From a poem by Patrick Kavanagh

Living room at 4350 Montclair Avenue

. . . posterity has no use
For anything but the soul

        --Patrick Kavanagh
        "If Ever You Go to Dublin Town"

4350 Montclair Avenue, Fall 2010

Our old home at 4350 Montclair Avenue, from 1962/63 to 2007...

Blackie

This is Blackie, a cat I found in our barn at The Cedars when he was only a few days old. I called him Black Lightning, because he moved so fast that I couldn't catch him. He has tufts of fur on the ends of his ears, which immediately endeared him to me. I loved that cat from when I first saw him.

Blackie loves a party, he loves people visiting the house. He's a sociable cat, extroverted when it comes to parties. He also eats at the table with whoever is there. We had Blackie until CZ developed asthma and he moved to my mother's house on Montclair. My mother said "He can't come here, I have a cat; put him down." A few days later I drove him over to her house and announced he was now living with her; "Blackie," I said, "this is your new home." He didn't object, he was always upwardly mobile. He soon became my mother's favourite. So, from the barn to our house, to our house in the city, to the big house on Montclair, to an apartment in Toronto, and next (as my mother enters a retirement home) to my brother and sister-in-law's home! What a character!

Here's Blackie waiting for his breakfast, I think it was French toast... could he chow down!

Here's Blackie (from his life in the country) with a birthday card in front of him, waiting to be opened. I think Blackie's a Taurus, like me.

4350 Montclair Avenue

My mother (holding our cat Simey) and Graham Nichols (my stepfather), whom she married in May 1963. The playroom at 4350 Montclair Avenue.

Annie Holden, my mother's cousin from Woodstock, Ontario visiting us, probably in 1967 for Expo 67. Photo taken in the backyard at Montclair.

My brother, my mother, and me (holding Simey, our cat), in the living room at Montclair. Around 1967.

Our Last Day at 4350 Montclair Avenue, March 23, 2007, 5 p.m.

I returned to the empty house at 5 p.m. and took some of these photographs. I had been there earlier in the day when the movers arrived. The photographs of the house, furnished, were taken the previous Christmas, 2006. The group photo, from left to right, is my mother, myself, and my sister-in-law Kathy. This was our family home from spring 1962 to March 23, 2007.