-born national treasure, but that didn't seem like much of an answer.

Meeting Lana spurred me to consider the question again. For my answer, see above.

Herbs: Partners in Life

For more information on Lana Kim McGeary's walking tours and workshops, contact her at: abundanceliving (at) hotmail.com

Field Custodian

2009-09-30T21:09:00.029-04:00

Past the east end of St. Viateur and beyond a gap in a chain link fence, between the factory buildings and the railroad tracks, there's a grassy vacant lot crisscrossed with dirt paths.

This lot, a huge expanse of open space by Mile End standards, has been attracting attention lately, in part because of Emily Rose Michaud.

If you talk to her, she'll tell you it's not actually vacant at all.

"It's a wild space in the middle of the city," she declares. Emily and the other neighbourhood proponents of the area call it the Roerich Garden, The Maguire Meadow or The Field of Possibilities/Le Champs des Possibles, and despite its contamination from having been a railway yard, they say it has its own ecosystem and habitat.

Originally owned by CP Rail, lot #2334609 was acquired by the city in June of this year and plans for its development are under discussion.

Emily, who is 26, grabs my pen as we talk and makes sketches on my notepad to emphasize and illustrate her points. She says I caught her on a high-energy morning, but it's hard to imagine her lethargic.

She was initially drawn to the wide open space as an art student and enjoyed walking through it along with the dog walkers, workers from buildings on Casgrain and de Gaspé and the neighbourhood residents going to or from St-Denis.

Then, two years ago, she did a project there for her sculpture class and her relationship with the place grew more serious. "I paid hundreds of dollars for 4 tons of compost to be delivered. I figured lots of artists spend that much on paint and canvas," she says.

She recruited a dozen volunteers to help her layer the compost, plus hay, leaves and cardboard in a pattern she'd spray painted on the November snow.

In the spring, bright green new grass grew there, forming the Roerich Symbol, a design used during WWII to protect cultural landmarks from aerial bombing.

Emily's sculpture course was over, but she found she couldn't let go. She wanted to maintain the symbol and protect the life of the field. "It became an obsession," she says.

She formed the gardening ensemble Sprout Out Loud and a blog devoted to the field (http://pousses.blogspot.com), which she now called the Roerich Garden. She began to organize work on the site and the planting of donated sage and hosta, plus bee balm and red clover that she bought with her own money.

Diane Boyer, a Mile End gardener who became a member of Sprout Out Loud, says that Emily opened her eyes to seeing the space in a whole new way.

"I used to cross the lot to get somewhere and I never thought twice about it. Then Emily started mentioning it as a field with its own biodiversity. I'd bumped into rabbits there, something you don't usually see around here, but I didn't think of how much it balanced out the cement and asphalt and buildings around us. It is precious."

In addition to cleanups and planting sessions, Emily programmed and coordinated Sunday events there. Bronwyn Chester spoke on the field's trees, Lana Kim McGeary on the wild herbs and urban botanist Roger Latour on what he calls flora urbana.

"It takes a lot of energy to keep it up," says Diane. "Also, her symbol is huge. It's a big landscaping job. And with volunteering, it's always the same people who do the work. Physically Emily is very strong. I look at her with her long, long hair and I see a sort of Xena goddess!" she says, referring to TV's warrior princess who fought against the forces of evil in ancient Greece.

Emily, who squirms when likened to a goddess/warrior princess, persevered in her efforts to bridge art and science on the site and the Roerich Garden/Maguire Meadow project gained momentum. Last spring, Annie Cavanagh, who was working on a Masters in science, approached Emily about an experiment in bio-remediation, or decontamination through natural methods. To this end, Annie planted 100 willow sticks around the edge of the big Roerich circle where they sprouted and grew all summer.

Until August, when the city mowed them in an attempt to rid the lot of ragweed.

"It was very sad," sighs Emily, who recently met with the city (as part of the Mile End Citizen's environmental subcommittee) to protest the mowing of the wild space. The city has agreed not to mow the area for now, although it may eventually decontaminate the site through a massive soil removal operation that Emily calls "dig and dump."

There's a book on the Roerich Garden in the works and a website in progress (roerichproject.artefati.ca ) and various citizens' groups are actively imagining and proposing ideas for the future of the field.

Between going to meetings and translating minutes, updating her blog and organizing events, Emily is looking for ways to support herself and do her art. "I told myself I was going to be more careful about my time and boundaries," she muses.

At the street festival on St.-Viateur East, Emily sits on the curb, next to a piece of brown burlap covered with green patches of sprouting wheat grass and red clover.

When the raucous drum troupe finishes its performance, she begins to sing quietly and cut into the material that's lying on the street. Gradually, she stitches a garment that's alive with green, attracting the attention of passersby who stop to look at what she calls her living armour.

On the grey street these tender sprouts are unexpected. When Emily steps into the burlap and sews it up around her it's even more surprising. It's become a sprouting dress and she's like some kind of wild fertility icon. Or the warrior princess of the urban field.

links:

emilyrosemichaud.com

roerichproject.artefati.ca

lechampdespossibles.tumblr.com

Postscript - November 2009: Emily announces that she will no longer be coordinating events in the field but will remain active on the Mile End Citizens' Field Committee. After two years of hard work she plans to wrap up the book project and focus on "personal/career things."

Oasis

2009-08-29T22:00:00.021-04:00

In the alley behind Esplanade, there's an oblong oasis. Tomato plants, beans, squash and tall purple-flowered amaranth rustle behind a chain link fence.

Summer evenings I used to see the silver-haired gardener move along the rows, tending his plants. One time I stopped and stared.

"Are those lemons?" Large fruits hung from the branches of a potted tree on the patio.

"Those are lemons, these are grapefruit," he said, gesturing to another tree. Casual about it. As if that stuff grows on trees around here.

Years ago, in Spain, I traveled on an old train with wooden seats and open windows, through lemon groves. The sight of citrus trees in the alley is like magic, a sudden secret passageway to the Mediterranean, a quick ticket to the Limón Express. I carry around with me the image of luminous fruit growing here. When I finally go back to tell him how much his trees mean to me, I arrive too late.

I find a young couple out in the garden. George Moumouris tells me that his father, Spyridon Moumouris, the keeper of the lemon tree, died in 2008.

"When I was growing up, he was out here until it was so dark you couldn't see anymore," George remembers. "My mom would be inside, yelling: 'Come in! Come eat with us!' "I didn't used to get it," George confesses. "But now I do."

Weekend mornings he's out in the gardens, front and back, with the watering can. "My dad is all around me," he says.

Spyridon Moumouris, or Spiros, as he was known, was born on Corfu moved to Mile End from Athens in 1969. He worked at a chemical factory and later switched to construction. In 1986, he bought the fourplex on Esplanade and hired neighbourhood kids to help him break up the pavement in back. His garden was born.

In the front yard, George notices the first ripe fig of the season and picks it to share with his wife. The branches of the beautiful pear tree are laden with fruit although he says it's no good this year, too much rain. The grape arbour, thick-leafed and studded with bunches of grapes shades a bench and a table on the patio, a cool place to sit. It reminds me of another shady grape-arbour haven up the street, north of Latina. I discover that Spiros helped plant it.

It seems there are traces of Spiros all along the block; stories of things he grew or helped along. Derek Reade, who lives near the corner, with a garden full of black-eyed Susans and dahlias, says he once asked Spiros for advice on a fig tree. 'In the winter, put it in the closet. Just don't forget to water it!' Spiros, fig oracle, instructed.

Reade followed this directive and to his surprise, the tree produced actual figs that summer. But the second winter, once the tree was relegated to the closet, the watering was forgotten. In the spring, when he discovered the dried up fruit tree, Spiros' words came back to him.

Linda Morrison remembers Spiros parading up and down the street with a giant zucchini from his garden. "It was an amazing conversation piece-- like a new puppy or something. He was so proud...He gave me a pear once," she adds. "It was delicious."

Jane Churchill used to live across the street from Spiros, who renovated her house. "He could do anything, but his specialty was plaster," she says. "Curved walls, straight walls, ceilings." He enjoyed the work, because from her place, he could look out on his home and front garden.

"He was like the king of the neighbourhood," Jane says. "Everyone stopped to talk. He loved telling stories. He'd stand in front of his house with his little cup of coffee, a swirl of citrus around him."

He shared heirloom tomatoes and armloads of basil with her. "He was always out there in his garden or his front yard, keeping an eye on all his growing things. He'd squish bugs with his fingers," she recalls. "He hated people leaving dog poop in the alley and graffiti made him crazy. He'd be out there trying to scrub it off."

One of Spiros' famous passions was his olive tree. "Fruit-bearing olive tree beats odds: Esplanade Ave. man puts his heart and soul into sapling from Greece," ran the story in the Gazette in 1997. It described him hugging the tree, and admitting "sometimes I'm crazy and I talk to her."

"That was the first thing I noticed," Linda remembers. "His little olive tree. He built what looked like a phone booth to protect it during the winter."

"He brought it over from Greece as a cutting in his pocket," says Jane.

"The olive tree got sick when he did," recalls George, pointing out a planter at the side of the front garden, with a skeleton of branches in it. "It was weird."

The olive has faltered. But the rest of Spiros' grove goes on – the fig, pear, grapefruit and lemon trees; the vegetable garden that Spiros started when George was a kid; and the grapevines –the ones with the actual grapes, and the kind made up of stories that neighbours tell each other about him. They continue to thrive.

I missed the chance to seek his counsel myself but I can still see him in his oasis, king of the neighbourhood, grower of lemons.

Secrets

2009-07-11T15:00:00.017-04:00

Tommy, the barber with the blue walls, museum piece barber chairs, the tonics pickling in jars, said no to me. He was holding his newspaper when he said it. “No. I don't want. I have nothing to say. No, no. No.” He fanned me out of the shop with his paper.

The bicycle sharpener, who I’d heard of but never seen, also said no. He appeared like a mythical creature out of a billow of blowing snow one Friday afternoon this spring and I yelled out to him, "I've been looking for you!"

I'd been wondering how I would find him, before he stopped riding around the disappearing garment factories sharpening scissors. And finally, there he was, with his grinding wheel in front of the handlebars and a hinged wooden box behind his seat.
It was like running into a horse-drawn ice cart.

He agreed to meet me when it wasn’t blizzarding. I asked if I could take his picture. "No, no, not today,” he said and pedaled off into the flying snow, down toward the underpass, vaporizing like the Sasquatch or the Snuffleupagus.

And then he stood me up.

Barry Shinder at the cap factory, who gets his gigantic antique scissors honed by the bike sharpener, guessed it was because he works under the table and didn’t want publicity or problems.

Over on Parc Avenue, at Chez Rose-Marie Lingerie, they didn’t want to spill the beans either.

“It’s a boring life but it’s my life,” said Rose who has wavy grey hair that tumbles around her shoulders. She’s an Armenian-born, Paris-trained corsetière who’s been working in Montreal for close to 50 years. Her arm is in a sling from the strain of decades of bra-fitting, and sewing alterations. Obviously a fountain of stories and inside information, she refused to give them up for me.

“It's an intimate thing,” Rose said. “It's not like selling dresses.”

She and her daughter, Nora, are as discreet and enigmatic as special agents. The way they tell it, bra-fitting is an undercover operation. “Sisters come in together, but they don't even want the other to know what size they wear,” said Nora, on why they keep their customers' secrets.

So, as it turns out, there are still some secrets in Mile End.

Recently, a journalism student asked if she could talk to me about “hyper local” news.

First I thought, no, no, no! I reacted just like Tommy the barber, Rose the corsetière, and the phantom bicycle sharpener. The prospect of being interviewed reminded me that I, too, am uneasy about revealing too much.

She wanted to know what my goal was, my hope, when I started this “hyper local” project.

I suppose that doing my neighbourhood sort-of-newsletter gives me special dispensation and nerve to ask people questions, even if they don’t want to answer.

And I get to write a portrait. A portrait of my neighbourhood, in pieces. Like one of those big pictures made up of a thousand little photographs.

Got any pieces for me? Any secrets?

You can tell me...

Postscript: September 2009

At Chez Rose-Marie Lingerie they remained mysterious until the end. In August, CLOSING SALE signs appeared on the windows. I thought this sudden turn of events was my chance: now they'll want to tell all! But they didn't, at least not to me. Inside, for a few weeks, the store was packed with shoppers buying up bras at reduced prices. September 1, it was empty, counters and displays gone, pink walls bare of vintage Wonderbra posters. "We are now closed," read a handwritten sign on the door. "For more information, call..." I dialed the number, and got a recording. Rose's voice, telling me to leave a message. No information, no stories, no secrets.

Call of the alley

2009-06-01T21:43:00.012-04:00

On a warm evening when I open the back door and the whole alley seems to be in bloom I hear him. A crazy burst of tuneful whistling. A loud whit-whoo! as if in appreciation of a real looker.

It's my favourite and most mysterious neighbour across the alley: the parrot.

This time of year his calls loop out of his third floor window and into our lives.

He has captured the beep beep beep of a truck backing up, and the screee of a squeaky clothesline. In the beginning, I didn't know these noises were coming from a parrot. But there's a reedy resonance to the toots and squeaks. Plus, he remixes the alley sounds with trilling whistles and sends them spinning back out again.

His loopy sounds are part of my summer. Yet inside his third-floor window, the parrot has always been invisible to me.

There's something strange about introducing yourself to people you've lived next to for a decade and a half. 'Hi, I've been meaning to say hello for a while now...' ?

The thing is, since I've become a mother, I talk to neighbours in a way I never used to. It feels natural, maybe even important. Our daughter opens gates, toddles up front walks and expects to go inside the neighbours' homes. Everyone is someone to wave at and every doorway is there to be explored. Like the parrot, she has no sense of boundaries.

She's my incentive and my role-model as I walk out my door and around the block to the front of the parrot triplex. Some kids are playing on the stone patio with a toy glider.

One boy's mother, a pretty, shiny-haired woman named Bia, turns out to be the parrot's owner. I tell her I've been hearing her bird for years. She thinks I'm there to complain. "It bothers you?"

"That's how I know it's summer!" I say. "I love it."

Bia tells me the parrot is an African Grey named Max.

Max was a gift to Bia from her husband Mario, 17 years ago, not long after she moved to Montreal from Porto, Portugal. Now they have two sons, but back then Bia was home alone while Mario went to work. She didn't speak much English or French and felt isolated.

"My husband works a lot," she says. "Probably why he got me the bird," she adds with a wry smile.

"Max is company. When you have no one to talk to, you talk to the bird. In the morning you say good morning, the bird says good morning back."

It has taken me 15 years to get this far, so now that I'm finally on Bia's patio, I go all the way. I ask if I can meet Max. Bia shows me upstairs, past shelves of bird figurines, through a spotless apartment where her teenaged son is listening to music in his room.

"I always thought Max was a male --until last year when she laid four eggs!" Bia tells me, adding that if she'd known, she might have mated her. African Greys are highly sought after and she says she could have sold the chicks for $1500 each.

She opens the door to the utility room at the back of the apartment where there's a washing machine, a step ladder, a window out onto our shared alley, and a spacious bird cage.

Max surprises me by being smaller than I imagined. Her soft, grey, white-rimmed feathers look like petals and she has a brilliant red tail.

I stare, not sure what to do now that I'm face to face with the invisible --almost mythical--alley creature.

The bird ruffles her feathers, wary of me. "She's afraid," Bia explains. "That's what she does when she sees someone she doesn't know."

Max doesn't realize I'm a devoted listener. She cocks her head to examine me with one yellow eye and then the other.

Then she gives a quiet squawk, "Hola."

Another surprise. I didn't know my-neighbour-the-parrot could talk. Apparently, when you're within talking distance, she does.

"Hola! Hola! Hola!" I reply, I'm a giddy fan with a backstage pass.

"She speaks Portuguese, like me," Bia explains. "She imitates Mario's whistle, the phone, everything."

While we're in her room, Max is not loud at all. No beeping or hooting or screeching. She looks at us, makes a little Portuguese conversation, and listens.

"She makes a lot of dust," Bia is telling me. "Dander. Every three days I have to clean the cage. And she has to have showers. And her wing feathers trimmed. You get tired," she confesses, about the parrot care. "And they can live for 95 years!"

Max shifts and twists on her perch, eyeing us with curiosity.

When Max is an old parrot, my daughter will be an old lady. They have so much in common. Just this morning, when I was changing her diaper, she heard the sound of a truck backing up, and hooted along à la Max. "eep, eep, eep, eep!"

Improbably, I imagine them as neighbours in the far-off future. Max will have new sounds in her repertoire by then, but every once in a while she'll call out a piercing beep beep beep, and this will remind her neighbour, a baby-faced old lady, of the olden days, of growing up along the alley, back at the beginning of the century.

Mission: Mile End

2009-05-02T21:23:00.015-04:00

For years, Luboslaw Hrywnak and I were neighbours without knowing it. Then, once I meet him, I see him everywhere. Our paths cross on Parc Avenue near his apartment building, or along St. Viateur, or outside the Mile End Mission where we first spoke.

He wears a blue parka or windbreaker, depending on the weather, and ambles as if lost in thought. He has wire-rimmed glasses and a white beard and takes drags on a cigarette with the intensity of a committed smoker.

I'd walked past the Mission on the corner of Bernard and St. Urbain a thousand times. When I finally go in to find out more about it, Mission director Roslyn Macgregor gets Lubo to fill me in.

"There are other places around town where you can get a free meal," he says, drinking coffee as the sun shines through the storefront windows filled with spider plants. "But this is different. It's smaller. More intimate and friendly. People get to know each other. For weeks in a row you sit at the same table, you recognize people by face. People are treated in an affable, personal manner."

Just like one of the neighbourhood cafes—although possibly friendlier.

Lubo sits at the edge of the room and people walk by saying, "Hi Lou," "Bonjour Lubo."

"I know everyone here today," he remarks.

Lubo has been coming to The Mission for almost 20 years, since it started as a soup kitchen in the basement of The Church of the Ascension (now the Mile End Library) on Parc Avenue.

He tells me he fell ill in his 20s while studying literature at Concordia and that he's on medical welfare which exempts him from work. "I don't have a paying job but I like to see people. I can come here and socialize and help out." Sometimes he carries in bags of donations or helps with the dishes.

Roslyn Macgregor is an Anglican priest at the Church of St Cuthbert, St Hilda and St Luke. She runs the Mission part-time and often sits at a table in the middle of the room, her eyes bright, white hair bobbing, as she juggles brainstorming and problem-solving with the staff.

To her mind, Lubo occupies a special role at the Mission. "He is for me a measure that what we do is of value," Roslyn says. "Being there for individual people, creating a home."

At noon, a volunteer cook comes out of the kitchen and asks if someone can wipe off the tables. People pull chairs out of the closet and pass cutlery and napkins around. Roslyn welcomes everyone, getting the crowd of a couple dozen to applaud for the volunteers.

Lubo stands to her left. It's a ritual they've been practicing for years. When she finishes, he says grace.

"God bless this food before us and give us the grace to get through what we have to," he begins, before switching to French and then Ukrainian. "Amin," he concludes, in Ukrainian and Roslyn echoes, "Amin!"

Macaroni salad is served.

From a certain angle, when you look at the fancy
bakeries, pricey restaurants and baby boutiques, 21st century Mile End doesn't seem like a place that needs its own soup kitchen or food bank.

But bordering the streets of triplexes and little gardens where à vendre real estate signs turn to acheté! overnight, there are low-rent apartment buildings on St-Laurent and Parc Avenue where eviction is routinely spelled by supers pitching mattresses off fire escapes into the alley.

Some members of the Mission, like Lubo, live in these buildings, some in the area's dwindling number of un-gentrified apartments, and some sleep under the Rosemont bridge.

"If you have a financial problem or a landlord problem the priest can help," Lubo tells me. "Rosyln has helped me in the past," he adds. Roslyn has been Mission director for 14 years while the neighbourhood has turned into a trendier and wealthier place.

Currently there's a lot of local discussion about the development and potential upscaling of St-Viateur East. Factories that once housed the garment industry may be turned into multimedia studios and new housing.

"What about the poor?" Roslyn wants to know. "Whatever new housing is developed, a percentage of it should be social housing."

After lunch, people browse through the jumble of clothes for sale. The stray gray cat the Mission has adopted wakes up from a nest of sweaters and jumps down from the shelf.

"I'm getting $10 - $11,000 on welfare," Lubo says. "My survival is guaranteed. Still, I can see room for improvement. The poverty line in Canada is $25,000.

"One time in my life I begged a guy for a dollar. He refused. I decided never again. When I see someone eating calmly in a fancy restaurant I don't get mad at them. But I could. It's unbalanced. "

Lubo and I have the same little notebooks. Like me, he's filled up a lot of them. He says he has hundreds of pages of journal entries. Unlike me, he writes his in Ukrainian.

I ask him to read a page and he translates a few words in a low voice. "Today is Easter and I read a little bit of the Bible...I feel my own goodness often..." he reads.

"I write every day, " he says. "I don't work but I have time to develop as a human being, to grow in consciousness, have compassion." He closes his notebook and puts it back in his pocket.

"If I had money, I would buy more tobacco, better food more often and live in a better quality apartment. I wouldn't buy a house, I would rent an apartment, a nice one. I like my apartment but there's no romance in poverty."

Lubo looks around the room that has a colourful Bienvenue-Welcome banner strung up on a clothesline.

"I'm lucky I can come to the Mission," he says. "It can't fit all the poor people in the city."

*

Mile-End Mission 99 Bernard Ouest, Montreal The mission operates a foodbank on Fridays, serves three hot lunches a week and sells donated clothes for $1 a piece. It also offers computers with internet access, a free phone, a community art group, yoga and sewing classes, and a legal clinic. For more information go to: www.mileendmission.org

The blessing of the baskets

2009-04-11T21:51:00.000-04:00

Easter eggs (dyed pink or blue or yellow), chocolate bunnies, slices of bread, shakers of salt and surprising hunks of kielbasa sausage.

These are some of the things in the baskets that people bring to St. Michael's Church on St.Viateur the Saturday before Easter. Hundreds of people of all ages and shapes come carrying baskets of food to be blessed by the priest, a Polish Catholic tradition.

All day long, they troop down into the church basement where long tables are arranged in a horseshoe shape. They place their baskets on the table and take a seat. On the hour, two candles are lighted and from the back of the room, a priest in a black gown appears.

Every hour, the 60 chairs arranged around the horseshoe are filled. For the blessing of the baskets ceremony there is standing room only.

I ask what the priest says in the Polish ceremony that lasts about 10 minutes.

"My mind wandered," confessed one man who was there with his family. "Something about the Eucharist."

After the priest finishes speaking, he dips a small straw broom into a metal urn and walks around tables, flicking drops of holy water on the baskets.

Then everyone collects their baskets and covers them up with lace doilies, or cloth napkins, or plastic Toys "R" Us bags and files out of the basement.

A few of them go up the outdoor steps to the lofty church sanctuary.
One woman steps outside and says, "We did it!" to her family, as though it was an exciting first.
For Szandra, who is 9, it's a holiday ritual. Her basket contains small sausages, carrots, an orange, an onion, a decorated egg and a stuffed pink bunny.

As quickly as they came, people leave, with their blessed baskets of coloured eggs and sausage, as if they're all going on a chilly picnic.

The bread next-door

2009-03-28T11:51:00.004-04:00

On a bright March morning J.J. Heffring, who looks like a homespun version of movie star Kate Hudson, makes bread deliveries on St. Viateur. She carries two big shopping bags of loaves and Sophie, her three-year-old daughter, scoots along beside her on a pink bike with training wheels.

The first stop is Salon Dorothy, where J.J. gives a loaf of warm homemade bread to owner Josie Paris who hands her $5 and refuses change saying, "No, no, no! You bring it all the way here, no!"

J.J. and Sophie move on, waving and calling out "Hi Tommy!" as they pass the barber who still has the postcard they sent him from their summer vacation on display in his shop.

It's as though J.J. has been living here happily forever, but when she and her filmmaker husband Jesse, first arrived in Montreal in 2001, she cried. She was three months pregnant with their oldest daughter, Zoe, and the grey streets and grime of the city made her want to turn the car around and go back to Calgary, where they'd been living, or to rural Saskatchewan, where she'd grown up.

Now she knows all the shopkeepers along St. Viateur by their first names. "That's how I've tried to cultivate a community for my girls because I don't have grandparents or parents here," explains J.J. who's named after her two grandfathers, Joshua and John.

The organic, multigrain bread she sells for $4.00 a loaf is her way of transporting the flavour of the prairies, and the traditions of her family, to the neighbourhood.

"It's a prairie bread," she says. "It's gentler than many multigrain breads. It has a light crumb and a great taste with a sweetness from the wildflower honey. It's a good morning bread, a breakfast bread. A lot of the French bakeries here are fancy or artisan and it's not that. I don't do decadent. I do wholesome."

When J.J. talks about baking she inspires visions of loaves and pies cooling on a windowsill, an eyelet curtain rippling in the breeze. She is the blond blue-eyed farm girl a marketing department would invent to sell baked goods. She calls her daughters "lovey" and says things like "son of a biscuit, where are my gloves."

J.J. grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan, eight miles outside the village of St. Brieux, a field away from her grandmother. "I have memories of stubble under my feet. It tickled," she says.

"I grew up watching Grandma bake pies in the early morning and bring them out to the men working in the fields. It was normal to haul a roast out of the oven at 11 in the morning. We put hot tea in sealer jars and stuck them in wool socks to keep them warm."

On her St. Viateur bread route, J.J. hooks a bag of bread onto the door at S.W. Welch's Bookseller's. Stephen Welch got to know J.J. when she came in to browse cookbooks and, as fellow foodies, they bonded. He's been getting her bread for a year now. "It's healthy, good bread. It's really not expensive and it's delivered," he says. "I like it fresh, with my natural peanut butter."

Sophie and J.J. cross Parc Avenue and head to the YMCA where a dozen mothers at the play-group are waiting for their fresh loaves. These are her core clients.

"It all started when I brought a loaf and jam to a casual play-group at someone's house last winter," J.J. says. "One of the moms there, said, 'oh can you make me one?'"

"I think it's a cool idea, a farm girl from Saskatchewan baking in her house," says Stella Furquim, J.J.'s first customer. "The price is fair and the most important thing, my son likes it. It's so hard to get kids to eat healthy bread! Maybe it's the honey in it." Stella told two friends about "J.J. bread," as it's called in her household, and they told two friends and so on.

By April 2008, J.J. was making six loaves a week for moms she knew. From there, word of mouth spread. She now bakes three dozen loaves a week, some for people she barely knows.

At 6 a.m. while her family is still sleeping, J.J. blends ground flaxseed, quinoa and millet together with stone-ground wheat, eggs, honey, salt and yeast. The quinoa is her variation on a recipe from her dad, the bread baker in the family. He's given her a Bosch mixer for the process and also a mill that she hopes to use to make her own fresh flour, once she can find a wheat supplier.

"My dad always said a good loaf squeaks when you knead it," she says, punching the dough into loaves in her compact, sunny third-floor kitchen. In her narrow apartment-sized oven, she can only fit six loaves at a time.

Her Monday customers pick up their loaves from J.J.'s doorstep and leave money in the envelope provided.

"I started to get upset because I hadn't met all the people I was baking for," says J.J.. "So, I'd hover around the door waiting and say, 'Hi, I'm J.J. and here's your loaf.' I like a hands-on approach."

She's crunched the numbers and found she really isn't making much on this venture. "But it's not about that right now," she says. "It's about getting me out there, getting loyalty, then maybe eventually opening a bakery."

In the meantime, she'd like to expand, but not by too much. Given her current set-up, she could increase her output by about 24 more loaves a week.

All the customers I talk to are fans of "J.J. bread" and they especially like taking part in this most micro of local businesses. "I want to support her. She's sweet," says Nancy Ho, whose one-and-a-half-year-old son, Louis, loves the bread.

Postscript - November 2009: J.J. has suspended her bread baking and pick-up/delivery service. She and her husband have bought a place and are moving out of the neighbourhood. Little do the residents of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve know what's in store for them...

One hundred neckties

2009-03-04T14:11:00.003-05:00

I notice Nick Dordas because he glows. At his spot in the window of the dry-cleaners, the lamp next to his sewing machine lights up his face and hands and his sharp white shirt. With his combed-back silver hair and crisp attire he looks almost too perfect to be real. He could be a tailor in a movie shoot, or part of somebody's art project.

Nick Dordas is his own work of art. In a neighbourhood where it's hard to find someone who's not wearing jeans, he wears a fitted shirt, a buttoned vest, dress pants, and a tie.

"I like to dress," says the tailor, who is 69, and the owner of 100 neckties. "I take off the tie when I sleep. I don't like jeans." He frowns at a pair on the counter in front of him. "I wear jeans when I go to the village in Greece. In the city, never!"

I am wearing jeans and a T-shirt, as I do every day, and while we talk I notice threads unraveling from my top. Next to Dordas it's hard not to feel like a slob. The only casual aspect of his appearance is the measuring tape draped around his neck. He pulls a length of it down to the counter, marks the offending jeans, and chalks the hemline with a yardstick.

His actions are meticulous, he is a jeans surgeon. It rings true when he says that as a boy in Tripoli, Greece, he chose tailoring over carpentry, shoemaking or painting because he wanted to stay clean. At 13, he went to Athens to work at a tailor's in the big city. "If you don't love it, you don't learn. I love it. I know everything. " He snips off extra material from the legs of the jeans, then sews a perfect hem.

When I give him my ripped jacket, in a couple minutes Dordas fixes the torn pocket and also sews up other holes he has located under the arm. He disposes of each frayed edge and ripped seam with the energetic intolerance of a perfectionist.

James Bitzilios hired him to do alterations at the shop a year and a half ago, after Dordas closed the garment factory he'd run for over 30 years. "I come here to pass my time," Dordas says. "What am I going to do at home. Wash dishes? I didn't want to retire. I'm not tired!"

He has a wife, grown children and grandchildren who go to Greek school. Plus, he says he knows half the Greeks in Montreal. Clearly, all this is not enough. Dordas needs to be sewing. He comes in at 7:30 in the morning, drinks a coffee, opens up the shop and gets to work.

"For him, it's like playing golf is for me," Bitzilios says. "You can tell he loves what he does."

Bitzilios says having Dordas in the window is good for business. People stop and stare, take his picture and then ask about alterations. Dordas is the siren, luring in passersby, with his Old World style and spellbinding fastidiousness.

"Everybody passes by, they wave," Dordas says. "Sometimes, they pass and..." he puts his fingers to his lips to mimic people's appreciation for his work.

At around three o'clock, after darning someone's holey wool sweater, Dordas announces, "Finished."

It's mid-afternoon. Jeans, pants, skirts and jackets lie in a large heap, waiting for his attention.

"For tomorrow, I have only this," he says with a hint of regret, as if the big pile is not much at all, as if it's not nearly enough.

Dordas uses this method every day. Before it gets too late, Dordas stops sewing, making sure to leave himself something to do in the morning. You can tell it's an effort. If he weren't careful, he might just give into temptation and breeze through the mountain of clothes in a flash.

Renew Système
251 Bernard Ouest
Montreal

This profile also appears in the mysterious paper Le Bathyscaphe #4.

Neighbours behind the wall

2009-01-07T10:03:00.000-05:00

Last fall, while masons worked on the 25-foot stone wall around the Carmelite monastery, I tried to peek into the secret garden. The high old wall made everything behind it intriguing, even the grass. That's cloistered grass.

On the other side of the wall, in the middle of a neighbourhood where privacy is impossible, somehow the Carmelites lead a life of silence and solitude.

They spend most of the day in silent prayer, and in a special annex they bake altar bread to earn a living. They leave the monastery only to go to the doctor or the dentist. A volunteer shops for their groceries.

Several years ago they were going to sell the property and its crumbling stone structures and move to the country. A developer planned to turn the place into condos. But there were objections from residents and urban activists and public outcry persisted until the Carmelite Monastery, with its garden, was classified as a heritage site that cannot be developed.

In Mile End, where a front yard may be the size of a carpet, the 2.5 acre cloister garden was important -- even if we're not allowed inside. Considering that it's a place we can never see or visit, we're oddly attached to it.

To my surprise, it's not as hard as I imagined to speak with someone in a cloister.

I make an appointment and on a cold winter morning when the grey stone wall seems to glow with light, I ring the monastery bell. The volunteer who answers the door tells me to wait in the parlour upstairs. As I take off my coat, the phone and the doorbell are both ringing. Evidently, like the rest of Mile End, the monastery is a busy place.

Sister Marie-Denise comes into the parlour which is divided by a wooden grille and a green curtain. She pulls aside the curtain and reaches through the bars to shake my hand with a smile, taking a seat on the opposite side of the grille which is there to separate the nuns from the outside world, even during visits.

She has bright friendly eyes and wears a white wimple, with the traditional black veil and the brown habit of the Carmelite order. As Discalced or Barefoot Carmelites, they don't wear shoes. Sister Marie-Denise has on brown socks and Birkenstocks. She is 58 and joined the Carmelites in 1992. Unlike most of the nuns in this community, she had a job before joining the order, working as a civil servant in Ottawa.

The grille is no stone wall but talking to her through this barrier is a reminder that we live different lives.

When I confess to peeking into the garden, she says I was not the only one. Joggers regularly ran through the construction site right into the garden to check it out.

"It's the mystery of it. It's just not knowing what's there," laughs Sister Marie-Denise. "Mind you," she adds, "it's no big mystery. If you go on Google, or is it Mapquest, you're going to see it. There's a satellite picture."

This is something I'd never thought of. A cloistered nun is reminding me how to use the internet.

"I'm the bursar," she explains. "All of our accounting is on the computer, oh la la."

I'll look on Google Maps later but in the meantime, I ask Sister Marie-Denise to paint me a picture of the garden.

"There's a row of linden trees. Then there's the maples, about 25 of them, mostly silver maples. There's a little apple orchard and two different types of plums and pears and cherries, not bing cherries but other ones, not quite as sweet. There used to be a chicken coop. One sister who came here in 1939 used to take care of the chickens. But in the '80s it was turned into a hermitage."

She explains that a benefactor plows the paths so that the sisters can walk around the garden and get out to the hermitage, even in the winter. She says in the summer, it's too hot and humid to make the altar bread in the annex, so they usually take a break from June 24 to Labour Day. So, like anyone else around here, the nuns have strategies to deal with the snow and then, in the summer, the heat and humidity.

Teresa of Avila in 16th-century Spain founded the Carmelite order whose monasteries are built for a maximum of 21 nuns to nurture a special intimate atmosphere of quiet contemplation. In Mile End there are now 12 nuns at the monastery. When I ask what they do for fun in the hour a day that they don't have to work or devote to silent prayer. Sister Marie-Denise gives a quick laugh from her side of the grille, as if the answer's obvious. "We talk!"

A chicken coop wouldn't have been unusual when the monastery was first built in 1895. before Montreal grew up around the village of St-Louis-de-Mile-End and its farms.

Now the quiet Carmelites find themselves between two of the liveliest boulevards in the city, St-Laurent and St-Denis. And, despite the wall, they're not untouched by urban activity.

"At the back of the garden we have pines, partly to protect us from the rowdy characters on the other side of the wall," Sister Marie-Denise recounts. "We find things they throw into the garden. They throw everything. Bottles, pizzas, cell phones."

Then she gestures in the other direction toward the 10-storey industrial buildings that loom over the monastery, the chapel and the garden.

"From there you can see into the garden or even inside the cloister," she says. "We ignore the factory buildings. But one summer somebody had music playing all the time. We couldn't go outside. We couldn't even pray. It's one thing to hear the rumour, the murmur of the city, it's another to hear a constant ghetto blaster."

But Marie-Denise says the nuns consider themselves part of the community.

"Our families let us know what's going on. Of course, we get Le Devoir and we receive Le Plateau. We try to keep in touch. Especially since they want to build more condos next to us.

"We have a mission to pray for everyone in the city. We don't need to know everything to know the hardship of Montreal. A drop is enough. We pray for everyone, even atheists, criminals. Everyone is a child of God."

The whole neighbourhood and the city beyond are included in the Carmelites' prayers. The blasters of music, and the bottle-, phone- and pizza-throwers, too.

Caps for Sale

2008-11-11T20:59:00.002-05:00

As soon as the laundromat turns into a bistro, or the garage on the corner becomes a condo, or the appliance repair shop reopens as a boutique, their old selves evaporate.

Sometimes I walk down St-Viateur trying to remember. What was the crèpe place before the big flat griddles and the paper cones for take-out crepes arrived? What used to be on the corner where the fancy ink and stationery shop is? The chocolatier two doors down sells tiny, pretty chocolates for $2.50 each. What was there before?

The neighbourhood is changing faster than I can remember.

Maybe that's why I'm so happy to find Barry Shinder at Maple Leaf Hat and Cap Company, on St-Laurent, north of St-Viateur. When I ask him how long he's been here, he crows, "Too long!"

He's stitching caps on the heavy black Singer sewing machine once used by his father when he started the business 78 years ago, on St-Laurent between Pine and Prince Arthur.

"I've been on St-Laurent all my life," Shinder says. "Me and my brothers used to lie on the sewing tables as babies." He lives, with his wife and daughter, in the apartment where he grew up, above the cap factory. He works weekends and nights, sometimes until 11 p.m. "It's convenient. I'm a workaholic."

Shinder, who is 61, with an athletic frame and a quick wide smile, picks up a flat cap, also known as a newsboy, or a Dutch cap, and admires it. "The beauty of men's hats? The style is what it was in my father's day in the 1930s and it's still going."

The caps are like the ones stacked high in Caps for Sale, the classic children's book about the cap vendor who falls asleep under a tree and wakes to find that monkeys have stolen his pile of caps. Shinder's 2008 models are dark coloured wool, tweed, or corduroy patchwork, with a brim and a button on top. Some have a snap on the brim.

Talking to Barry Shinder is like finding the living link between the neighbourhood's past and present. I've been in Mile End through a decade and a half of changes, but he's been here for 55 years. It's like stepping into the green-walled grilled-bologna-serving Wilensky's Light Lunch, or right into The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

Shinder remembers what used to be what around here: "The Mile End Station was over where Million Tiles is. Me and my cousin used to hop trains to Outremont...General Motors was on the corner of St-Viateur, where Yellow Shoes is...Before Cafe Olimpico was Open da Night it was Tony and Franco's." He piles up the layers of history like stacking caps, one on top of another and another.

He talks without stopping his work which at the moment is stitching sweatbands into poorboy caps. "I do the work of three and so we're actually six," he explains, gesturing to include the three Haitian women who've been sewing for him for a combined total of 39 years. Margaret, Jacqueline and Rose use words like "cool" and "respectful" to describe their boss.

"Every year it gets tougher," Shinder says of the business, citing the flood of inexpensive imports from China as a factor. "At one point I wanted my son to build it up. But why ruin his life? He's going to work 60-70 hours a week in here? Is there a future in this? I can't see it. I'm a dying breed."

After he stitches the sweatbands, one by one, into a pile of caps, Margaret takes them and sews in the label of a clothing company. As it was in Shinder's father's day, 90 percent of Maple Leaf's work is contract.

The caps they make will sell at the historic, high-end Henri-Henri hat store on Ste-Catherine, or at Hiver en Folie shops across Quebec. The hats get out there, but Maple Leaf Hat and Cap company remains strangely invisible.

You could be wearing a Maple Leaf Cap and never know it.

Unless you wander into the small one-room factory and convince Shinder to stop sewing long enough to sell you one himself. And if you do, that's a bonus, because then you know the story.

It's a little like knowing that the building on the corner of St-Viateur and St-Laurent, before it became the Cagibi with the tofu wraps and DJs, was a pharmacy, and long before the racks were stocked with zines, medicines and remedies lined the wooden apothecary shelves.

But in the case of Barry Shinder and Maple Leaf Hat and Cap Company, it's not just the story of what used to be what, it's what still is.

*

Maple Leaf Hat and Cap Mfg. Co.
5758 Boul. St. Laurent
Montreal

Neighbours

2008-10-25T11:36:00.000-04:00

The neighbour ladies sit on their front porches next-door to each other on warm days. They sit like symmetrical flowerpots, unbudging. They chat without moving from their seats by the front doors. Their white plastic chairs might as well be welded to the porch. They sit on their separate stoops and turn their heads a quarter turn toward each other.

What is keeping them apart?

All summer I see them in their spots. In the warm late afternoon we wave.

"How long have you been neighbours?" I finally ask.

"Yes!" the southernmost neighbour lady in black laughs. "Friends!"
The northern neighbour in the blue dress just stares.

Their story is locked away in Portuguese. I am left to wonder what the rules are.

Do they have symmetrical Portuguese husbands? I think there is only one husband, which explains why one lady is wearing black. Sometimes the husband sits out with the blue dress, but not during ladies' visiting hour.

He stays inside or shuffles up the street, picks a handful of plums from a front yard tree and eats one after the other as he leans against the door of a parked car.

I wonder what makes them keep their distance. Maybe they used to be closer, until one said something about the other's granddaughter being a little gordura, fattish, and the other thought, who is she to think she's so perfect when she doesn't even have any grandchildren or even a husband and mine has to repair the screen to keep the cats out of her crawlspace and grind and paint her railings every spring and I'll be damned if she's going to come sit on my stoop.

Or maybe they are just being neighbours.

If I step out onto my back balcony and my neighbour is out on his, I tilt
my chair toward the trees so I'm not staring right at him.

Sometimes we talk -- from our balconies. If we were to go into each other's kitchen, we'd be alarmed by just how much you can see from the other side. When there's not enough space for privacy you have to invent it by pretending.

Now it's cool out. Dry leaves whisper along the cold sidewalk. The chrysanthemums are fading. I wonder if visiting hours are over, or if the neighbour ladies take it inside for the winter. Maybe they'll suspend the good balconies make good neighbours motto and drink coffee and eat little yellow Portuguese custard tarts in one kitchen or the other.

Until next spring, when they'll emerge in front of their doors, like crocuses, or cats on mats.

(my apologies for blurry photos!)

Mile End Street Life

2008-10-08T14:12:00.001-04:00

Jacques Ferland, a gnomelike figure in a baseball cap and mirror shades from the dollar store, bounded up our steep front steps several times a week for years. He banged on the door with the urgency of a special delivery messenger. If we didn't answer right away he tapped the glass with a key or a quarter. Toc, toc, toc, toc!

His knock made us scramble out of our third floor apartment and down the stairs, shoelaces trailing. Monsieur Ferland was the bearer of a vital message: move the car this instant or pay. His knock meant the Ville de Montreal parking patrol was minutes away from handing out a ticket for obstructing the street cleaner.

Stripes of triplexes line our street like Neapolitan ice cream flavours and Monsieur Ferland made it his duty to match cars to apartments; he knew that we belonged to the 20-year-old gray Volkswagen Fox.

Up and down the block, Monsieur Ferland saved his neighbours from $42 parking tickets, inspiring devotion along the way. He hasn't often owned a car himself but he's drawn to them; he's worked as a tire changer at Canadian Tire and as a truck driver and if you ever pop your hood he materializes at your elbow like a cat who's heard the sound of the can opener.

I don't remember learning his name. It seems like everyone has always known who he was. We all call him Monsieur Ferland as if he's the teacher in the classroom of Waverly Street. After people move away, he's the one they reminisce about when they mention Waverly. When they come back to the block and bump into him within minutes, they talk about it as if they've seen Leonard Cohen on Marianne. "Guess who I saw outside?" they say, faces glowing. "Monsieur Ferland!"

Monsieur Ferland moved into an apartment in a Waverly Street triplex with his wife and teenaged children in 1970, long before Mile End was a trendy place to live, before willowy students started selling cupcakes from a table on the corner, before local designers offering purses made out of recycled vinyl took over the storefronts, before the laundromat turned into a restaurant that serves duck ravioli in cream sauce. The rent was $75.

He and his wife had to leave their original apartment six years ago when the landlord decided to renovate. Monsieur Ferland managed to find a flat for rent on the other side of the street. His son and daughter share a place next door, where his granddaughter lives with her young son.

A great-grandfather, Monsieur Ferland is Waverly Street's tiny patriarch. He grew up in the English neighbourhood of Pointe St-Charles, speaking English with his neighbours and French at home. I imagine him as a kid on the stoop, wearing one of those caps that newspaper boys wear in old movies, but instead of shouting, "Extra, extra, read all about it," the young Monsieur Ferland says "Regarde ça, les Michauds got a new char," or "Attention au chien là, he bites." Playfully bilingual he has a puckish way of saying "Bonjour!" when you say hello and "Good day!" if you greet him in French.

For years he helped out at Café Olimpico, bussing coffee glasses, hauling bags of garbage out to the curb, bolting down the bike racks in the spring and removing them in the fall. He had jobs at both neighbourhood laundromats where he got attention for his personalized service.

"I used to deliver the laundry," he says. "I walked around with my red wagon. A lot of people who played on TV brought me their wash and Daniel Lavoie, a singer who lives in Outremont, he did, too."

His love of cars and his observant, helpful nature made him the public enemy of parking tickets. What began as a service neighbours paid him for, turned into a vocation. "Somebody around here had to go away in the winter and said, 'If I leave you the key will you start my car?' After that I started with the tickets. When I saw the city guy coming, I'd ring the bell. People appreciated what I did. One time I got a ticket." He reports this with the amazement such a shocking event deserves. "The city guys said to me, 'Monsieur, was that your car? We didn't know. We wouldn't have given you a ticket if we'd known!'"

But this summer Monsieur Ferland is not on parking patrol the way he used to be. He's had a number of small strokes and has been in and out of the hospital with a heart condition. His five-foot frame is even slighter than it used to be and his walk is less jaunty. "I can't do it now," he says with regret. "Not because I don't want to. I just can't. The doctor says I have to take it easy."

This is a blow. Not just the throw-your-money-out-the-window expense of the tickets that pile up as soon as street cleaning season begins. The absence of Monsieur Ferland's toc-toc-toc at the door hints at the end of an era. He's been looking out for us as long as we've been here and Waverly without the committed supervision of Monsieur Ferland feels unwelcoming, like a street without trees.

It was a different street when we first moved in. We were the new kids on the block and paid $162.50 each in rent, before our 94-year-old landlady, Mrs. Murphy, died and we bought the ramshackle building. In the old days, back in the mid-90s, the café was full of old Italian men and the walls were yellow from cigarette smoke and it was known as Open Da Night because of the faded letters over the door that proclaimed it open day and night. We were young then, back before everybody in Mile End was young, and Monsieur Ferland was here to show us how this urban street packed with triplexes was actually a village.

Even though he's supposed to take it easy, Monsieur Ferland still makes his rounds to the corner stores, the café, and back. He beetles up and down the sidewalk many times a day. "I have to keep in shape!" he says. He's not allowed to haul out all the garbage from the café anymore, but on garbage night, if I forget, he pulls my garbage can out to the curb. The next morning, I find it stowed underneath the steps again, as if by elves.

One day this summer he wanders by with a piece of wood and a hammer to fix the arm rest of an old church pew that sits outside the café. "Everybody sees it but nobody does anything," he points out. Little do the smokers know that they have him to thank for eliminating splinters.

When I don't see Monsieur Ferland for a few days, sitting on my front steps isn't the same. The corner seems blank. I start to worry. Then, one morning, the doorbell rings and there he is. I know it's not the parking, the car is sitting in front of the building in a good, unticketable spot, something which Monsieur Ferland likes to refer to as "une belle place."

"I was in the hospital," he tells me. "They can't get my heart right. I say to the doctor, 'if you can't fix my heart, I can go to Canadian Tire for a boost.'" He's cracking jokes, but he's not here just to chat.

"Did you find something I left for you?" he asks. He'd discovered a pair of sunglasses next to our car and deposited them at our front door. I'd noticed them folded carefully on the doorsill and suspected him of putting them there.

They weren't mine, not this time, but that's not the point. If I had dropped my glasses, or anything important, Monsieur Ferland would be the one to find them, and bring them home.

Postscript: That was the last time Monsieur Ferland rang our doorbell. He died a month later. Jacques Ferland, 1933-2008.

This portrait of Monsieur Ferland also appears in issue 8 of carte blanche, the literary review of the Quebec Writers' Federation, at www.carte-blanche.org and in the journal Le Bathyscaphe.

Monsieur Ferland

Pendant des années, Jacques Ferland, un homme aux allures de gnome coiffé invariablement d’une casquette de baseball et arborant des lunettes de soleil sorties tout droit du magasin à un dollar, montait notre escalier plusieurs fois par semaine et venait taper frénétiquement à notre porte comme s’il avait un message urgent à livrer. Si nous ne répondions pas tout de suite, il frappait alors sur la vitre avec une clé ou une pièce de 25 cents. Toc, toc,toc.

Quand il frappait, nous descendions à toute vitesse de notre appartement du troisième sans même prendre le temps d’attacher nos lacets. Monsieur Ferland était porteur d’un message vital: déplacer votre voiture tout de suite ou bien vous devrez payer l’amende. En frappant de la sorte, il annonçait que le préposé au stationnement n’était qu’à quelques minutes de la maison, prêt à verbaliser tous ceux dont la voiture stationnée en zone interdite empêchait le nettoyage des rues.

Notre rue est bordée de triplex multicolores et Monsieur Ferland jugeait de son devoir de savoir à quel appartement correspondait chaque voiture. C’est ainsi qu’il savait que notre voiture était une Volkswagen Fox grise.

Monsieur Ferland a épargné aux habitants de la rue des amendes de 42 dollars avec un grand dévouement. Rarement propriétaire d’une voiture au cours de son existence, il était néanmoins attiré par les autos. Longtemps, il a travaillé à changer les pneus des voitures au garage Canadian Tire ; il a aussi été conducteur de camions. Si jamais il nous advenait d’ouvrir le capot de notre auto, aussitôt il surgissait à nos côtés à la manière d’un chat qui entend ouvrir une boîte de nourriture pour chat.

Je ne me souviens pas comment j’ai appris son nom; il me semble que tout le monde a toujours su qui il était. Nous l’appelions tous Monsieur Ferland, comme s’il était le maître d’école de la rue Waverly. Si, après avoir déménagé, une personne mentionne la rue Waverly, c’est lui qu’elle évoque. De même, si cette personne revient dans le quartier et tombe sur lui, presque tout de suite elle en reparle comme si elle avait vu une vedette. «Devine qui j’ai vu dehors, disait-elle alors, le visage illuminé : Monsieur Ferland !»

Monsieur Ferland a emménagé en 1970 dans un appartement d’un triplex de la rue Waverly avec sa femme et ses enfants adolescents, bien avant que le Mile End soit un quartier tendance, bien avant que des étudiants aient commencé à vendre des gâteaux au coin de la rue ; bien avant que des innovateurs locaux se soient installés devant les magasins pour y vendre des porte-monnaie en vinyle recyclé ; bien avant que la buanderie ne se soit transformée en un restaurant servant des raviolis au canard dans une sauce crémeuse. Son loyer était de 75$.

Lui et sa femme ont dû quitter leur appartement initial il y a six ans, lorsque le propriétaire a décidé de faire des rénovations. Monsieur Ferland a réussi à trouver un appartement à louer de l’autre côté de la rue. Son fils et sa fille habitent à côté, là où sa petite-fille vit avec son jeune fils.

Arrière-grand-père, Monsieur Ferland est le patriarche en miniature de la rue Waverly. Il a grandi dans le milieu anglophone de Pointe-Saint-Charles, parlant anglais avec ses voisins et français chez lui. Je me l’imagine gamin sur son perron portant une casquette comme les livreurs de journaux dans les vieux films, mais au lieu de crier : «Dernières nouvelles», le jeune Monsieur Ferland disait: «Regarde-ça, les Michaud got a new char», ou: « Attention au chien là, he bites». Taquinant le bilinguisme, il a une façon malicieuse de dire «Bonjour !» quand on lui dit «Salut !» et «Good day !» si on le salue en français.

Pendant des années, il a travaillé au Café Olimpico, à s’occuper des tasses de café, à sortir les sacs de déchets, à installer les porte-vélos au printemps et à les enlever en automne. Il travaillait aussi aux deux buanderies du quartier, où l’on remarquait son attention personnalisée.

«C’est moi qui livrait le linge, dit-il. Je faisais le tour du quartier avec ma charrette rouge. Beaucoup de gens qui étaient à la télé m’apportaient leur linge et Daniel Lavoie, un chanteur qui habite Outremont, lui aussi.»

Son amour des autos, sa nature observatrice et serviable en ont fait l’ennemi numéro 1 des contraventions pour stationnement illégal. Ce qui avait commencé comme un service rétribué s’est transformé en vocation. «Quelqu’un dans le coin devait s’absenter pendant l’hiver et m’a dit: ‘Si je te laisse ma clé, est-ce que tu feras démarrer ma voiture ?’ Après ça, j’ai commencé avec les contraventions. Quand je voyais le préposé de la ville s’approcher, je sonnais ma clochette. Les gens appréciaient ce que je faisais. Une fois, j’ai eu une contravention.» Il rapporte cela avec tout l’étonnement que mérite un événement choquant de la sorte. «Le gars de la ville m’a dit: ‘Monsieur, c’était votre voiture ? On ne savait pas. On ne vous aurait pas donné de contravention si on avait su !»

Mais, cet été, Monsieur Ferland ne patrouille plus pour prévenir les automobilistes en faute comme c’était le cas auparavant. Une série de petites attaques cardiaques l’ont conduit à l’hôpital. Il est de retour dans le quartier, mais du haut de ses cinq pieds il est encore plus fragile qu’avant et son pas est moins assuré. «Je n’y arrive plus maintenant, dit-il avec regret, ce n’est pas que je ne veux plus, mais que je ne peux plus. Le docteur me dit que je dois y aller doucement.»

C’est un coup dur. Pas seulement parce qu’on va se ruiner à payer des piles d’amendes dès que la saison de nettoyage des rues va commencer. Mais parce que l’absence du toc-toc-toc de Monsieur Ferland marque la fin d’une époque. Il s’est occupé de nous depuis que nous sommes ici et la rue Waverly sans la surveillance régulière de Monsieur Ferland est aussi peu accueillante qu’une rue sans arbres.

C’était une rue différente quand nous avons emménagé. Nous étions nouveaux dans la rue et nous payions chacun 162,50 $ de loyer, avant que notre propriétaire âgée de 94 ans meure et que nous achetions l’immeuble délabré. Dans le temps, vers le milieu des années 90, le café était plein de vieux Italiens et les murs étaient jaunes de fumée de cigarettes. Il était connu sous le nom de Open Da Night à cause des lettres à demi effacées au-dessus de la porte qui proclamaient l’ouverture jour et nuit. Nous étions jeunes alors, bien avant que tous les habitants du Mile End le soient. Et Monsieur Ferland était là pour nous montrer comment cette rue urbaine pleine de triplex était en réalité un village.

Même s’il est censé y aller doucement, Monsieur Ferland continue de faire sa ronde aux dépanneurs et au café. Il s’affaire le long des trottoirs plusieurs fois par jour. «Il faut que je me tienne en forme, fait-il remarquer.»

On ne lui permet plus de sortir les déchets du café, mais le soir des ordures, si j’oublie, il tire ma poubelle jusqu’au bord du trottoir. Le lendemain matin, je la retrouve sous l’escalier, comme si des lutins étaient passés par là.

Un jour cet été il se promène avec un morceau de bois et un marteau pour réparer l’appuie-bras d’un ancien banc d’église à l’extérieur du café. «Tout le monde le voit, mais personne ne s’en occupe, fait-il remarquer.» Et les fumeurs ne se rendent pas compte que c’est grâce à lui qu’ils évitent les échardes.

Si je ne vois pas Monsieur Ferland pendant quelques jours, être assise au pied de mon escalier ne me semble pas pareil. Le coin de la rue semble vide. Je commence à m’inquiéter. Puis, un matin, la sonnette retentit et le voilà. Je sais que ce n’est pas pour le stationnement : la voiture est garée en face de l’immeuble à un endroit sans problème, une position que Monsieur Ferland aime à appeler «une belle place.»

«J’étais à l’hôpital, me dit-il. Ils ne peuvent pas soigner mon cœur. J’ai dit au docteur : Si vous ne pouvez pas réparer mon cœur, je peux aller me faire survolter chez Canadian Tire.» Il plaisante, mais il n’est pas seulement venu pour bavarder.

«Avez-vous trouvé quelque chose que j’ai laissé pour vous ? » me demande-t-il. Il avait trouvé une paire de lunettes de soleil à côté de notre auto et l’avait laissée sur le pas de notre porte. Je l’avais remarquée, soigneusement repliée sur le seuil, et je l’avais soupçonné de l’y avoir posée.

Elle n’était pas à moi, pas cette fois-ci, mais la question n’est pas là. Si j’avais laissé tomber mes lunettes, ou un objet important, c’est Monsieur Ferland qui les aurait trouvés et me les aurait rapportés.

Post-scriptum: C’est la dernière fois que Monsieur Ferland a appuyé sur notre sonnette. Il est mort un mois plus tard. Jacques Ferland, 1933-2008.

Pigeon Man

2008-09-24T09:33:00.000-04:00

Every day, late in the afternoon, in the alley between Parc Avenue and Jeanne Mance, John takes his position near the dumpsters, and waits for his flock.

Pigeons flutter down from the rooftops and wires and flap up from the pavement where they've been pecking at stray sesame seeds. They whir through the air to land on his wrists and knees.

John pulls a peanut from the pouch around his waist and cracks it open. A white speckled bird on his hand bobs for the nut in the shell. John murmurs to it and strokes its neck.

Two small blond Hasidic boys stop and watch , fascinated, until their father pulls them away.

Other people aren't intrigued. "He must be so dirty with them all over him like that," remarks a 14-year-old girl who says he's been on that corner with the pigeons for as long as she can remember.

"People think pigeons are dirty," John shrugs. "They're dirty because people are dirty. People spit, throw garbage on the ground and the pigeons walk in it. I wash my hands after I touch them," he gestures with a yellowed thumbnail. "They don't spread disease.

"I've had warnings. It's against the law to feed pigeons in Montreal. But I like to feed them. It's my hobby."

John wears a yellow windbreaker and has a trim white beard. His grey hair curls out from under his baseball cap. His standards of cleanliness might not be everyone's but apart from the birds cloaking his arms and legs, he's neat and self-contained. He's lived on this alley, in the apartment building next to St-Viateur Bagels, for 25 years. In addition to the alley full of pigeons, he has two pairs of doves at home. He's originally from Hungary and says dove like the past tense of dive.

John speaks quietly and to hear him you have to get close which means getting into pigeon space. The pigeons hover at elbow height, wondering if I, too, might offer something as enticing as peanuts. One flaps against me and I jump at the surprising feathery touch and wave my arm so it won't land on me.

They are iridescent gray, or soft purplish brown, or white with speckles, they're beautiful and grimy like the alley.

All different colours of pigeons perch on John's shoulders, arms and hat, and their wiry red talons curl around his hand.

The owner of the St-Viateur Bagels, Joe Morena, strides by without a glance.

"He doesn't like me," John says. "He doesn't want me to feed them. But they come for the seeds from the bagels," he explains. "People eat their bagels, the seeds fall down, that's it."

If he didn't feed the pigeons, wouldn't there be fewer of them?

"Maybe a few less," John concedes. "But you can't get rid of them. They know where the food is."

He's not inclined to give up his hobby, even if it's unpopular with one of the street's most prominent entrepreneurs and also against the law. He goes through about eight pounds of peanuts a week during his regular shift. "I'm here from 4:00 to 8:00," he says. "They wait for me."

Sometimes John can be seen arriving at the lane behind his apartment by bicycle. He walks his bike through the patch where pigeons are scavenging for seeds. He hates the cars that kill them by speeding down the alley. He takes his time and looks down fondly as the pigeons crowd around his ankles.

Voice of the Tree

2008-09-02T15:53:00.001-04:00

On St-Viateur East, in the shadow of an old factory building, a tree has a small sign around its slender trunk. It is part announcement, part polite plea heralding the tree's point of view. "The tree says: 'There is now, at the corner of St-Viateur East and St-Dominique Streets, a slew of bike racks for you to lock your bicycle. Why not take a few seconds and use them? I thank you!'"

In the square of earth around the tree, there is a tiny flower garden full of carefully kept marigolds, geraniums, nasturtiums, tall grasses and daisies. Along the block between Casgrain and St-Dominique there are three more trees with signs and neatly tended squares of garden around them.

On a recent Monday morning, Diane Boyer was kneeling on the sidewalk, deadheading the flowers and tending to the plants. She wore gardening gloves and knee protectors and had a bucket of gardening tools she moved with her from square to square.

A man wandered over to say good morning to her. "I'm not awake yet," he said, looking like he wanted a cup of coffee. "Gilles is a woodworker," Diane explained. "He donated the bamboo and made the fences." She pointed to the tiny fence posts protecting the flowers.

"We just had some good news," she continued. "There's an Eco-Quartier contest about embellishing your neighbourhood," she said, using the French word for beautify. "And we won! Helen Fotopulos, the mayor of the borough, is going to come give us a plaque."

Diane has lived in the building, which was once a piano factory and then a shirt factory, for 11 years. She shares her fourth-floor loft with her cat Picolo who has extra toes on each paw and stalks around with big-footed entitlement. Diane has plucked many sewing pins, relics from the shirt manufacturer, out from between the hardwood floor planks. Her sunny space features a purple painted leather couch and bright blue, green and red walls adorned with wooden sculptures.

"I paint, draw, sculpt and grow plants," said Diane, whose day job is coordinating dubbing at a sound studio. "I used to have a community garden but I gave up my plot and I thought this space in front would be my garden. My neighbours pitched in and lent me hoses. I hook up to a water outlet at the loading dock on Casgrain and when I connect two hoses together they reach all the way to St-Dominique."

Since she started the gardens in late June, people have been receptive to the trees' message about using bike racks instead of locking up to the tree trunks. As a result, the trees are doing better. Diane indicated a spot where the tree bark had previously been worn away and showed how a fresh sprig was now poking out of the same trunk.

"The only thing we can't control is the cats and dogs who wander at night. The cats use the gardens as a litter box. But there's very little damage."

As Diane adjusted one of the laminated signs on a tree, two women walked out of the building. "You're the one who did these gardens?" they asked. "They're great!"

Diane smiled and plucked a dry leaf off a daisy.

Our Lady of the Cherries

2008-08-15T09:43:00.000-04:00

Once I start looking I notice it everywhere. Urban fruit.

The postage stamps of green along the streets and alleys of Mile End are home to trees bursting with plums, pears, apples, crabapples, cherries, even surprising peaches -- and in one special spot, luminous and unlikely, lemons (more on the lemons soon).

It's almost magical for fruit trees to thrive in this dense patchwork of row housing, street and sidewalk where the tiny yards are only 25 feet wide and often just 10 feet deep.

Ivan Apotic has a white mustache and a watchful look and stands in his front yard like a security guard on duty. I've walked by him at the his end of the block many times. His manner is not inviting, but today I am on an urban fruit discovery mission.

I ask if those are cherries on his tree with the shiny dark bark. He makes a face and tilts his hand from side to side.

"Not sweet. Too much water. Rain." The next thing I know he's stepping over the feathery cosmos to pick some. He gives me a handful of soft fruit. They are not the dark colour of bing cherries but that special bright red that says poison. I'm hesitant. Maybe this is the security guard's way of discouraging intruders. Bravely, I taste one. Sour but juicy. I can imagine a tangy sour cherry jam.

It turns out Ivan is not unfriendly but his English isn't great. When I ask where he's from originally, he says, "Religion? Catholic." That's when the shrine behind his cherry tree comes into focus for me. I've half-noticed this virgin in the shade, framed by her slender string of lights, every time I walk up the street. Ivan must have been the one to put it up.

Ivan has lived on Waverly for 33 years. He planted his cherry tree 18 years ago. Originally from Slovenia (I asked again), he used to work at furniture and fur coat factories in Montreal.

As Waverly Street overflows with young professionals there are fewer and fewer residents like Ivan who've been here for decades. You're more likely to see a baby jogger or a Mclaren stroller or an organic vegetable basket next to the front steps than a shrine.

I used to hear a cricket under the apple tree across the street through my open window on summer nights. It's amazing to hear a cricket in the city. Somehow its resonant chirp created a vaulting cathedral of space.

They cut down the apple tree and bricked over the rug-sized lawn that used to surround it. I can't hear a cricket from here anymore. Maybe there's one under Ivan's cherry tree, in its tiny oasis, next to the virgin.