Call of the alley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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Maple Leaf Hat and Cap Mfg. Co.
5758 Boul. St. Laurent
Montreal