Christmas Morning on Morningside Drive, 2008

Stairs at the Art Gallery of Ontario, summer 2009 (2)

Stairs at the Art Gallery of Ontario, summer 2009 (1)

St. James Anglican Church, Quebec

St. James Anglican Church, built in the early 1800s, is located in St. Jean sur Richelieu, Quebec (near Lacolle, which is a border crossing from Quebec's Eastern Townships to New York State). When the church was constructed there was a large English-speaking population in the Eastern Townships (including members of my paternal grandmother's family who attended the church over 125 years ago), but for various reasons the English-speaking population has dwindled over the last fifty or sixty years. For more information, visit: http://www.morrisseyfamilyhistory.com/.

St. Cunegonde Church in fall, rue Notre Dame, Montreal

Notre Dame de Bonsecours in Old Montreal

My maternal grandmother

Here is a photograph of my maternal grandmother, taken (I believe) at Westmount Park, around 1922. Her maiden name was Chew, and she was married to my grandfather, John R. Parker. My mother is on our right and my Uncle John, her only living sibling, on the left. An older child, Willie, died before my mother was born; a doctor was called when he was ill but by the time the doctor arrived, intoxicated, the child had died.

St Anthony of Padua Church

Located on St. Antoine Street in Montreal, near where our family used to live, the old St. Anthony Church was demolished for the building of the Ville Marie Expressway. The new St. Anthony's is a much more humble building.

From the old St. Anthony's Church, seen through the window on the far right of the church doors.

This is the Ville Marie Expressway directly across the street from St. Anthony's Church, where the old church was located.

Photo from 1963 before the Ville Marie Expressway was built

Turret Cigarettes

Here is the same Turret Cigarette advertisement as in the previous post, except that now debris has been cleared away from in front of it. This advertisement was protected, in pristine condition, because it was between two adjacent walls for many years. Since this photograph was taken someone has painted graffiti over it.

Smoke Turret Cigarettes!

A painted billboard, recently exposed when the neighbouring building was demolished after a fire, for Turret cigarettes. Located next door to Artie Gold's old apartment building, The Westmore.

A walk in N.D.G., Summer 2008

A walk in our neighbourhood, Notre Dame de Grace, is always interesting and fun. Here, beside the apartment where Artie Gold used to live, is a painted billboard from the 1920s-1930s, pristine and clear after being protected and hidden for many decades by another building that was destroyed by fire a few years ago. The debris has now been removed from where the old building used to stand. I see others have posted photographs online of this same painted billboard. 

Montreal isn't Ville Marie--the City of Mary--for nothing. Here, a few blocks east of the Turret cigarette advertisement, is a statue of Mary (to the left of the huge statue of Jesus), in someone's back yard. 

A few hundred feet east from the statues of Jesus and Mary, on Monkland Avenue, is the former home of poet Irving Layton; it has been renovated by the new owners. I remember visiting Layton here, with CZ and Noni Howard, in his living room. Sometimes, when I would walk or drive by Layton's place, I'd look at his home and see him sitting at his dining room table writing poems, smoking his pipe.

On the Loyola Campus of Concordia University, near where Irving Layton used to live, is this statue of Mary, with a water fall and water circulating around the statue.

Next, we walk down Elmhurst Avenue from Sherbrooke, cross the railway tracks, and then walk along St. Jacques by the old Griffith-McConnell nursing home; the building has fallen in disrepair and neglect since they moved to their new location in Cote St. Luc. The old place is still standing, but since these photographs were taken, in 2008, construction has begun behind the building and I suspect it will be demolished.

Poetry, spirituality, lilacs blooming in spring, lanes that are like the country, history and people, they all make N.D.G. one of the nicest neighbourhoods in Montreal.




On the way home we stop by Rosedale-Queen Mary Road United Church, at Terrebonne and Rosedale, where they have constructed a labyrinth outside of the adjoining community centre. I gave a reading here once, all very nice people. The labyrinth is open to the public and has an amazing affect when walking on it. You are almost immediately plunged into profound questioning on the meaning of mortality. I never expected this but it certainly had this affect on me. As you walk the labyrinth, you are removed from the everyday, you find yourself in the spiritual.

There is a lot more to see than this on our walk in N.D.G.; this is just a part of the less trendy western part of N.D.G. For instance, there is a miniature Chinese garden directly across the street from the labyrinth; this is a wonderful creation someone has lovingly made and maintained in their front garden, it is a city and landscape all in miniature, with Oriental statues, running water in a little river, and tiny houses.

Morningside Park, spring 2009

An Exhibit at the Metropolitan, NYC

This is a curious small sculpture that shows a woman holding onto the tail of a bird, apparently in flight. The caption beneath says that the purpose for this sculpture is unknown. I suggest it shows a shamanistic journey, that this is a depiction of a shamanistic journey. In future posts I will describe other texts and artifacts in this way.

(From the exhibit Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C.November 18, 2008–March 15, 2009, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, 2nd floor.)

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!

Windsor Station, mid-2000s, Montreal

Windsor Station on a spring day, mid-2000s.

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.