The man with little — but who always has enough,
Readers tried to help him see his mom, but Mike Mallard would rather help others
On Christmas Day four decades ago, Mike Mallard’s grandmother collapsed on presents under the tree and died of a heart attack. Ever since, on the anniversary of her death, he makes her favourite meal.
“A double-decker grilled cheese and bacon sandwich, with tomato soup — she used V8 juice and half-and-half cream and milk,” says Mallard, who is 64 and lives in a downtown Toronto rooming house.
“You dip your grilled sandwich in it . . .” He then closes his grey-blue eyes and whispers, “To die for.”
This year, Mallard will also miss his regular Christmas Day phone call to his mother, Marjorie, in North Bay. She died in August at the age of 91, after Mallard had not seen her for15 years.
Mallard had the option of visiting his mother last Christmas when a story about him in Metro and the Star touched readers. They offered to pay for a trip to North Bay, but Mallard says he didn’t take the donations.
“A couple of people offered to pay my way but I said, ‘Look, I can’t go up there. Me and my sister don’t get along. We fight like cats and dogs,” he says. “I said, ‘Help somebody else out.’ ”
So he did what he had done for years: he made his Christmas Day double-decker sandwich, ate alone and called his mother and thanked her for the $100 cheque she sent him. His mom said what she always said: stay safe, and shave off that long white beard.
Mallard then spread his mother’s money around to friends, most of whom use the Seaton House homeless shelter near his home.
“They were down on their luck,” he says. “I don’t need stuff. I have a12-by-eight-and-a-half-foot room. I have my own sink, my own kitchen cupboards, fridge, a double bed, a 19-inch flatscreen TV with six channels.
“I’ve got an insulated coat, a down-filled vest, I eat every day and I get my laundry done. What else do you need?”
Mallard loves to talk. On a recent afternoon, he sat bundled up in his insulated coat on a bench at the Church of the Holy Trinity, near the Eaton Centre, where friends call him “Ducky.” He cheerfully recounted a personal history of wonder and woe.
He was born in Timmins, a “blue baby” starved of oxygen. At the age of 2, doctors opened his skull to remove a tumour in his brain. He claims a relative pushed him off a third-storey roof when he was 11.
His father was in the military and the family moved every 18 months. In the 1970s, Mallard says his dad gave him a choice: cut your long hair or get out. Mallard hit the road, hitchhiking across the country, twice. “From coast to coast,” he insists. He married in 1981 and divorced the same year.
“I’ve had about 18 different jobs in my life,” he says, including painter, sandblaster, military man and line cook at a mental health hospital.
At his last job, on a Timmins construction site in 1993, he jumped off the back of a truck, slipped on ice and landed hard on his back, injuring his spine.
“I can’t bend and I can’t pivot,” he says, demonstrating by painfully bending as low as he can. “And when you can’t do that, you’re out of work.”
He moved to Toronto in 1996 for specialized medical care and ended up homeless for several months. An acquaintance then gave him a room in exchange for renovating the house. Mallard slowly got it done.
In 2001, he says he finally received a pension from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, which now amounts to about $13,000 a year. That leaves him with plenty left over, he says, after paying $425 in monthly rent.
“I don’t smoke and I don’t drink,” he says. “I’m a very frugal man.”
He’s also a man of routines. He rises every morning at 5:30 and hobbles to one of the downtown churches or agencies that offer free meals. Then he collects discarded beer and wine bottles for recycling, using the deposit money during the fall to buy Christmas tree decorations.
“God provides me with the empties, is the way I see it,” he says.
For the past three years, Mallard has decorated an evergreen tree at a community garden at the corner of Dundas St. E. and George St.
This year, the god of recyclables has been kind; Mallard has decorated five trees. Neighbours are calling it the “George St. Christmas garden.”
The idea came to him when his landlord said he couldn’t have a real tree in his room. So he poured his love on the trees down the street from his home.
“At Christmastime, people get depressed,” Mallard says, referring to the street people he knows. “They have no family, or the family doesn’t want anything to do with them. This brings them a bit of Christmas cheer.”
Glen Simourd sees the joy it brings every day. He lives across the street from the garden, which is planted and maintained by Simourd and a neighbourhood improvement group called Garden District. The strip of land became available when the city narrowed the turn from George St. to Dundas.
“I think what he’s doing is wonderful,” says 78-year-old Simourd, who planted the evergreen Mallard decorates. “There’s a steady stream of people who stop and admire it. It really does make people happy.”
Simourd, who calls Mallard “Santa Claus,” uses pictures of the decorated evergreen for Christmas cards.
Surveying his work, Mallard beams with pride and offers a simple Christmas message: “Treat everybody with respect.”