Souvenirs

Maybe it was the album. One of those put together with ‘Photographs’ scribed on the supple black leather cover: scribed in gold in the fanciest calligraphy one could muster back before the age of television. They are picture storybooks really—the kind likely to be found in many homes: A loose narrative of a lifetime with moments arrested.

While in Ottawa, tending to the needs of a now recuperating dad, I am asking questions about the photo record with its ear-bent covers and pages of fading black-and-white images. Recalling who was who; about where and why; the hows and whens. Offer me links in the story to pass on. I’m asking, ‘cuz the chance to ask won’t always be there, and also ‘cuz, having lived a century already and with a memory crisper than mine, Dad can connect the dots, no problem.

And so it was a photo of people—grandparents I recognize—gathered on an upper balcony of a house with a mansard roof that brought me to the streets of Vieux Hull.

The neighbourhood of my earliest childhood is a rag-tag of slim avenues, rickety wooden verandas and telephone poles that lean into the easements of crooked sidewalks. The former autonomous city of Hull, Quebec, lies on the north bank of the Ottawa River, across from the Parliament buildings. Now merged into Gatineau, the old town of Vieux Hull is a victim of former political deciders and urban planners.

A number of decades back, in an attempt to create a National Capital Region, the take on it was to bulldoze the heart out of a working people’s city; a place once called Le Petit Chicago for its shady night life; a place of pulp and paper mills and match factories and tall churches at the crest of every hill, with beer joints and music halls at the next corner. Bulldoze rows of wooden houses in between and with them, take out the dépanneurs—the grocery stores that also sold beer and wine and delivered orders to your door by a boy on a sturdy bike with an awesome-big holding frame below the handlebars and who took empty bottles as a tip. With a stroke of a pen, the suits razed block after city block of the old place.

And in its stead, atop the rubble, Lego-like stacks of beige, 10-storey Federal government buildings appeared. A narrow main drag was flattened and widened to become a throughway burrowing below towers, slicing the remains of the town in two. Facetiously, today the old town claims a high tourism rate: Monday through Friday, 20,000 visitors arrive at 8 a.m. from across the bridge in Ottawa. Meanwhile, at 4 p.m., the reverse tide of government employees leaves the streets empty. Dead-empty on weekends.

My very early years were spent at the corner of Garneau and Leduc streets in old Hull. A top-floor apartment of a red brick house, with the mansard roof I recognized in the old photographs. That was before we moved to Ottawa. Later, I earned my chops as a musician in the old city. The place offered plenty of work for players in the era when live music filled the dining lounges, dance halls and bars seven nights a week ‘til 2 a.m. It was a place of rowdy conversations that easily slid between French and English. According to Ontario liquor laws: Ottawa mostly shut down at 11:30 p.m. The hour the race began across the bridge to Quebec. A couple of legendary watering holes in Hull were fittingly called the Bank and the Ottawa House Hotels.

It’s a Sunday morning. Deadpan quiet under slate grey skies. A dusting of snow overnight makes the sidewalks dodgy in places, especially since the old town—situated on an island— rides on a turtle-back of ancient granite shaped by glaciers. I’ve taken this morning to show a friend around the ol’ hood.

Except for the wall of office buildings, the remaining parts of Vieux Hull could easily be taken for a coal mining town in Cape Breton or a gold-rush place in the Klondike. A frontier town of veteran stick-frame houses, of spiralling outdoor steel staircases and boomtown facades. My boyhood home remains at its corner, intact with its early 20th century lines. The veranda from the photo is still there. I point out the telephone pole that anchors a 90 degree corner of the steep hill and sidewalk. The pole is somewhat a tribute to the daring of a five-year-old who rode his wagon with zest down the hill and, under-navigating the turn, engaged with the anchor more than once. The scars on the pole remain a testament to foolishness.

Frontenac, Vaudreuil, Kent: ragged-ass streets of winter, like old photos, faded with time; deserted sidewalks holding onto secrets. I catch a whiff in the air: potates, frites, poutine—a chip wagon? We’re up to rue Eddy, a once-happening strip.

Heavy vapour rises from the vent of a flat-roofed building near the corner of rue Papineau. The plateglass window is steam-drenched; there is life at La Patate Dorée—the golden potato. It is 10 a.m. Inside is warm, sparse. An inviting oasis. The two ladies working the fryers in sweatshirts and hair nets are upbeat and friendly. The customer awaiting his order offers a smile. The dialect of French joual evokes memories. Glancing at the hand-written menu on the wall, we order “une grande poutine, deux fourchettes, s’il vous plaît,” then move to the waist-high counter that runs along the window from the pop machine to the frosted front door. There is no seating. The hot comfort food is devoured as we gaze out the window.

There is movement up the street. Across from Los Andes Dépanneur is a thrift shop. A lady in a wheelchair at the bottom of an access ramp. I sense that a Saint Vincent de Paul store open on a Sunday morning is a fitting metaphor for the spirit of the old town. Curiosity calls. Inside the store, the pickings are slim: A small cream pitcher made in post-war Japan.

Outside once more, the lady in the wheelchair, a smoke on the go, smiles and beckons us; says a few words in a quiet voice. I move to her. Reach my hand into my pocket: “Un Valentin monsieur?” she repeats. I now understand. We converse in French, me admiring the emerald sparkle on her cheek. The Valentine lady is attractive in her makeup and her wool beret and scarf. She takes a long drag on her cigarette and her image morphs into a study out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. Lautrec, an aristocratic, alcoholic artist who chose his subjects from the brothels and dance halls of the Montmartre district in Paris at the end of the 19th century. His art was inseparable from his life, drawing truth and beauty from the night-life culture. Lautrec made his adopted family of entertainers into celebrities through the newly invented lithograph process that gave birth to the art of the French poster.

Perched on Madam Valentin’s lap is a plastic bag. In it, a potpourri of cards and envelopes: Valentine cards, leftover cards from Valentines past: Choose one for a token, she invites me. I lightly sort, then draw one out; daisies and roses and little plastic hearts glued to the cover. She reaches out her hand as I gladly pay her, wishing her a Valentine greeting. Madam Valentin, the poster lady of winter, a souvenir frozen in time, like the pages from the album on the shelf in my father’s house.