Please read “About this project and the Author” for more information on my project. In this excerpt Daryl begins to tell his story, which he titled Citizen of Ville Joie:

“One day of late summer when I was six years old, I was playing with other kids from my neighbourhood in the narrow street behind where I lived with my mother, sister and three brothers. We rented an apartment in a hovel in a part of town where the poorest of the poor lived. It was a place where nothing ever happened and where time went by very slowly. Since everybody was equally poor and none of us kids ever had anything of value to make our friends envious, we didn’t really noticed we were poor. Plus we spent most of our days playing in the backstreet so to us, concrete looked like concrete no matter where we were. It didn’t matter to us either that all the tenants had their windows covered with newspapers. Nobody could afford to buy curtains so when the pages turned to a dark yellow colour and it was time for a new window treatment, we’d just buy a newspaper.

There were dozens of clothes-lines going from our building to the building facing it on the other side of the street. So many lines and constantly bent by the weight of old, freshly washed clothes. I wish I could tell you that the clean clothes were a stark contrast to the landscape but an enormous beige bra hanging next to a formerly white t-shirt blended just fine with the rest of the tableau. To the easily amused eye of a child though, these lines looked like a giant spider web. We spent entire afternoons lying on our backs observing them and trying figure out which line connected to which apartment. Funny how the imagination of a child can be productive when it has to rely on its own power.

Unemployed men sat in their rocking chairs on the balcony and drank beer all day while their wives stayed inside to roll enough cigarettes to last until late in the evening and also to get the meals ready on time. That last part was easy because nobody ever ordered à la carte in my neighbourhood. A can of beans or a can of stew, that was the menu du jour. For my family it was peanut butter, perfect for breakfast or lunch or dinner. So peanut butter it was; for breakfast, for lunch and for dinner. Anyway, husbands and wives spent their entire days just a few feet apart but the only moments they actually interacted with one another was when they yelled at us kids. Yes, it was that kind of neighbourhood.

So when a big expensive white car turned on our street and drove in our direction, all of us kids stopped playing and marvelled at the car in absolute awe…”

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Contact: steve.marchand@rogers.com