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• 1 2015-11-30T19:43:54-08:00 1971 4 plain 2015-11-30T19:54:04-08:00 Its memory still embedded in my spine. The 1970 October crisis was barely behind us, but what fuelled it was still alive. On March 3rd to March 5th nature hit us hard with a record-setting snow storm reminding us that cities are pastimes, playthings, Lego, artificial, fragile and impermanent. It was nicknamed the “Storm of the Century”. Didn’t know it then. In Montreal, all we remember was life coming to a halt, on the Trans-Canada highway, downtown, suburbs, everywhere people were stranded. Schools were shut down for days until traffic could move.  Skis and Ski-Doos took over the streets. Took most people hours to walk home that first night. Some froze to death. Others were lucky to have their ears still attached to their heads. Thirty-plus people died across Québec, at least seventeen in Montreal, some from being stranded in cars and others from heart attacks and from all the other possible reasons. Death has many, and doesn’t need any. Every success in life is ultimately a win in the death column. With one quick coup de théâtre nature thrust us back into the 19th century, and none of our 20th century toys and technological advances could save us. Cars were buried in snow and people were shovelling a foot deep to spot the roof of their car. We kids had fun, celebrated and built hockey rinks on the street and could finally play non-stop and not worry about cars – for days. It was a defining moment for Montrealers, among the elite events of the last 50 years. Expos ’67, the October ’70 Crisis, the ’76 Olympics,  the ’76 PQ victory, the ’80 referendum, the ’95 referendum, the 1998 Ice Storm, and the ’71 blizzard. It had brought people together.  Many hitchhiked to work and everyone got picked up. That’s Montreal. The total 47 centimetres that fell on the city – though record-breaking then - was puny compared to what other parts of Québec were hit with. But Montreal was Montreal, the biggest and most culturally dynamic city in Canada, a role it would gradually surrender to Toronto only a half-dozen years later – after 334 years of being Canada’s financial and cultural hub. The one-day record was finally broken again on December 27, 2012. I was there for that, too. So was my 9-year old son, but not my 6-year dead father and the thousands who left the city for Toronto from ’76 to ’82. My father didn’t care for Toronto, loved Montreal, and couldn’t wait for snow, and every winter he stood outside for hours waiting to welcome it with open arms and a shovel in hand. 
  
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• 1 2015-11-30T19:34:45-08:00 He wasn't there 3 plain 2015-11-30T20:01:05-08:00 Like many.
  It happened every year, for I don’t know how long, and I was happiest when he left, and just as happy when he came back, his departure brought happiness to the household, his arrival brought gifts, chocolate and beer from Germany… five years of hard labor… but lighter than the ten years he spent in the infernal Zwartberg coal mine, in Genk, Belgium, one kilometre below, the Flemish underworld with no room for metaphor, where if the mine didn’t kill you, as it did many, eight-hundred-and-sixty-seven to be exact  - but no one was exact between nineteen-forty-six and nineteen-sixty-three, though his stint was between nineteen-fifty and nineteen-sixty, the peak years, coal wise and death wise - silicosis did, but he survived it, married an old maid of twenty, and he an old man at thirty-six, while shuttling back and forth, from a southern hell to a Belgium one, was not in the Marcinelle mine disaster, though many believed he was, including his young bride, where two-hundred-and sixty-three lost their lives of which one-hundred-and-thirty-six were Italian migrant workers, the cheapest of cheap labour, but just one of thirty-plus disasters in the dozens upon dozens of Belgium mines, where safety rules were elementary at best and imaginary at worst, making his construction work in Germany a club-med vacation, sent money home, and everybody else’s home, taking take of his siblings, even the older ones, like a father, leaving me to a household of eight women, where I learned how to sew and have fun and to trust women more than men, smoked till he was seventy-four, moved us to the almost America of America in 1965, hit the streets in 40 below working three straight eight-hour shifts, repairing gas leaks in and around Montreal, where on his bedroom commode lay the pictures of his buddies who didn’t make it, and till his death lamented not having had a pen, schooling, almost always being on the losing end of those who knew how to use one, and for all the years he wasn’t there, he was always there.