Book Launch on Monday, November 16

Coracle Press is pleased to announce new poetry books Girouard Avenue by Stephen Morrissey Blue Poppy by Ilona Martonfi Please join us for the book launch Monday, November 16, 2009 at 7:30 p.m. The Word 469, rue Milton 514-845-5640 Refreshments will be served Coracle Press: www.coraclepress.com

Farewell as you leave this place

Stained glass window above the front door at 2226 Girouard Avenue.

Our tour of 2226 Girouard Avenue has come to an end. I have other photographs from that visit last April, and I could add a few more photographs to this, but you've seen enough for now. To most people this visit will mean very little--or nothing--and why should it be any other way? For me, this was an exciting journey into the past.

When I returned to the old flat, it really felt as though no time at all had intervened since I was last there, back in 1969. It was as though I had left the place for just a few minutes and then returned, and in that intervening time the place had mysteriously fallen into the state it is now in, all in the blink of an eye. I suppose at some level, emotional or psychological, or spiritual, time doesn't exist except as chronological time. We grow older, the body wears out just like my old white 1994 Honda Civic that CZ named "Pete" after the abbreviated letters on the license plate. "Good old Pete" we say, personifying the car, making it a familar thing, not just a rusting metal vehicle that gets me back and forth to work. Pete is older and more rusted and I, too, am older and seem tired much of the time. That's the effect of chronological time. I think, also, of my old friend Audrey Keyes who I met again in 2005, after not seeing each other for over forty years. There she sat waiting for me that summer day outside of St. Viateur Bagel Restaurant on Monkland Avenue, near Oxford and only a few blocks west of Girouard, and we immediately recognized each other and began chatting away. Time did not seem to exist, not at the emotional and psychological level, but chronologically we were both forty years older.

There is an archetypal value to Girouard Avenue. Maybe it was the first street many of our families lived on as we moved upward in social class, from St. Henry to Notre Dame de Grace, to "NDG," our new neighbourhood. And people living in NDG love the neighbourhood. Girouard is on the eastern edge of NDG as we drive through the underpass at the bottom of the street and then you're in Lower NDG, turn left on St. Jacques and you're headed for St. Henry, St. Cunegonde, Griffintown, Little Burgundy, or Point St. Charles. That's where we came from, my mother born on Irene Street and my father on Marin, both in St. Henry.

We came up in the world, we were educated, we went to university while our parents never finished high school but our parents worked hard and made sure we would also get ahead, and we did. We valued education and we got good jobs and we became "somebodies" (relatively speaking). You begin on Girouard and you move up, to Hoolahan's flats on Oxford Avenue and Audrey and Bobby Keyes, and Mr. and Mrs. Keyes, are your neighbours, more Irish, Irish everywhere, Irish descendants, Irish names. It was either Irish, English, or Jewish; another friend, Ica Shainblum lived across the street and we all played together. A few doors south was Uncle Herbie and Auntie Dorothy's flat, and a few blocks east is Girouard where my grandmother, great Aunt Essie, and Auntie Mable lived, and later (in the early 1960s) my great Aunt Edna moved to Girouard. As I've said before, my parents and my brother and I also lived there in the early 1950s; and over the years, in the 1930s and 1940s, many other family members lived in the flat on Girouard. Even if you move up to the big house on Montclair Avenue, where I lived for thirteen years, you still have one foot in the old street, in the old neighbourhood, and you're proud of it.

So, Girouard Avenue is more than just a street, it is also a border between one neighbourhood and another, one social class and another, one period in our lives and another. It's a psychological border that we've crossed. If you drive north from St. Jacques (few call it St. James anymore) where Girouard begins, then along Girouard to Cote St. Luc Road, to where Girouard ends--it's not a long street--you've run the full extent of it. It's a journey of years and emotions and a journey from the past, frozen in a kind of suspended animation, like my grandmother's old flat.

How many times I have revisited the Girouard flat in dreams, usually my grandmother is absent, maybe one or both of the old great aunts are there. Or it's empty, no one home. So, this makes me think it isn't only the people, it's the place and the place includes and encompasses the people, the beloved relatives and ancestors, and it encompasses all we've done with our lives. I know I could sit down with any of the ancestors, if it were possible, even with great great and great great great grandparents and beyond the greats, as far into the past as one can journey, and it would still be family, flesh and blood, people I love. So, the place, 2226 Girouard Avenue, means all of this to me. And I say "God bless them all," no matter their social status or what they acomplished or didn't accomplish in life. God bless them. God bless them all.

P.S. Driving by the old flat this morning I see extensive work being done on the place. What I have presented here is the last of 2226 Girouard as it used to exist. I caught it just before the end. It will soon be gone.

Door and stairs, leaving 2226 Girouard

View from back porch

Top photo: my Auntie Ivy, then below is my Uncle Alex, holding their son Herb. Then my grandmother, Edith Sweeney Morrissey, on the same day, holding her new grandson, Herb Morrissey, winter or spring 1939. Then, below, here's the cover of my 1989 book, Family Album (Caitlin Press, Vancouver), taken back in 1953 on the same back porch on Girouard. That's me with my grandmother.

Below are other shots of this same porch, taken in April 2009.

Now we're back inside the flat and it's April 2009 again; this is a view of the lane and the back porch looking out the porch door from the kitchen.

Cover of Girouard Avenue (2009).

Lane behind Girouard in winter (two)

More photographs taken in the lane between Girouard and the street to the west of it. Winter 2009.

Girouard in winter

Lane behind Girouard in winter

I took these photographs a few months before the other interior photographs--it's January or February 2009--photos taken from the lane looking up at the flat.

Kitchen (two)

Above: The storage room.

Above: Looking from the kitchen to the hallway leading to the front of the flat.

Above and below: That's the storage room on the left, the door into the pantry, and the door to the back porch on the far right.

Kitchen and pantry

This and the photograph below are of the kitchen pantry.

Below: in the kitchen, open pantry door.

Below: in the kitchen, facing the hallway.

Below: the storage room off the kitchen.

Below: facing into the kitchen from the hallway.

Now we're in the kitchen at the back of the flat. There is a room to the left, a small room which leads to a door to stairs to the basement of the building. My grandmother's father slept in this room after he moved to Girouard. It was a storage room back in the 1940s-'50s-'60s, after he died, and I remember a red cardboard carton of six bottles of Cokes on the floor to the left as you entered the room. In the basement, my mother stored various things, including a coin collection, that someone stole. I remember visiting and eating in the kitchen in the late '50s, in the darkened flat, pork chops cut into pieces for me, mashed turnip and mashed potatoes, still among my favourite foods.

You can also see the pantry in the kitchen, as you can see in pretty bad shape now. There was an old khaki knap sack hanging in the pantry and, to the right of the pantry, is the door to the back gallery and a view of the lane from the second floor of the building. Quite a few family photos were taken on this gallery, long before it fell into such disrepair as it is in today. Some of these photographs are in my possession and whatever I have of them can be seen on this blog.

The days before...

And then, looking at these photograph, I think this is how people used to live, in the days before electronic gadgets had taken over our lives, when we didn't live on borrowed money, or have holidays in Cuba and take it for granted, and before most stuff in our stores was Made in China... These are the days before all of this. This flat, run down now, the floors crooked and the window frames rotting, exists in a kind of suspended animation of how things used to be. However, I can see that it was always, for me, a place of suspended animation. It was a place of the past, of the old, of memories, of family. It has always been a place of psychic importance for me, a psychic center, frozen in time, frozen in suspended animation.

How life in our society has changed. Much is better now, of course. We are materially more wealthy, medecine has improved, but sitting outside of the Eaton's Centre in downtown Montreal is a row of the homeless that we didn't have in Montreal in the past; our streets are congested with cars cars cars; and there seems to me to be a general diminishment of compassion for other people. We are all so smart now, but what of compassion? Many of us don't seem to care about other people anymore. We've become desensitized to the suffering of others, we don't care, we leave it up to government to do something about the poor, or worse, people get what they deserve and it's number one all the way, and "screw you buddy." Political correctness disallows comments about race, and justifiably so, and equality of the sexes is paramount, and justifiably so. Things have improved, but we've lost the human scale, compassion for others, the easy relaxed communion of people in everyday life has been lost to the necessity of working all the time. As a society we help others, the poor, the sick, the abandoned, they won't die in the street but we still make sure they won't be enjoying their life on welfare (we say: "not at my expense; why don't they get a job? why should I pay their way? screw those lazy bastards!"); as individuals, we've become selfish and ego-centric.

Great Aunt Essie's bedroom

How much smaller this room seemed to me when visiting in April than when I was there forty years ago... There was a bed, head against the wall on the left, and a bureau, but not really much else. For many years Essie worked at Tooke's factory which would have been several miles to walk, so she probably took a streetcar or bus to get there. In the mid-fifties, Tooke's pensioned her off saying that she hadn't carried her weight for years; that was when Tooke's was relocating in rural Quebec where wages could be reduced.

Bathroom

The first room on the left as you walk along the hall to the back of the flat. Not much has changed here. Some superficial painting, but the old claw-foot bathtub, the sink and medicine cabinet the same as I remember them. All pretty much as they were forty years ago, and forty years before that.

Hallway to kitchen

I remember this hallway, from the dining room to the kitchen, as being longer than it really is. The first room on the left is the bathroom, litle changed since I last visited in 1969. The next room is where my grandmother's sister, my great aunt Essie slept. I may have entered the room once, if ever, in all the years I visited Girouard, and I remember her giving me some money as a present, only once, it was a ten cent piece, a dime. Even then that wasn't much. I received a birthday card from her, addressed to Master Stephen Morrissey, the formal way of addressing a letter to an underage person. Essie was deaf and wore a hearing aid, she also had respiratory problems, at least I assume she did as she wore a mustard pack on her chest when she was ill. She moved to Girouard, I guess, when her father moved there in the late 1930s. In a way, she must have been quite a character in her own way or I wouldn't remember her as well as I do. The gesture of "zipping" up her lips and throwing away an imaginary key, indicating that she wouldn't tell something, and drinking her tea by pouring it in a suacer and sipping it, or drinking tea from a cup with her little finger protruding away from the cup, all were affectations that are memorable to this day. I don't remember her ever visiting or staying at my grandmothers's St. Eustache country cottage, I guess living at Girouard was as far as my grandmother was willing to go, as well as the country cottage was fairly small and there was no room for her. She worked at Tooke's factory most of her life, until they pensioned her off in the mid-1950s, they had been "carrying her" for many years they said. No pension, no severance pay, which is why in the old days being old without a pension and without family to support you meant poverty for many old people. I remember around 1968 seeing her sitting outside the former Steinberg's Grocery Store, corner of Melrose and Sherbrooke, next to the big post office, as I passed by on my way home on a city bus. I guess that's what she did with her days, go for a walk and sit in a public place. Essie died while still living at Girouard. God bless her.