Cote St Luc shopping centre on 24 January 2012

 

Avonmore Avenue in January 2015

“Can you take me back where I came from, brother can you take me back?”

Avonmore Avenue. This was my parents' first home after they married in 1940, they lived at Apartment #4, at 5515 Avonmore Avenue; it was their home for the next ten years. During this time they lived only a few blocks from my paternal grandmother's home at 2226 Girouard Avenue. That's how things worked in the old days, you didn't move far from where your parents and siblings lived, your parents didn’t live far from where their parents lived. You stuck together as a family but this isn't possible anymore. My parents lived on Avonmore; it is a short street, it is a crescent and easy to miss as you walk in this area. This whole area, including Avonmore and Clanranald, always felt like it was in the past, to walk there was to walk in the past, it a neighborhood of apartments built in the 1930s and 1940s and, for me, it always had a quality of those years; it was also Avon which is a Celtic word for “river”, and it always suggested to me a place of dreams and mystery, a place where the days and nights were long. And then, in 1950 when I was born, my father was told by his doctor “you can’t live in a 3 1/2 room apartment with two small children” and so we moved a few blocks and lived with my maternal grandmother on Girouard Avenue, and that’s where we lived until around 1953. It was after the war and places to rent were still difficult to find, and if you did find an apartment or a flat to rent you had to pay the landlord for the key, it was a way the landlord could make some money on the side. Then, around 1953, we moved to one of Hoolahan’s flats on Oxford Avenue where my father’s brother, my Uncle Herb, already lived and he helped get us a place at 4614 Oxford, just a few doors from where Uncle Herb and his family lived. The new place was spacious, hard wood floors, a fireplace, living room, dining room, three bedrooms, kitchen and bathroom, an unheated enclosed back porch, front and rear balconies, basement and garage. My God, it was (and still is) luxury living compared to the 3 1/2 room apartment on Avonmore that had a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, and a single bedroom. 

These photographs were taken on the afternoon of 06 January 2015.

5515 Avonmore Avenue is on the right

5515 Avonmore Avenue

Late January 2018

 

Garden on New Year’s Day

 Morning, 1 January 2024.

Out walking this January morning

 

Our 30 cm snowfall

Here is our 30 cm snowfall as seen this morning, several days after it fell. Soon the city workers will be out there plouging and trucking away the snow; it's been worse than this, one year we had so much snow that it was difficult for the city to find a place to dump the snow. It's also getting colder over the next few days, perhaps -20 C cold. Still, there is only seven weeks of winter left, the end is in sight, and it hasn't been all that bad a winter so far.

The garden under snow

There's nothing you can do in the garden when it's winter and -25 C (or colder), except stay in-doors, read a book, watch Morse on Vermont Public Television, listen to the radio, cook a meal, make your home cosy, keep the heat at 23 C., wait it out. It's difficult to have any enthusiasm to go outside. The good news is that spring is just two months away. We can do it! We're tough! We're Canadians!

The synchronicity of dates

It's mid-January 2020 and winter has set in, it's -18 C today. So far, the winter hasn't been all that bad, meaning that while we've had some snow the temperature has hovered around -5 C to + 2 or 3 C. That has now ended... 

In my experience important events happen in clusters of dates, these are meaningful for specific people; there is a synchronicity of dates. For instance, two friends were born on January 15; they are Audrey Keyes (Veeto) who died last October, she was my first friend in life, someone I knew from age four or five. The second friend was Artie Gold who I met in the early 1970s, Artie was my first poet friend. Artie died in February 2007. A third friend, Paul Leblond, was born on January 16; he died suddenly in 2015. My friend Pat McCarty, with whom I traveled the length of California and down into Baha California in April 1976, died eleven years ago, on January 18, 2007. Pat was a truly lovely person and I still miss him. I've just learned that Pat McCarty's birthday is January 21, 1947, this is the same date as my wife's birthday. A final date, January 14, 1965 is when I began keeping a diary, something I have done on a daily basis since then, it has changed my life, it has helped to fulfill my life. All of these significant occurrences are clustered around the mid-January dates. The synchronicity of dates gives cohesion and some meaning to life.

And now we turn to winter! Mid-January winter photographs. 

Here are photos taken yesterday, on Greene Avenue in Westmount and then on the drive home along Cote St. Antoine Road.

Pinocchio outside the old Nicholas Hoare Bookstore on Greene Avenue

Walking along Greene Avenue

The Bistro on the Avenue is gone; we had many happy times there over the years, dinners with friends and family and with fellow members of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal

Years ago the old Westmount post office, on the corner of Greene Avenue and Blvd. de Maisonneuve  was closed and then made into boutiques, stores

This is Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, Leonard Cohen's family synagogue; it is where
his song "You Want it Darker" was recorded

Murray Hill Park; I suppose the green snow fencing is intended to keep people
from tobogganing down the hill

Fire Station/Caserne 34 between Decarie and Girouard

That's St. Augustine Catholic Church on the right, just after Girouard Avenue;
the church closed and it is now River Side Church 

That's the Loyola Campus of Concordia University, almost at the end of
Sherbrooke Street West, almost home