My father had the habit of taking me to the woods from an early age. Six years old, to be precise. Back then, one didn’t have to drive for four hours to reach some form of legitimate wilderness. We had woods even in developing areas such as Ville Saint-Laurent and even more on Laval island in Montreal. I’m talking about woods you could hunt in. But, of course, now all these areas are covered in residential developments and shopping malls. On one occasion, my dad went the extr

My birthday fell on the same day as my mother’s and my maternal grandmother’s, which someone once told me the odds of were quite long and even longer as both my mother and I were born a few minutes before midnight. My mother, Madeleine, was a delicate, refined, and gorgeous lady with jet-black hair and bewitching eyes. She had a passion for the movies and could name every actor in any of them. She was born in Montreal, and her maiden name was Painchaud, which translates to “h

For the last 20 or so years of his working life, my dad sold trucks. Big trucks. Big International Harvester trucks to be specific. In Montreal, he had a very odd sales territory, defined as St-Laurent street, known locally as The Main, for its entire length from its upper end near the river that separates Montreal and Laval islands, right through to its other end on the St-Lawrence river in the Old Port of Montreal. His turf consisted of both sides of the street and was fitt

When I was nine years old, and my folks had been divorced for a few years, my mother and I lived in an old apartment building on Gatineau Street in the Côte-des-Neiges district of Montreal. The landlady at the time was a Miss Pompadour, a stout French woman from Marseilles, who occupied a huge apartment with a large stone terrace. Miss Pompadour had taken a shine to my mother and me, and we occasionally would go down to her place for pâtisseries and the like, which I enjoyed