Goodbye Montreal

Montreal 2012

I left Montreal, the city I grew up in, around 1970. I had kicked around the city for about 5-6 years after high school and just didn’t see any future there. I couldn’t see working my way up in some staid company getting crappy pay sitting year after year at a desk as a clerk. Retail sucked and was boring. Waiting tables was a dead end and construction was a bit too rigorous for my liking. I eventually ended up on the west coast.

I was aware of the politics in Quebec. The FLQ and RIN stuff. The Separatistes. I saw some of the marches and riots on Sherbrooke Street. It seemed like a temporary kind of deal back then that would sort itself out in due time. Being of English background didn’t seem to be a problem. We were all over the place on the island of Montreal and just across the river. N.D.G., Hampstead, Montreal West, Westmount, The Town of Mount Royal, Cote de Neige, Cote St. Luc, Verdun, Snowden, Lachine, Dorval, Pointe Claire, Beaconsfield, St. Anne de Bellevue, St. Lambert, Greenfield Park, Rosemere and Ste. Therese.

I was gone when the War Measures Act was implemented by Trudeau and when Bill 101 became law a number of years later.

Like a lot of other English speaking people who had grown up in Montreal I tried to figure out what had so many French people pissed off. Was it because “the Anglos” controlled a lot of the commerce in Montreal?  Was it because the French simply outnumbered the English? Was it the threat of losing their culture? Was it that the Anglos were afforded more opportunities than the French?

Most of us Anglos didn’t live on Belvedere Road in Westmount. Most of us were middle class. There were even poor areas in Montreal like Griffintown and Goose Village where some English speaking people lived.

A popular theory that many English speaking people considered back in the day was that the reason a lot of French people didn’t do that well in life was because of the Catholic Church and the seigneurial system that promoted large families in rural areas. A farm simply couldn’t support all those kids once they became adults, and in order to survive, they migrated to larger cities like Montreal and often had a minimal education which left them in dead end manual jobs. Growing up in NDG, the guys that delivered the milk or drove the snow blowers were always French.

It is interesting to note that Quebec is now one of the least religious areas in Canada. Many French Canadians have become disillusioned with the Catholic church.

I never got the cultural stuff. Long after Tommy Hunter had disappeared from the CBC French Canadian TV variety shows were still humming along. Andy Kim wasn’t much of a threat to Robert Charlebois.

Politics in Quebec always seemed like a fatherly kind of thing. Maurice Duplessis, Cameleon Houde, Jean Drapeau, and Rene Levesque all seemed like egocentrics to me. Pauline Marois, although a woman, appears to be another egocentric. Drives a Porche and used to live in a chateau?

Bill 101 was the kicker though. It smacked of apartheid. Of trying to expunge a community that had historically been a large part of Montreal. Was the French Canadian culture that delicate that store signs and street signs had to be in French only? It is sad really.

Where would Bombardier, The Cirque de Soleil, Quebecor. Agropur, or a number of professional hockey players be today if they insisted on a French only policy?

Well that’s my 2 cents worth.

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In the latter part of June of this year we spent about a week in Quebec. I wanted to see the places or what was left of them that I remembered from years ago. I hadn’t visited Montreal in about 18 years. I had forgotten all about how Montreal can be so hot and humid in the summer.

We drove down the 401 and got on the 2 and 20 and found a motel in Pointe Claire. I picked up some take out smoked meat sandwiches at Chenoy’s. As always, delicious. I placed my order and was given a slip to take to the cashier. There was a bit of a discussion between two of the staff and my order was also entered into a book. Only in Montreal could buying take out seem so complicated. It seemed like the management didn’t have a lot of trust in their employees.

The next morning we took a bit of a tour around Pointe Claire. We drove along Lakeshore Road and stopped at a large mansion that overlooked Lake St. Louis. My parents swam in this part of the St.Lawrence River in the 1930s. It took a few minutes to find my bearings but I found the house my parents had retired to in Valois. What was once a bright sunny lot was now darkened by matured trees.

Stewart House, Pointe Claire.

My parents old house in Valois.

We continued on into Montreal and I took the Montreal West cut off. We stopped off at a local patisserie for a cup of java and had a chat with a tattooed waitress on her break at an outside table next to us. We were feeling the funk.

I got lost for about 10 minutes in amongst some high rise apartment buildings near Cavendish Boulevard. I got my bearings and we made our way through N.D.G. to Harvard Avenue and the house I grew up in. As luck would have it we were given a tour of the old home by a very pleasant lady from France. We also visited my old grade school and high school.

Harvard Avenue

We walked around the neighbourhood. I spotted the Monkland Tennis Club where the best players from Austrailia, including Rod Laver and Roy Emerson, once played some exhibition matches in the early 1960s. We walked by the apartment building at the corner of Marcil and Monkland Avenue where I spent the first few years of my life. Over the years Monkland Avenue has become yuppified. Sidewalk cafes and Subways have replaced Chinese laundries and novelty stores.


Apartment building on Monkland Ave. where I spent the first 4 years of my life.

Monkland Tennis Club.
 

We drove around Hampstead for a while. I spotted the park with the pond where we ice skated in the winter 5 decades ago. I remembered the Friday night dances at Hampstead School. I also recalled caddying at the Hampstead Golf Course that disappeared in the early 1960s. Back in the day, Hampstead was an upper middle class area and the unwritten rule was that WASPs didn’t sell their houses to Jewish people. Today Hampstead is something like 85% Jewish, even the mayor. I once had a girlfriend for a short while who lived in Hampstead. I was her guest once at a dance at the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association. We did the bunny hop from one large room to another.

We thought about checking out the Orange Julep but the Decarie Expressway was crammed. We drove by St. Joseph’s Oratory and cut down Cote de Neige past Forest Hill Avenue where I once had an apartment and past another apartment building where my grandparents once lived. I took a right along Sherbrooke and cut off on Atwater.

Just below St. Catherine Street and off of Atwater we found Weredale House (The Boys Home of Montreal) where I spent two unhappy years from 1961 to 1963. The home has been closed since the late 1970s. I’m not sure what purpose the building serves today but it had security and I wasn’t keen about pushing the envelope in trying to get inside.

Weredale House

We drove back to N.D.G. to meet an ex Weredale boy at the Monkland Tavern. I remembered the place as being frequented by old drunks and 10 cent draft beer. Times had changed. The chalkboard showed mac and cheese for 24 bucks. We had a pleasant chat for an hour or so and headed back to our motel in Pointe Claire.

Monkland Taverne.

The next day we hung around the motel in the morning and met a long lost nephew at a brasserie close by. I had never met him before. He turned out to be a really nice guy. I had to take a pass on ordering a large pitcher of beer. I can’t manage that anymore never mind at lunchtime.

There were a couple of heavy set middle aged dudes sitting at a table near to us with back up beers at the ready. Their waitress spent a lot of her time chatting with them. In my mind I was trying to decide whether they were heavy equipment guys or criminal types. Who knows? One thing is for sure, nobody in the brasserie seemed in any hurry to get back to work and the place was packed.

We spent most of the afternoon down around the McGill student ghetto area. We passed Montreal High School where my mother was a student in the early 1930s. We saw the updated building at the top of University Street that was once a frat house that I lived at and rented out rooms back in the summer of 68. It took a while but we found The Yellow Door coffeehouse that was the home to many aspiring folksingers in the 1960s. Actually, all we found was the sign. No posters about upcoming events. Nada. The door wasn’t even yellow.

Frat house on University Street

Yellow Door coffee house.

We drove west along Sherbrooke Street and pulled into a parking lot by Victoria Hall where my grandfather produced a number of plays and musicals over 50 years ago. I remember when I was about 7 years of age and seeing Jack and the Beanstalk there. I almost believed that there was another world at the top of the beanstalk. They used to have the audience sing “Hail, hail the gang’s all here” which my grandfather changed to “hell, hell the gang’s all here” and I joined in. Very risqué!

Victoria Hall, Westmount.

We found our way up to upper Westmount. Someone has a yard right next to the dome of St. Joseph’s oratory. Who knew? We stopped and had a gander from the Westmount Lookout.

Westmount Lookout.

I decided that it might be fun to find a pizza joint on Cote St. Luc Road that I had fond memories of. Mama Mia Pizzeria. It was obvious when we spotted the place that it isn’t what it once was. Back in the day a guy with a white chef’s hat would toss the pizza dough in the air. A large pizza was about 3 feet wide. There was no such thing as goat cheese or even pineapple on pizzas, just the choices of pepperoni, fresh mushrooms, green peppers and perhaps some anchovies. You could pull the mozzarella cheese about 12” and the crust was slightly blackened on the bottom as were the tips of the pepperoni slices.

The restaurant now had fake marble walls. I told our waiter that I hadn’t been inside the place in close to 50 years. He said he had heard people say that a lot. After that he pretty well ignored us other than bringing us our food. They only make 10 inch pizzas these days and they aren’t anything to write home about. Grovelling seems to be an art form in some restaurants In Quebec and we couldn’t help noticing the waiter bowing and scraping to his regular Jewish clientele. He even resorted to dragging his kid out from the back which didn’t seem to get him any points. We left a tip and never heard a good night from him or a thanks for coming out. All in all it was a waste of time.

Mama Mia Pizzeria.

The next morning we headed up to the Laurentians. I missed the cut off near the Decarie junction and we ended up in eastside Montreal. It took quite a while to get back on the right track. Eventually we made it to St. Sauveur where I had spent some time in my later teens. It was clear that St. Sauveur had become a bonifide tourist trap. We strolled along the main thoroughfare, had a coffee, and I waited outside while Linda wandered in and out of a number of shops.

Old drinking places like the Inn and Nadeau’s were gone. It looked like they had been replaced by a newer building that had been a bank and was now for lease. I wanted to see if I could find what was left of Nymark’s Lodge where I had worked for a few months one winter in the mid 1960s. We asked some kids walking along a road if they knew where it was and one of them gave us the wrong directions and it took me only a few minutes to figure out that I had been lied to. We drove past them after I reversed our course and they looked a bit frightened when I thanked them for wasting our time.

Where the old weekend drinking joint The Inn once stood.

 As we were driving towards where I thought Nymark’s was I noticed two small wooden churches by the roadside. It dawned on me that the older of the two buildings was where I once slept off a hangover in the loft only to be awakened by the Sunday morning flock coming to attend services.

We parked the car and wandered over to the two small chapels. The door was open in the newer building and a church meeting was in progress. English was being spoken. It kind of seemed clandestine. The leader asked if they could help me and after I told them my little story one of the flock got a key and let us into the older building. It turned out that the older building had been built by Victor Nymark himself.

View from the loft where I once slept.

I knew that Nymark’s Lodge was just down the road. At least it once was. A local told us that it had burned down years before and a gated mansion now sat where the old lodge once was. I tried the intercom at the gate and what seemed to be the hired help pretty well told me to buzz off.

We drove up to St Agathe. I didn’t have any particular plan of where we were going. We learned that the Grey Rocks Inn near Mont Tremblant had been closed for a number of years due to some tax dispute with the local government. We found a very reasonable motel with a pool close by that is owned by an Asian family. It turned out that the owner is a marine biologist by trade. Go figure!

The following day we headed back to Montreal but not before stopping off in St. Eustache where Linda had figured out that her long deceased father had some relatives. They own some apple orchards but unfortunately there was nobody home when we dropped by. We had an interesting conversation with  their elderly next door neighbour.

Linda's distant relatives farm in St. Eustache.

We made it to downtown Montreal around noon and parked our car up the street from the old Montreal Forum on Atwater Street. My plan was to walk down St. Catherine Street to around University Street and see if we could soak in the atmosphere of the big city. It was hotter than hell out and we had a lot of walking ahead of us.

The Forum had been turned into some kind of shopping mall and the only reminder of what once was is some sort of thing imbedded in the sidewalk with the Montreal Canadiens hockey logo. It felt kind of strange sitting outside the Forum building drinking a latte from Tim Horton’s. (Tim was a long time Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman.)

Outside old Montreal Forum building.

About all I recognized on our walk along St. Catherine Street were a few churches and the remnants of Olgilvy’s, Simpson’s, Eaton’s and Morgan’s. The sidewalks were very crowded. I couldn’t spot one familiar restaurant. Theatres like the Capital, The Princess, The Palace and Loews were all gone. We took a little walk up Crescent Street and I took a look inside the Winston Churchill Pub. The place was cavernous. It appears like they have expanded and expanded over the years. The sunglasses on the forehead crowd were basking on the outside balconies in the sun.

Winston Churchill Pub

We went over to the Place Ville Marie. The building was designed by I.M. Pei and was a concept of William Zeckendorf’s. I remember an old story about the PVM. Apparently Mr. Zeckendorf ran out of money shortly after the hole where the building was dug and went to the St. James club and begged for some financing and ended up out of the picture.

Place Ville Marie

We ventured into Montreal’s underground shopping malls and found our way to Central Station. I spent about a year and half working on the trains in the late 1960s. I also remembered working at the Maison Danoise (The Danish House) in the mall for a month or two before being canned. We took a few pictures of Mary Queen of the World’s Cathedral and the statues at the top of it. Then we went over to Windsor Station where the C.P.R. used to have its head office. The train station had long been shut down and all that was left was a giant room with a few bronze statues.

Central Station

Windsor Station

We decided to take de Maisoneuve (formerly Burnside) back to our car. I noticed that the road didn’t go underneath the building where the CKGM radio station used to be anymore. CKGM was where Pat Burns and Joe Pine used to taunt  French speaking Montrealers. I remember when all the disk jockeys had their pictures in a big picture window except Pat Burns who had a silhouette.

We passed the Concordia University building. I went there for a bit at night when it was called Sir George Williams University. Initially Sir George was part of the Y.M.C.A. I remembered the school being “occupied” and the student riots of 1968.

Concordia-formerly Sir George Williams University

By the time we got back to our car we were exhausted. We phoned my nephew in St. Therese and spent the night at his place. I had never really spent any time in this community. We enjoyed my nephew and his wife’s hospitality and shared some steaks with them on their deck by their pool. The next morning we went for a walk down by the river.

With nephew Gary in St. Therese

Around lunchtime we headed off to the Eastern Townships and upstate New York and Vermont. On our way back through Quebec we decided not to stop again in Montreal. I had seen pretty well what I wanted. We never went to Old Montreal. It never had much meaning for me. I remembered once when I was about 20, trying to get into a nightclub in Old Montreal and some guy telling me through a peephole that I couldn’t come in. That kind of sealed it for me.

I have no bitterness about how things have changed over the years in Montreal. It isn’t my home. I am proud to say it is where I grew up. They were fascinating times. You would have to look long and hard to find anyone who left years ago having deep regrets about leaving. At this stage of my life it is all about the memories.

The drive-in restaurants like The Bonfire and Miss Montreal on Decarie Boulevard.

Ben’s Delicatessen and the strange people in there at 2:00 a.m. The photos on the walls.

The Shrine Circus every year in May at the Montreal Forum and 27 clowns getting out of a small car.

The woolen Montreal Canadiens hockey sweaters that kids wore playing street hockey that the snow stuck to.

Skates hanging off of the end of hockey sticks and the snow falling by streetlights as we made our way home from the rink at Hampstead Park at night.

Watching the Raftsmen at the Café Andre.

The Friday night fights outside of the Hampstead Hop.

Delivery the Montreal Gazette in the dark.

Being fired from a company for pocketing a bus ticket and later finding out the same company  (J.P. Porter & Sons) was being sued for price fixing and collusion in the dredging of Montreal harbour.

Knowing that a few of the kids I went to school with had fathers who were gangsters.

Getting a knockwurst on rye for 35 cents at Dunn’s.

Being arrested for underage drinking at the Café Andre and downstairs at The Berkley hotel.

My first office job that paid all of 40 bucks a week.

The time I was fired from Canadian Refractories because I misrepresented the classes I was taking at night at Sir George Williams. Stay away from sales I was told. I ended up spending most of my adult life in sales.

Bringing bottles back to the grocery store in the McGill ghetto so I could make a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner.

Walking down the road from my parent’s place in Valois and hitchhiking across Canada.

Discovering that French girls were far more sexually active than English girls.

The first time I ever got drunk behind West Hill High School after consuming a couple of Labatt 50s.

 

I will continue to write stories about my experiences as a young guy growing up in Montreal but visiting the city again is hardly likely. That door has closed.

Some random photos of Montreal.....

Mary Queen of the World and Queen Elizabeth Hotel

Bikes

Sculpture.

Graffiti.

Rooftop party time in the sun.

 

 

 

 

Cooper....A Free Spirit! 2003-2012

Our dog Cooper had to be put down on August 16, 2012. He had cancer in both his chest and abdomen. He was struggling to breathe. We found out on a Monday night and by Thursday night he was gone. It broke my heart. I loved him dearly. We loved him dearly. He touched a lot of people in his short 9 year life. I feel so lucky to have known him. He was a free spirit and still curious and excited right up to the end. He was an amazing dog.

Gabriola Island, BC

 I had always wanted a dog but didn’t get one until I was 56. I kept putting it off for some reason. I would talk about the idea of getting a dog with my kids in the car from time to time and finally decided to go for it. My son Dean came up with the name Cooper and I liked it right away. Cooper had his name long before he was born. It was later that I came up with an explanation of his name. A Cooper is a barrel maker and scotch whiskey is kept in barrels and whiskey is similar in colour to what Cooper was.

I answered an ad in the Vancouver Sun newspaper. Dean and his twin sister Leah and I drove out to Chilliwack to see a recently born litter of golden retriever puppies. They were all out in a fenced yard in the back of a farmhouse. Some were taking a snooze while others ran about.  The breeder worked for a vet and this was a one- time only thing so it wasn’t a puppy mill. The puppies slept in a free standing garage at night which had a Franklin stove where the puppy poop was burned.

I was asked to pick out the puppy that I wanted. They all looked kind of the same to me. Not knowing what I was getting myself into, I simply asked for the biggest guy in the litter. We had to wait about another 6 weeks before taking possession of him.  “Possession” is a funny word.

Leah and I made the second trip out to Chilliwack to pick up Cooper. Dean was tied up with something else. It must have been nap time because Cooper slept in Leah’s lap all the way back to where we lived in Richmond, BC. We were getting kind of hungry and stopped off at a MacDonald’s in Cloverdale. I went in and got the food and Cooper remained in Leah’s lap. Such a peaceful little dog we thought. We were wrong about that.

As a puppy in Richmond, BC

My ex and I had split up several years before and we were doing the co-parenting thing. I rented a large house close to my kid’s high school and they would come back to my house each day before being driven to their mom’s place or some activity they were involved in. My office was also in the house and most weekdays I would meet the kids in the large park next to their school at close to 3 p.m. with their new puppy. It was quite evident from the start that they were more interested in showing him off than taking him for walks which was entirely OK with me. They also had a big cat (Zack) that they were very fond of at their mom’s house.

I really didn’t have much of a clue about having a dog. The stuff about not peeing etc. in the house was easy. It was the teething that was the problem. Cooper would chew on anything he could find including my bed cover and the furniture.  I tried leaving him in the bathroom when I went out but he chewed away all the rubber along the baseboard and scratched the door. I knew he was going to be a big dog so I went out and found the biggest kennel I could find before everything was in tatters.

Right from the start Cooper was a “puller”.  He was determined to get wherever we were going at a very fast speed. I started to get annoyed with some neighbours who repeatedly said “Who is walking who?” It didn’t take long to figure out that I had a very active dog on my hands with almost unlimited energy.

It didn’t seem like Cooper was a puppy for very long. I wish I had taken more pictures of him then. Like the time he spotted his image in a mirror and started barking. Or when he first saw the ocean and seemed frightened by the waves lapping up on the shore. I was totally wrong about that suspicion.

He started to sprout like a weed. It almost seemed like he was on steroids. He grew into one handsome dude and I kind of felt like his wingman. Or was it the other way around? Throughout his life he was well muscled and sleek. He got a lot of exercise. For his first few years he was taken for a walk at least twice a day, sometimes more.

I started taking him over to the huge park near my kid’s school early in the morning at about 6:30 a.m. when hardly anyone was around so he could run free off leash. It was here that he first discovered chasing birds, the kind of birds that that didn’t fly together but who zoomed in solo over the grass and the morning dew in search of worm or grub. He never got close to them but he didn’t quit until he was exhausted and out of energy.

One morning a young couple with a dog about the same size asked me if I was OK with them letting their dog off leash so it could run with Cooper. Their dog’s name was Princess. All was well for a short time until Cooper ran their dog into a fence. They weren’t very pleased about that.

Dogs only see in black and white and Cooper had a nasty habit of ingesting discarded Kleenexes if he spotted one. I always had to keep an eye out. Dogs can be a bit gross at times

We started to expand our horizons as to where he could be taken for a walk. We went down to the dike area in Richmond where they had an off leash area. At the time, he loved to race around with other dogs. On more than one occasion he somehow managed to find an oily pit which he rolled around in and I would then have to get him to go into the river to get most of the gunk off.

We discovered a great off- leash park out by the Vancouver International Airport.  Cooper was about 5 months old then. By this time he had a keen sense of where water was and would do anything to get into it. He was still about a month away from being neutered and I remember a couple of gay women chastising me that this procedure had not yet happened. It was only when I got home that I thought about whether their dogs were spaded. If so it wouldn’t have made any difference if Cooper tried to mate with their dogs.

I took Cooper into the vet to get neutered. I was told by some that this would quiet him down a bit. When I went to pick him up he wandered down the hall like a listing John Wayne. 20 minutes later I realized his personality hadn’t changed one iota.

As a novice with dogs two things quickly became evident about Cooper. He liked to pull when on his leash and in his exuberance he liked to jump up on people when greeting them. I enrolled us in a dog training class at a local pet store.  It was a really crappy atmosphere out in the parking lot with distractions and cigarette butts. In fact the trainer smoked while giving instructions. It was just a waste of time and money.

I owned a country place on Vancouver Island at a place called Fanny Bay. About twice a month we would go over there for the weekend.  On one of those weekends I stopped off at a drug store and picked up a bag of fruit candies and some disposable razors before catching the ferry. After we arrived I went to the car to retrieve those items only to discover that they had all been eaten by someone.  Sometime later, Cooper and I were out on a trail when we ran into some hikers. I told them about Cooper eating the razors. They then told me that they had spotted some blue plastic in some dog poop further back on the trail and now it made a lot of sense.

Cooper got me in trouble several times when he was younger. I remember the time I was spending the night at a girlfriend’s who lived near Kits Beach. Dogs weren’t allowed in her building so Cooper slept in the car. I awoke early and took him down to the beach in the dark. He jumped a guy in a suit who was carrying a cup of coffee. A passerby broke up the fight that was just about to start. That was a close one.

When Cooper was about two I decided to pack it in in Vancouver. I sold my business accounts and we moved to my place at Fanny Bay.  I was going to be semi-retired.  We lived there for two years as bachelors.  I was kind of a serial dater on the internet and over the years Cooper found himself in a number of strange houses. One time he took over an ailing Doberman’s toys and I could see him up on the host’s couch looking out the window when I went out for a smoke.  There are many other stories about how he interacted with these women but I will leave that to your imagination.

I’ve always been the type who liked to lie down on the couch while watching TV. At Fanny Bay we had a routine.  I would change positions on the couch from time to time. Cooper by this time had become well accustomed to sharing both the couch and my bed. All I had to say was “switch” and we would readjust where our territories were.

The whole setting at Fanny Bay was kind of idyllic. In the colder weather or when it snowed we were both safe and comfortable in our small house with a roaring fire. In warmer weather we investigated all of the close by trails. Cooper often swam in the ocean at the nearby oyster beach. He loved rolling on dead fish. Yuck! We would often drive over to Roswell Creek a few miles away where he would have a good swim.

I still had the problem with his pulling and jumping up on people. From time to time I would hear a shriek when we were out in the woods and Cooper was ahead of me. He was all about introducing himself by leaping up at them. One day I let him out of the car on a quiet road not seeing anyone around and the next thing I knew some old guy was beating him with a newspaper.

I’m not saying this was a good thing. I made one last attempt at getting Cooper out of his bad habits. I hired a guy who had a whole slew of border collies. He could direct them with hand signs from a hundred yards away. His solution to Cooper jumping up on people was to stick your knee in his chest. All well and good for me but how did I train complete strangers?

About once a month I would go over to Vancouver to visit my kids. Sometimes I would leave Cooper at a local kennel near Fanny Bay.  A few times I found it hard to recognize him when I picked him up. He had been rolling in the dirt with the other big dogs. When I would get him in the car he would be sitting in the front seat staring out the window as if he was making a statement that if we were such good pals why did you dump me with strangers?

In warmer weather I would often let Cooper lie by himself out on the front lawn. He tried to dig a few holes but for the most part he seemed to be content. Occasionally he would sneak off drawn by his curiosity through the woods behind us only to be returned by a neighbour.  I started to peek out the back window when I couldn’t spot him on the front lawn and attempted to stop him before he started to wander.

One day he went next door where they had an older big black dog. Somehow Cooper managed to get a big stick caught in his collar and I don’t know who was more grateful I decided to check on him.

My kids and their friends visited from time to time and Cooper always welcomed them into the pack. Over the years he always slept close to whoever was visiting, either in bed with them or on the floor beside the bed. He kept this habit to his final days.



Dean at 16 (in red T-shirt) with his friends and Cooper at Fanny Bay, B.C.

Leah at 16 with Coop at Fanny Bay oyster beach.

At some point I came to realize that the Fanny Bay deal wasn’t going to work. People kept mostly to themselves in the area and there was no social life other than the occasional brief chat at the roadside while out for a dog walk. I loved everything about the area but it seemed like the kind of place to go before you die or go into a home.  Cooper and I had some more living to do.

I sold the property and we moved to Victoria. I certainly over paid for the place I rented but I was determined to have a sizable backyard for my dog. We soon discovered Elk Lake Park in Saanich.  We spent many long hours there. Once again Cooper discovered chasing birds.  He would run to exhaustion and it dawned on me that I had to cut his efforts short when one day he lay panting in the weeds totally spent.

A few months after arriving in Victoria I met Linda on the internet and she would become a big part of Cooper’s life in the years to come. A guy with a golden retriever couldn’t be all that bad I guess? Linda lived in Nanaimo and for over a year we would go back and forth to each other’s places.

Linda had been a life-long owner of dogs. Cooper and her bonded right away.  She knew things about animals that I didn’t.  My philosophy in bringing up children or taking care of a dog was rather simple. Enjoy life, investigate, have fun. Just don’t take too big of a risk or hurt yourself.

Playing with Linda Victoria, BC

 Linda was to share in the next 5-1/2 years of Cooper’s life. Over those years we hiked and travelled all over Vancouver Island. The place we always like the best was Florencia Beach in Pacific Rim National Park on the west coast of the island. In later years we would make a day trip of going there and be back home by sundown.

Florencia Beach BC

Florencia Beach BC



Florencia Beach BC

We took Cooper to lot of islands near to Vancouver Island. Salt Spring, Gabriola, Hornby, Denman, Sointula, Alert Bay, Quadra, and Cortez. We took him to Port McNeil, Telegraph Cove, Tofino, Banfield, Spider Lake, Rosewall Creek, and out to Bamfield when Linda went on The West Coast Trail. We watched Cooper surf at China Beach north of Victoria. We took him to the interior of BC and Invermere, up to Whistler, and back to his old stomping grounds in Vancouver. Cooper got around.

Tribune Bay, Hornby Island, BC.



Alert Bay, BC

 

I remember a particular hike we took him on up Rosewall Creek when Linda was practicing for The West Coast Trail. Unwisely we made our way through the bush up a steep grade hanging onto roots so we could get a clear view of a waterfall. It turned out to be very unsafe and I’ll never forget the look in Cooper’s eyes and his legs shaking. “Are you guys totally nuts?”

Linda and I have lived together for 4 years in a small community just north of Nanaimo called Lantzville.  I kind of gave up the leader of the pack thing a bit to her. She was more of stickler about Cooper having a restraint thing attached to his collar where as I would usually not use it. I was used to his pulling.

We had the good luck of having trails through the forest only minutes away from our front door. We spent hours on those trails with Coop. We also had to try to dissuade him from searching for rabbit poop or as we called it “the buffet”. At the end of one of the trails was a blackberry patch and Cooper learned how to gingerly help himself to berries among the lower thorns. He knew where the small creeks were on the trails were. We were rarely successful in getting him home dry.

Finding Cooper a place to swim was always a priority in warmer weather. Up the hill from our place is a marsh with lily pads and croaking frogs and down the hill there is the ocean and a pebbled beach.

Cooper came with us on our trip back east earlier this summer. He drove with me across Canada to Ontario. He ran around the countryside In Saskatchewan and swam in Lake Superior. He stayed at my brother’s place near Guelph, Ontario in the country for about 2 weeks out of the 5 week trip.

We then headed back to the west coast and BC across the US. At times the temperature reached as high as 105 degrees. We made sure Cooper always had plenty of ice water. He swam in Lake Michigan, went with us to visit the American Pickers warehouse on the shores of the Mississippi in Leclaire, Iowa, he swam in an alpine lake in Yellowstone National Park.

Alpine lake in Yellowstone National Park

A few days after we got home Cooper was feeling kind of listless. He lost his appetite. The he perked up only to become listless again. We thought that it might just be the heat or maybe fatigue from the long trip. He still came on his daily hike but he seemed to have slowed down a bit. We thought that maybe he was just getting older. After all, he was 63 in human years.

My son Dean came over for a visit for a few days and about 2 weeks later my daughter Leah came over for 4 days. We took Cooper out to Pacific Rim National Park. We had no idea that it would be Cooper’s last visit. This time he didn’t race around like he usually did. You could tell he wanted to. My kids got to see Cooper one last time.

We had noticed that aside from Cooper slowing down that his stomach was starting to swell. We thought that maybe he had been drinking too much water in compensating for the heat or he picked up some kind of a stomach bug on his cross-country trip. We took him into the vet on Monday morning. After having a look at Cooper and feeling his body the vet suggested x-rays and then asked us to come into the examining room to tell us the news. I had to go outside and cry and Linda joined me in the car to do the same. It was as if a large part of our life was about to be removed.

Leah was still here and we still had to tell her. We had a spontaneous group hug and a further cry. Leah went home on the ferry the next day but got to say goodbye to her pal.

Leah and Cooper

We took Cooper down to the beach in Lantzville on Tuesday night for one last swim. It was a special time. Linda started to feed him whatever he wanted. It reminded me of a prisoner choosing his last meal.

Last swim Lantzville, BC
 

Last day at the beach Lantzville, BC

I think Linda and I were both stunned. We wanted to keep him with us as long as we could. I took Cooper for one last short walk while she was at work. The hours in his life were getting shorter.

We agreed on Thursday that the time had come. I don’t think Cooper had a clue about what was about to happen and that is a good thing. He was alert and curious right till the end. Breathing was becoming too difficult for him.

We will miss him. As the days go by it gets better. We got his ashes back a few days ago and sometime in September we will once again take him back out to Florencia Beach and cast his ashes to the wind. They will fly away like the free spirit Cooper always was.

 

I’ll miss the way he placed his head on my knee when he wanted something.

I’ll miss people asking if they could pat him as they did countless times.

I’ll miss him disappearing in the distance as he chased a high flying bird along the beach.

I’ll miss hearing his footsteps.

I’ll miss his love of fun.

I’ll miss the way he shared himself with strangers and those that knew him.

I’ll miss being greeted at the door when I come home.

I’ll miss just knowing him.

 

 Goodbye Cooper. Goodbye Coop. Goodbye Mr. C.

 

4590 Harvard Avenue

In late June of this year, Linda and I were taking some pictures of the house I grew up in the N.D.G. area of Montreal. An elderly British gentleman in his eighties turned up with a bag of groceries and asked us what we were looking at. After hearing my short tale, he suggested that it was quite likely that the woman who owned half of the fourplex would be open to showing us around the house I once lived in. She was sweeping out the garage when we introduced ourselves.

It turned out that she was originally from France. We ended up spending almost two hours with her. Between the three of us we managed to communicate in 2 languages. I think she was in her late seventies. A rush of memories came back to me as she showed us around. My old bedroom had become a part of an expanded kitchen. It was very interesting to see the changes she had made to the place.

She insisted that we have a beer with her and we sat at the kitchen table right where my bed used to be. She told us about a son she has who lives in the same province as us. (BC).  Then she brought out some old photo albums with pictures of her and her kids in France. She pointed out her handsome husband who had died years ago.

I got a bit of a laugh out of her by wrongly trying to indentify cars in the pictures. Citroen? Renault? Throughout our visit her little yellow bird flew about.

Not that we ever owned the flat, it was nice to know it was in good hands. I should also say that was a honour to meet such a kind and gracious lady.

4590 Harvard Avenue...upstairs...door in front

French lady, British guy, at back of house

Living Room

Dining room

Bathroom

Breakfast nook

My old bedroom

Kitchen

Linda  and lady with her bird

Showing us old photos

4590