An hour ago I was walking on Westmore Avenue, on my way to Pharmaprix on Westminster Avenue, when a cardinal flew across the road; maybe he's here for the winter, or maybe cardinals stay all winter. Westmore was always my favourite street in this area, large lots, nicely kept Cape Cod houses, and quiet. In fact, in 1997 when we were looking at homes we looked at two houses on this block of Westmore; this was two years after the 1995 referendum on separation (we call the topic the "neverendum") and the bottom had fallen out of the real estate market; home owners were accepting rock bottom offers for their homes; what else could they do if they wanted to sell their home? Political instability will destroy the economy because business hates instability. Anyhow, those inexpensive homes from 1997 are now worth six or seven times what people paid for them, but it's almost thirty years later and house prices across the country have become prohibitively high.
One day, years ago, my mother commented that back in the early 1950s my Uncle Bill lived on Westmore. I checked it out in Lovell's Montreal City Directory and there was his name, living in the house where the cardinal flew over the street earlier today. I think he and my Auntie Lill and possibly his son Bill Jr., stayed for a year in this house before buying a home in Ville St-Laurent. My mother was never critical of Young Bill but she was also never critical of anyone in the family.
My cousin, Young Bill, as opposed to Old Bill who was my uncle (this is how they were referred to), had been in the army in World War Two and had been part of the Canadian army that liberated Holland; his mother would speak to my mother and read her letters from Young Bill that described in detail the horrors of war. Young Bill was alcoholic and returned to Canada with possibly/probably undiagnosed PTSD; maybe when he was younger he also had Asperger's disease or ADHD, maybe that's how he would be diagnosed today. People were critical of Young Bill for his alcoholism that seems to have consumed his life. I've heard stories about him falling down drunk in the streets . . . I don't know what became of his wife, the mother of his daughter Jo-Ann, she was never mentioned, but Uncle Bill and Auntie Lill raised Jo-Ann and she was very close to her grandparents and, as far as I know, estranged from her father.
I haven't mentioned any of this before now; I didn't know Jo-Ann when she lived in Montreal but I got to know her on Facebook. I am sad to say that she died about a year ago. I never mentioned her father, Young Bill, to her, I felt he was persona non grata.
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This is the house at 5265 Westmore Avenue that Uncle Bill rented in 1950,
back then it would have been typical of other Cape Cod cottages, not renovated like it is now.
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This is the grave of Lillian and Bill Morrissey at Mount Royal Cemetery;
their son, William Chipman Morrissey, is also buried here. He died on 27 February 1990.
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| William Morrissey in 1973 |
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