"I Years had been from Home" by Emily Dickinson

Childhood home, 4614 Oxford Avenue, Montreal

I Years had been from Home
And now before the Door
I dared not enter, lest a Face
I never saw before

Stare solid into mine
And ask my Business there —
“My Business but a Life I left
Was such remaining there?”

I leaned upon the Awe —
I lingered with Before —
The Second like an Ocean rolled
And broke against my ear —

I laughed a crumbling Laugh
That I could fear a Door
Who Consternation compassed
And never winced before.

I fitted to the Latch
My Hand, with trembling care
Lest back the awful Door should spring
And leave me in the Floor —

Then moved my Fingers off
As cautiously as Glass
And held my ears, and like a Thief
Fled gasping from the House —

Renovations at 2226 Girouard Avenue in October 2009

My heart went out of visiting Girouard Avenue when the renovations began. Whatever there was of the place as it used to be is now gone. The future has arrived and it has little to do with the past. I hope the new residents, in their brand new condo, will enjoy living there, but my interest was solely in family history.

Thoughts of Girouard Avenue

Back porch at 2226 Girouard Avenue, my grandmother and my cousin Herb,
spring 1938

My parents worked hard and ensured their children had the opportunity to get ahead. Even so, due to my father's bad health, we lived with my grandmother and other relatives on Girouard Avenue for two years in the early 1950s. We were not the first to return there to live. I could make a list of the different family members who lived there over the years. When my grandmother was planning to move--maybe it was the move to Girouard from St. Henry back in the mid-1920s--my father told her to get a smaller place so she wouldn't be able to take in so many family members. As it turned out, the flat on Girouard was bigger than ever. The door was always open to family members who needed a home, who needed a safe harbour.

Some families are still willing to take in relatives fallen on hard times, bad health, unemployment, or family crisis, but the "open door" seemed to happen more often in the past before a social safety net took over this function. If you had family or friends, you would never find yourself on the street, you’d never be homeless. In our family, this help was given by my grandmother; other families did the same thing for their relatives when they were in need.

As I remember it, homeless people in the past were almost all men who had fallen on hard times, often due to alcohol; we called them “rubby-dubs,” and I wonder if this word exists outside of Montreal and if it is derived from a French word? If you saw any homeless people, or beggars, in Montreal just a few decades ago they were mostly men and many of them were hopeless alcoholics. Now, there are many homeless people in Montreal. Not all sleep in the streets, many sleep in shelters, others crash for a few days in the apartments of friends, and you see a few pushing grocery carts full of plastic garbage bags containing their possessions through the streets, or sleeping in the entrance ways to stores that have closed for the night. Being homeless is now a possibility in many people’s lives, just as time spent incarcerated is a possibility for some people, almost an expected event. If one served time in prison in the past it was a terrible disgrace and you had brought shame on your family; now, especially in the United States, for many poor people, it is just a part of life.

Are people really all that much worse now than they used to be? Must so many people end up in prison? Maybe these people really are terrible, lost souls, that you want to avoid, or put in prison. Maybe using illegal drugs has made them outcasts from traditional society. Maybe our society has turned into something that would be shocking and incomprehensible to people just fifty or sixty years ago. They might recoil with horror at some of the changes in our contemporary society.

Recalling my grandmother’s home as a place of welcome, I believe that this is how memories and family cohesiveness is created. When family memories are loving and happy ones, then these memories are sustaining for us when we are having difficult times in our own lives. We remember the good times when the hard times seem overwhelming. That is when an address, like 2226 Girouard Avenue, a place remembered, enters into the geography of the soul and into the important memories in a family’s collective history.

(Yes, they were called "rubbies," that is "rubby-dubs," because they drank rubbing alcohol. I had forgotten this.)

Return to Girouard Avenue

Looking south on Girouard Avenue

(1) Return to Girouard Avenue 

When I returned to my grandmother’s flat at 2226 Girouard Avenue in May 2009, it felt as though no time at all had intervened since I was last there, that was also in May but forty years before. I had driven by the flat that day, as I often do, and noticed that the front door was open, there was an open house set up by a real estate agent. I rushed home and got my camera, and returned to a place that had meant so much to me my whole life. Entering the flat, it was as though only a few minutes had intervened since my last visit, so many years before. There was also a feeling of suspended animation as there had been no major renovations to the premises since it was built around 1900, and since 1966, when my grandmother died, there seemed to have been very little maintenance—the floors were now uneven, the door jambs crooked, the roof had leaked, and windows were threatening to fall out of the walls. Despite this, I felt “at home”; I was happy to have returned to this place that figures so much in my imaginal and psychic life. 

(2) It was in 1959... 

That day I took many photographs as I walked through the flat, I knew this would probably be my only visit there, and it was. The first room I entered had been my Aunt Mable’s bedroom where I can still remember sitting one afternoon on my father’s lap and learning how to spell, maybe I was three or four years old. Next was the living room where I often stood at the window and looked out at the street below—we were on the second floor — and one day in 1959 I counted eleven streetcars running along Girouard Avenue, for it was the last day there was streetcar service in Montreal. Here, too, was where my brother and I had visited our great aunts at Christmas just months after our grandmother had died; my Great Aunt Edna told us stories of the past, describing our grandparents’ wedding over seventy years before. I also entered what had been my grandmother’s bedroom; then the dining room; and as I walked down the long hallway to the rear of the flat I noticed the old claw foot bathtub in the bathroom; then my Great Aunt Essie’s bedroom; and finally I entered the kitchen and spare room off the kitchen where my great grandfather had lived his final years. All of these memories returned to me, including Bella, the cleaning lady my grandmother had come to the flat once a month in her old age; I remembered Bella on her hands and knees, with her nylons rolled down to her ankles, polishing the hardwood floors by hand and the smell of floor wax in the air. 

(3) Geography 

Girouard Avenue is on the eastern edge of NDG although it isn’t the true border where NDG begins and ends, but psychologically that border is Girouard. Driving south on Girouard, below Sherbrooke Street West, we pass my grandmother’s flat and then drive through an underpass at the bottom of the street; now we’re in Lower NDG and if you turn left from there onto St. Jacques you're headed in the direction of St. Henry, St. Cunegonde, Griffintown, Little Burgundy, or Point St. Charles. This journey is across the years but also across our collective emotions, a journey from the past that is frozen in a kind of suspended animation. 

(4) Dreams 

While I have often dreamed of the Girouard Avenue flat, it bothered me that usually my grandmother was absent in these dreams. Maybe one or both of the old great aunts would be there or the flat was empty, but only seldom was my grandmother present. I now see that it isn't only the people, it's the actual place that is important to me, and this includes and encompasses my relatives and ancestors who lived there, it encompasses all we've done as a family living at this one location for so many years. Not only was the flat itself important to me, it was my psychic centre, a place of dreams and poetry, a place of creativity, family, memory, and emotion. The Girouard flat was a place of the soul and I have manifested the soul’s vision in the poems I have written. We contribute to the world with our poetry, our creativity, our love, our enthusiasm, our spirit, and this is what I have tried to do in my writing and in my life. 

(5) Notre Dame de Grace 

Many people have their own “Girouard Avenue,” as such it is an archetype for that first home, that first idealized place where we grew up and where we had our first memories of childhood. It is a place for us that recalls the world of innocence. For many of us, it is the place where we first lived as we moved upward in social class, from St. Henry to Notre Dame de Grace, to the familiar "NDG," our new neighbourhood. Many of our parents never finished high school: my father dropped out of St. Leo’s Academy to help support his family after his father died; my mother went to the Mother House and learned shorthand, typing, and secretarial work. 

(6) The quiet zone that is old age 

I was a quiet child and did not need constant entertainment, or any entertainment, when I stayed at my grandmother’s. I never thought of her as being someone to play with, I went to her house and stayed the day and just naturally played on my own. I respected that she was old. I looked out the window; I played with little cars on a tea wagon; I sat and listened to the radio with my grandmother; one day, I asked her to play the piano for me and we sat on the piano bench, just inside the living room, and she played a few notes, and then stopped, she could no longer play. I accepted my days of relative inactivity at her home as normal, as what one did at one’s grandmother’s home. I knew she was old and that she did not do much, she drank tea and ate toast, she sat, she listened to the radio. This created in me a sense of what it is to be old, of the quiet zone that is old age. I still enter a quiet zone of my own, as I have done my whole life, and which was a gift from my grandmother to me.

News of the Book Launch

Monday evening's book launch for Girouard Avenue and Blue Poppy, at The Word book store on Milton in McGill Univrsity's student ghetto, was a big success. An excellent turn out, 40 to 50 people, readings from the books, excellent food, and a good time for all of us.

Here is Poetry Quebec's review of the book launch.

Thank you to Adrian King-Edwards who hosted the evening. Thank you to everyone who came!

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.