Hmm, another difficult interview question. I have actually lived in multiple countries and it would take several books to catalogue all those changes. So I will just do a compare/contrast between where I lived growing up, in Montreal, and where I live now in Sierra Vista.
Although Montreal is a much bigger city than Sierra Vista is, I lived in a smallish area of Montreal called Rosemount. Actually it was called Rosemount back then but it’s now called Rosemont-La Petite Patrie. Roughly 130,000 people now live in the area but when I was growing up, huge swathes of it were still unoccupied land and I vaguely remember cows not that far away. That was when we first moved there, when I was 2. The cows were gone by the time I went to school. We were living in a duplex, two up/two down, near Hochelaga, actually quite close to where the Olympic Park is. I have the address somewhere in my dad’s old papers; he put his address on his wartime C.V. But as he moved from being blue collar, on the shop floor, to being a white collar plant manager, he decided to buy a house. I can only imagine his pride in being able to do so.
6797 34th Avenue was a new build bungalow in a small enclave of bungalows surrounded by duplexes and wartime housing. I took a photo of what it looks like today off Google Maps--that photo looks like it was taken through a screen but oh well. The basic shape of the house is the same as I remember but when we lived there, the brick was red, the walkway to the front door was different, the door was different and, well, unsurprisingly it’s changed in almost 70 years. My dad and I moved from there to Cote St Luc—almost on the other side of Montreal—in 1970.
But back in the 1950s, the neighborhood was growing very rapidly with an influx of refugees and immigrants from Europe, as well as with other French-speaking Quebecois moving in to new duplexes and houses. Multiple languages spoken: French, English, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, those were the predominant languages that I heard in the neighborhood and at school. (In fact the area is still known as Little Italy.) Actually the “French kids” went to French school but French was a mandatory subject from fourth grade. Most of the European immigrants whose mother tongue wasn’t French went to English school, either Protestant or Catholic, although our area was predominantly Catholic. Come to think of it, though, most of the people on 34th Avenue were actually English Protestant. Hmmm, could be a socioeconomic thing, at least in the northeast end of Montreal (see my comments at the end of this.)
Right from the beginning, the neighborhood had great bus service. Although everyone on our street had one car, most of my friends at school didn’t have any car at all. It wasn’t a big deal growing up, you could get downtown, you could get to the movies, to shopping, to friends on the buses or you could walk. And the buses ran until 1:00 a.m., which was an hour past teenage curfew anyway. We walked quite a lot. I remember walking to birthday parties, to the swimming pool in the summer, to go sledding at the local snow pile (yes, the city would pile snow from the snow plows at a field near where I lived so it made great, if a bit gritty, tobogganing.) And, in the summer, we bicycled although biking on the main roads was always a bit terrifying. Montreal drivers rule the roads. At least there was less traffic in the 1950s.
We also had several small grocery stores, French and Italian, as well as a large Steinberg’s at the Boulevard Shopping Center (sadly now derelict although there is always talk of resurrecting it.) It would take about 15 minutes to walk to Boulevard, longer in the winter when we’d be slogging through snow. But, it was on the bus line if we wanted to splurge for carfare (what we called bus fare back then.) Before my mother first became ill, she would walk to Steinberg’s, do the weekly shopping and then take a taxi home. I think she even took my toboggan a couple of times and pulled the groceries home. That was when I was very small. Once she was diagnosed with a heart condition, Dad would go shopping with her on Friday nights and they would drive home. I remember when T-bone steaks were $1.50 each; they’d be a special Saturday night treat. Couldn’t eat them on Fridays; as Catholics Mom, myself and my sister were all “no meat” on Fridays. Dad, however, would sit there and eat HIS steak in front of us while we had Mom’s tasteless Velveeta macaronic and cheese. With a can of tinned tomatoes dumped in. Did nothing for the taste. Grrr!
We went to Sunday Mass at St. Brendan’s Church, a new parish for Mom who had attended St. Aloysius (St. Al’s) until we moved. My grandmother and aunt were stalwarts at St. Al’s. There were multiple churches in Rosemont and on Sundays everything was shut tight—oh except for a couple of patisseries that somehow managed to open despite the "no Sunday openings" law--Jewish bakeries in the west end of Montreal--for the post-Sunday Mass crowd getting their desserts for Sunday dinners. But, apart from that, no, nothing much happened on Sundays. That changed by my mid-teens and it was a great Sunday excursion for my friends and I to go downtown (on the buses of course) and explore the flea markets down in Old Montreal. And then when the Metro opened in 1967, subway service, oh joy!
Sierra Vista is entirely different: different weather, mostly white American, loads of US military/retired military, our house here is almost twice the size of our house in Rosemont although there’s only R and myself. Because of lack of bus service—no demand?—and because of the intense heat for half the year, no one walks very far outside of early mornings or evenings. And even those are the “walkers for exercise”. It’s very much a car-oriented society. While Rosemont had loads of different stores, Sierra Vista has only a few and none of the ethnic groceries I grew up with (sometimes I think I would pay an outrageous amount for a good patisserie or good bread—just not to be had here.) This morning R and I had our oh-so-exciting jaunt 5 miles in the car to Target where he had a sandwich at Starbucks while I picked up some groceries. Then to the garden center to look for plants; not yet mid April and it’s 70+ degrees by 10 a.m.
I won’t discuss politics in this memoir. My immediate family and trusted (in this town I have to be careful) friends all know my political leanings. Growing up in Montreal, politics was completely different and didn’t become hateful until I was in my mid teens when the rancor between Anglophones and Francophones became very heated and the FLQ started blowing up mailboxes. Although, being honest, there were a lot of shouted insults traded on the streets to and from school … some of the first French words I learned were swear words. So, I can’t say that things were peaceful and I also can’t say that the Francophones didn’t have justification, but it was religion as much as language that caused issues in Quebec. For those interested, historical research will tell you what I mean.
And here in Sierra Vista? Well, as a Canadian I am appalled by a lot of the attitudes here towards guns, towards elections and towards a certain ex-President. But I like a quiet life now and, in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t going to make a difference to my memoir. At least not so far ;)
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