April

 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

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

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

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

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

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

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On ice

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.