LOVING THY ENEMY

There’s much we can learn from our new best municipal friend, Montreal,

I may not be the perfect guy for this, but if we are supposed to be pals with the city of Montreal, I guess I’m going to have to do. Bona fides? I lived in Montreal for six years. I’ve been here longer. There, I lived in the Plateau Mont-Royal. Here, I live in Parkdale. The two neighbourhoods are not dissimilar: weedy, leftish, organic — a perfect match, if Parkdale was interested in seceding. A language lesson: We lived in a nice little apartment on Rue Christophe Colombe. The old couple who lived next door had a boarder who was developmentally disabled; the boarder used to make a few bucks with his bicycle, delivering groceries from a dépanneur in the neighbourhood. A dépanneur is a corner store. You can buy cheap wine at a dépanneur. Nobody likes the cheap wine very much, but if you have no shame and miss the liquor store, you might bring a bottle to a friend’s for dinner. Or to a resto. That’s short for restaurant; unlike here, the corkage fees are reasonable in the neighbourhood restos; unlike here, there are a lot of neighbourhood restos because rents are a little cheaper there. I am digressing. The neighbour’s boarder also made a little money cutting lawns. He asked me one summer day, not long after we moved in, if he could cut mine.

I don’t speak French and I wasn’t quite sure what he wanted when he showed up at the door. He got frustrated, and so he did that thing which people tend to do — HE STARTED SPEAKING LOUDLY — in order to make me understand.

I told him, calmly, in Plateau-accented French, that I couldn’t speak French — which, to him, meant that I really did speak French — which I didn’t, and still don’t.

But he thought I was tricking him — if I didn’t speak French, then how could I tell him, in French, that I couldn’t? We eventually became friends.

The word for lawnmower is “tondeuse.” There is a better way to learn. It is your right, as a Montrealer, to live within walking distance of the best bread you’ve ever had. I’m not being snobby; once you’ve had a baguette with a perfect crumb and a crust like an eggshell, that’s all you ever want. You learn to ask for it by watching the people in line in front of you. “Meme chose, s’il vous plait.” Same thing, please. A baker near our place made such good baguettes there were lineups a block long in front of his boulangerie — his bakery — even in winter. It became apparent that he needed more room to meet the growing demand, which meant he had to raise some capital, so he sold shares worth $20, redeemable for $25 worth of bread. I bought five shares, and everyone I knew did, too. A wild success. A Toronto restaurant owner recently tried something similar, and the securities people shut him down. There’s a lesson in this — perhaps it’s what our mayor meant when he said we should loosen up. And then there’s attitude. Torontonians tend to walk cautiously, almost tentatively, so as not to upset anyone or get in the way — tentatively, except for those pushy commuters rushing for the trains back to the burbs — they are the ones who give us a reputation for being cold and in a hurry.

Montrealers walk, every single one of them, as if they were proud to be alive.

We all might learn a bit of that.

When I lived in Montreal, it was possible to redeem aluminum pop tins for a nickel; there were special machines in certain malls, and the guys who lived on the street would show up now and then with giant plastic bags full of tins, which they would feed into the machines, one by one, and collect the nickels the machine spat out. We should also do that here. An update: Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen was bought by Céline Dion a couple of years ago; my heart will go on, because I can still get a haunch of smoked meat expressed to my doorstep.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Boulevard St. Laurent — a.k.a. the Main — Berson’s Monuments is gone, or is about to go. The late Mendy Berson sold headstones; dust in the air, along with the smell of smoked meat and mortality. But oh, Mendy carved lines that will last longer than anything I’ll ever write.