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, 2009

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.

Bathroom

The first room on the left as you walk along the hall to the back of the flat. Not much has changed here. Some superficial painting, but the old claw-foot bathtub, the sink and medicine cabinet the same as I remember them. All pretty much as they were forty years ago, and forty years before that.

Hallway to kitchen

I remember this hallway, from the dining room to the kitchen, as being longer than it really is. The first room on the left is the bathroom, litle changed since I last visited in 1969. The next room is where my grandmother's sister, my great aunt Essie slept. I may have entered the room once, if ever, in all the years I visited Girouard, and I remember her giving me some money as a present, only once, it was a ten cent piece, a dime. Even then that wasn't much. I received a birthday card from her, addressed to Master Stephen Morrissey, the formal way of addressing a letter to an underage person. Essie was deaf and wore a hearing aid, she also had respiratory problems, at least I assume she did as she wore a mustard pack on her chest when she was ill. She moved to Girouard, I guess, when her father moved there in the late 1930s. In a way, she must have been quite a character in her own way or I wouldn't remember her as well as I do. The gesture of "zipping" up her lips and throwing away an imaginary key, indicating that she wouldn't tell something, and drinking her tea by pouring it in a suacer and sipping it, or drinking tea from a cup with her little finger protruding away from the cup, all were affectations that are memorable to this day. I don't remember her ever visiting or staying at my grandmothers's St. Eustache country cottage, I guess living at Girouard was as far as my grandmother was willing to go, as well as the country cottage was fairly small and there was no room for her. She worked at Tooke's factory most of her life, until they pensioned her off in the mid-1950s, they had been "carrying her" for many years they said. No pension, no severance pay, which is why in the old days being old without a pension and without family to support you meant poverty for many old people. I remember around 1968 seeing her sitting outside the former Steinberg's Grocery Store, corner of Melrose and Sherbrooke, next to the big post office, as I passed by on my way home on a city bus. I guess that's what she did with her days, go for a walk and sit in a public place. Essie died while still living at Girouard. God bless her.

Grandma's bedroom

Cupboard in the bedroom; the woodwork (now
painted over) is quite nice, elegant

That open door in the adjoining room
is the entrance from the stairs

Looking from the bedroom to the dining room

Window in my grandmother`s bedroom

These are all photographs of my grandmother's bedroom. Above, looking at the bedroom from the dining room. The others are of the cupboard in the room and the room in general.

There was an open house that I visited and took photographs of my grandmother`s last home, photos and visit took place in spring 2009. She lived here, on Girouard Avenue, from around 1924-25 to her passing in April 1965, and then her two sisters stayed on in the flat until 1968-69. I don`t think I had ever been in her bedroom, the door was open during the day and the foot of her bed was visible at the entrance to the room. During the day she often sat just to the right of the bedroom door, in the dining room, and the radio was playing. It was kind of an open-concept room, at the top of the stairs you entered to a foyer and the foyer opened to the dining room, other rooms were off this part of the flat. The flat was built in the early 1900s. (updated 15 September 2023)