Images of Quebec: Montreal was my "first" Big City, first went there for a summer as a university student in 1959...loved it: the city buildings, the smell of hot dust...Expo 67...moving to Montreal with a young family in 1969, being among a younger generation of families renovating Victorian houses in Lower Westmount: the children's' story time at the library, the downtown churches with gilded altars and Tiffany glass and Italian marbles, and the little High Streets with city shops

...the Expos on summer evenings at Jarry Park with airplanes lazily cruising in overhead, the fall colours at Mont St Bruno and the apples of Yamaska, Warshaw's, St Lawrence Main, and le Vieux Montreal...the Atwater Market and the regulars with the vegetables and the cheeses...

...hearing Frank Sinatra in person at the old Forum, and seeing Jean Belliveau skate (how I wish he'd accepted to be the Governor General)...speaking college French with my Vietnamese workmate, speaking franglais with my Bon Boss, getting better but not good enough to understand social joual...working my way through the history of the parishes doing deed research at the Registries of Deeds...

...seeing for the first time the statue of Madeleine de Vercheres: her story was in my Grade 4 reader back in the 1950's: why does no one in English Canada know it now? A young heroine! ... listening to my confrere interviewing an old farmer about his land being taken for Ste Scholastique, & thinking that he and my Nova Scotian grandfather would have understood each other very well...