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.

*

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

Neighbours

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

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.