Summer Soft-Serve

Dairy Queen in the Petite Patrie. Photo by Kate McDonnell

Branded architecture is wrong in so many ways: it’s disposable, it’s a waste of space, it’s vulgar. So then why do I have such a soft spot for Dairy Queen’s little Swiss huts?

It must go back to the Dairy Queen at the corner of Park and Bérubé in Montreal. Red-roofed, fronted by a small parking lot and concrete terrace, it sits next to a row of triplexes in the shadow of an apartment tower — a country bumpkin oblivious to its own incongruousness. Every winter, the small parking lot out front is covered by a mountain of snow, until one day in March when the snow begins to melt and a neon sign is switched on — Ouvert — a harbinger of spring.

On summer nights, when the day’s humid heat settled in my living room, I would jump on my bike and ride south down Hutchison to indulge in a guilty pleasure. Hot fudge sundae, sometimes a Blizzard — these were my indulgences estivales. The pleasure is guilty because I knew I should be spending my money on handcrafted gelato from Havre aux Glaces, but instead I was forking over $3 at a corporate franchise that specializes in junk-food ice cream.

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L’espoir, le regret, la mémoire : chronique d’un départ

J’ai décidé de quitter le Canada parce que la banlieue m’énervait. Aussi – et surtout ! – pour me sauver de moi-même. Ou plutôt, pour échapper à mon quotidien. Bien entendu, il y avait cette routine – quoique agréable dans mon cas – qui envahissait de plus en plus ma vie. Mais avant-tout, j’ai plutôt cherché à fuir mes peurs. Mourir, souffrir, pleurer. Regretter. Des préoccupations qui devenaient obsessives et omniprésentes dans ma vie, prenant davantage de place que les moments de quiétude.

C’est la peur de l’échec – quelle honte ! – qui était la plus destructrice : elle controlait de plus en plus mes réflexions et orientait mes gestes et décisions. Il devenait difficile de vivre normalement, ayant à exécuter toutes ces petites attentions pour ne pas devenir faible, malade, cancéreux. Fou ! Une gangrène au cerveau.

Aussi, je décidai, un après-midi pathétique et pluvieux, de me préparer au grand départ. Les yeux fermés, la volonté dans les jambes et l’acception qu’il n’y aille possiblement aucun lendemain à chaque matin. Au moins, j’aurai pris une vrai décision – aussi idiote soit-elle ! – avant la fameuse fin de ma vie terrestre.

Nostalgique, je regarde ces coins de rues comme on offre une dernière tendresse à sa mère, le jour de sa mort. Les arbres, aux feuilles enflammées, virevoltent dans les rues calmes et proprettes d’Outremont : Montréal, Amérique du Nord. Je repense à l’essentiel : documents de voyages, permissions, visas. Lettres adéquates de l’ambassadeur d’Italie, ma première destination. Je songe également aux derniers mots échangés avec mes amis, lors de ce diner de départ, organisé à la hâte, à l’image de tout ce qui m’attend. Le fromage était doux, le pain chaud. Le chocolat fondant. Le vin blanc sucré et suprenant. Les larmes authentiques. Les miennes du moins…

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My Old Apartment

Four years ago, on a freakishly cold April day, my girlfriend and I walked up Park Avenue in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal, heads pressed against the wind, to check out a third-floor apartment in a typical six-plex, the kind with the steep, curving outdoor staircase leading up from the street to a second-floor balcony.

After meeting with the landlord, a talkative Hasidic Jewish woman whose husband owned a travel agency down the street, we decided to take the place. Over the years, we got to know our neighbours—an increasingly famous DJ, a shy couple from Alberta, an eccentric recluse who once came barging into our apartment at 3am, complaining that our bathroom was leaking—and enjoyed the comfortable intimacy of our surroundings.

It was only last winter, however, that I started to wonder who lived in our apartment before us. I knew that our six-plex had been built in 1918, almost a decade after the other buildings on our block, and I knew that the tenant before us had been an artist with a penchant for green-tinted lightbulbs; he left in a hurry to settle his father’s estate in Brazil, leaving behind boxes of old art books, some rubber gloves and a bag of trash.

But who lived here in the years, decades, generations before that? Just how many coats of paint were on these walls? Lovell’s Montreal Directory, which lists Montreal’s residents and businesses from 1842 to 1999, offers me some clues. Scanning the Park Avenue pages, I see that somebody named Chas Larivee lived in my apartment in 1929. Two decades later, there was another Chas, this one from the Axman family. In contrast with the apartment downstairs, where a Mrs. Laurin lived for at least 30 years, ours had high turnover, with a new tenant arriving almost every year. Somehow, knowing the names of the people who once lived in my apartment makes its history more immediate: I’m not the first to have paced its slightly crooked floors.

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Following My Father

My father was born in 1919 in a town near Manchester. His parents were both of Irish background, part of a wave of people who had migrated there to find work in the Lancashire mines and mills. He was an only child. By the time he was ten years old his mother had died and his father, for reasons that remain unknown, brought him to Montreal and left him with a relative of his wife’s, Margaret Ryan, and her daughter May. They hadn’t been in Canada long before my father joined their household, where he stayed until he married my mother in the late 1950s. Thomas McDonnell returned to England and never saw his son again.

When I found out that the Bibliothèque nationale had digitized Lovell’s street directories, a catalogue of Montreal residents and businesses from 1842 to 1999, I spent a few hours tracing where the Ryan household had lived in Montreal long before I was born. The directories functioned for many years much like a phone book: look up someone’s name and it gives you their occupation and a street address, although not a phone number.

I knew that the Ryans had lived in various rented premises over the years and recalled mentions of the street names and parishes. The directories made it easy to find out the exact addresses where my father had lived: 1720 Nicolet, from 1931 to 33; 4354 Fullum, in 1934; 4324 Messier, from 1935-41; 5973 Waverly, from 1942 to 50; and 5352 Park Avenue, from 1951 to 57. So I went to have a look.

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Mount Royal at Night

For years, I ignored the brooding hulk of Mount Royal at night, pausing only occasionally to contemplate the shape of its silhouette or the glow of the cross atop it. It was only recently that I actually began to venture onto the mountain after dark, well after most park-goers head home, and when the woods become especially dark and spooky. Sometimes I would head up to its lower reaches, alone or with friends, to lie on the grass, drink some beer and look out over the city. On a couple of occasions, I biked all the way up to the top.

Cycling up the mountain at night is a sensual experience: the sound of gravel under my tires; the strange, damp coolness that descends upon my skin as we head deeper into the woods and higher up the hill; the darkness of the path in front of me, marked against the red glow of the city sky. My friends and I always start at the Cartier monument, taking Olmstead’s broad path, which twists its way up the mountain on a gentle slope and a series of switchbacks. It isn’t long before the darkness overwhelms our vision and we rely on sound and instinct to avoid plunging down some rocky escarpment. It’s a completely disorienting experience, travelling along the path at night, and I enjoy the unique sensation of being guided forward without actually knowing where I’m going. Except for a brief moment when the back of the Royal Victoria Hospital is visible, I never really know where we are, and the increase in ambient noise from the city is the only indication that we have come around the front of the mountain and are biking above downtown. Soon, and always rather unexpectedly, we arrive at Beaver Lake.

Beaver Lake is an interesting place at night. On weekends, there are usually groups of people sitting near the water, chatting and drinking. People often set off fireworks near the pavilion, and in the distance, I sometimes hear street racing along Remembrance Road. On the hill overlooking the lake, my friends and I like to relive our childhood by rolling sideways down the grass slope, trying and failing to get up when we come to a stop, drunk on dizziness. It’s even more fun now than when I was a kid.

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Everywhere People

2005

2008

My life in Montreal is full of what my friends call “everywhere people,” strangers whom I see on a regular basis, walking down the street, sitting in a café, on the metro, in line for a movie. I don’t know them and I have no reason to talk to them, but they give me a sort of grounding in my daily life. In the 1970s, the social psyschologist Stanley Milgram termed these people “familiar strangers,” and he theorized that they are a natural aspect of urban life. In big, crowded cities, which can sometimes seem so alienating, they help to humanize and familiarize the cityscape.

For the most part, familiar strangers are found in your own neighbourhood, on public transit or somewhere that you frequent, like a café. What is odd and particularly surprising is when you visit another city for the second, third or fourth time and realize that, oddly enough, you have everywhere people there, too. I find myself in Vancouver about once a year and it is not unusual for me to spot, on the street or on the bus, sometime I recognize from an encounter during previous visits. This happened to me in March, too, when I spent a month in Hong Kong, my second trip to the city after first visiting in 2005. Much to my astonishment, I ended up crossing paths with a bicycle delivery man I had photographed three years earlier — and I even managed to snap another picture of him.

I arrive in Hong Kong, this time on a more permanent basis, one week from tomorrow. Will I see my everywhere man again?

Half-Truths and Reflections on Home

If it hasn’t yet been made clear to my regular readers, I’m on the verge of moving to Hong Kong, maybe for only a year, but likely for much longer than that. What this means, of course, is that I’m going to leave Montreal. (I would take my beloved city with me, but the South China Sea is a poor substitute for the Saint Lawrence.) Lately, as I contemplate my impending move, I have been coming to terms with the memories I will leave behind in the city I have, over the past six years, deliberately fashioned as my home.

At night, when I lie awake, unable to sleep, my mind floats through the laneways I have strolled at night, past the mountain, its cross, the silos on the Lachine Canal, the sign blinking Farine Five Roses and down to the St. Henri bedroom in which I first lived as a new Montrealer. I think of those first nights I spent here, listening, as I lay in bed, to the sound of trains coupling in the distance. I think of the six years of memories and experiences, all of them linked inextricably to the life and landscape of the city around me.

Guy Maddin, the maker of eccentric films best known for his 2003 movie, The Saddest Music in the World, has a somewhat different relationship with his hometown. While I left the city of my birth at the age of 17, in search of a place that better suited my outlook and personality, Maddin has spent all 52 years of his life in Winnipeg, one of the coldest and most isolated cities on the continent. Now he has made a movie—ostensibly a documentary—about the city in which he has spent his life.

“Always winter, always sleepy… Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Winnipeg. Snowy, sleepwalking Winnipeg,” he intones in the opening sequence of My Winnipeg, which is currently playing in Montreal at the Cinéma du Parc as well as at various arthouses and small cinemas around North America. In his inimitable style, drawing heavily from the aesthetic of silent films and the kitschy melodrama of b-movies, Maddin creates an image of a city propelled by drowsy inertia, its inhabitants’ attempts at escape foiled by the heavy pull of memory and nostalgia.

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How Jane Jacobs Changed My Life

I’ve been interested in cities for as long as I can remember. My childhood is marked by Lego metropolises on the living room floor, streetscapes doodled in schoolbooks and early Saturday mornings playing SimCity for hours on end. So it only made sense that, when I was fourteen, on a beautiful summer day spent wandering Vancouver’s streets, my uncle turned to me and insisted that I read Jane Jacobs.

“Sure,” I mumbled in a teenagerly way and we continued walking. He proceeded to tell me about a Marxist-Leninist bookstore on Hastings Street that had a great urban-issues section. “You should go there sometime,” he added.

Later that year, sitting under my family’s Christmas tree, I ripped opened a present from my uncle, revealing a bold mustard-coloured paperback. The title was stamped in bold capital letters: The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Below it was a blurb from the New York Times Book Review: “Perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning… a work of literature.”

It wasn’t until the following spring that I actually got around to reading Jane Jacobs’ 1961 classic, a book so widely read that it has never gone out of print. It opened my eyes. It confirmed what I had already begun to suspect about cities, about the way they worked, looked and felt, about their cultures and economies.

Looking around the Calgary of my youth, I saw how suburban planning had deprived the city of a public sphere. When I moved to Montreal, I was ecstatic to find exactly the opposite: a city whose human spirit was alive and visible in its streets, businesses and buildings. The seed of my interest in cities was planted a long time ago; Death and Life made it grow into something robust.

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