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.