Lachute, Love and a New Beginning

Joyce didn't want to date me at first.

One of the reasons was Malcolm.

She didn't like him, and because Malcolm and I were friends and running around together, that didn't exactly help my chances.

Joyce had also gone out with my old friend Bobby Kibbe on a few dates.

But our paths continued to cross.

We kept going to Corfort, one of those places where young people gathered for live music and weekend dances. In those days, places like Corfort were a big part of our lives.

Joyce was born in 1948 and had grown up on her family's farm about nineteen miles west of Lachute.

She had a sister nine years older and a brother. Joyce was something of a surprise because her parents were already getting older when she was born.

Her father was a farmer. The property was about 250 acres, as I remember it, and he sold hay from the farm. The family also had six cottages and a swimming pool that they rented during the summer.

Joyce went to school in Lachute.

When she finished school, she moved to NDG — Notre-Dame-de-Grâce in Montreal — where she lived with her cousins and went to work as a teller at the Bank of Commerce.

That's when our paths crossed again.

By late 1968, I was living at home in St-Eustache with my mother, my stepfather Fred, and my brother Doug.

I was working as a printer and commuting into Montreal.

As luck would have it, my mother and Fred both worked at the Bank of Commerce — the same bank where Joyce worked.

My mother got to know Joyce during breaks and at lunchtime.

I was always asking about her.

"How's Joyce?"

"Did you see her today?"

"Did she say anything about me?"

Finally, I decided to do something about it myself.

I started going to Joyce's bank to cash my paycheque.

Of course, cashing the cheque wasn't the real reason I was there.

I wanted to see Joyce.

I tried to get a date with her.

No luck.

I kept trying for a few months.

Still no luck.

So I did the next best thing.

I got a job at the bank.

I went to work in the basement of the Bank of Commerce as a printer, making cheques for the bank's customers.

Now Joyce and I were working in the same building.

At lunchtime, I would go upstairs and sit with my mother.

Naturally, I tried talking to Joyce whenever I had the chance.

She avoided me.

I'd managed to get myself into the same bank, the same building and the same lunchroom.

And I still couldn't get a date.

Then, about a month later, I tried something different.

I told Joyce I was going skiing up north.

I knew I would be passing right by her family's place near Lachute.

So I asked her:

"I'm going to be passing right by your door. Would it be okay if I stopped in?"

This time she surprised me.

She said yes.

I stopped at the farm and met Joyce's parents.

They were both in their sixties and were very hard-working people.

Their home was an old stone farmhouse. Downstairs were the kitchen, dining room, living room and a bedroom. There were four more bedrooms upstairs.

At the back was what they called the summer kitchen. Today, we'd probably call it a mudroom.

There was also a garage, a shed and a barn.

But some of the things I remember most about that farm weren't the buildings.

They were the little things that happened every day.

At Joyce's house, you ate four meals a day.

Her mother was a great cook. At around ten o'clock at night, out would come the sandwiches and cookies.

I particularly remember her chopped-egg sandwiches.

And when she put food in front of you, you ate it.

Her father had a morning routine I'll never forget.

He got up early and started the day with a shot of whisky to, as he put it, "kick-start the blood."

Then came breakfast.

I remember his eggs looking like French fries.

He would boil water for tea and then pour the hot tea into a saucer to cool before drinking it.

Those little memories have stayed with me all these years.

That first visit to the farm changed everything.

After months of trying to get Joyce to go out with me, we finally started dating.

Before long, we were going steady.

Over the next few months, we went to country music bars in downtown Montreal. I took Joyce to Huntingdon to meet my friends. We crossed the border and went to the Skyliner in Malone, New York.

She came to my mother's house in St-Eustache, and I went to see her at her cousins' place in NDG.

But most weekends, I was at the farm.

I helped with chores on Saturdays and Sundays and gradually became part of the routine there.

When I stayed overnight, I slept downstairs on the couch.

Joyce slept upstairs.

Then early Monday morning, Joyce and I would get up and make the drive into downtown Montreal for work.

We were young, working, driving back and forth between Montreal, St-Eustache and Lachute, and beginning to build a life together.

And one snowy Monday morning on Autoroute 15, we very nearly turned that life upside down.

One weekend, Joyce and I stayed in Montreal instead of going to Lachute.

We had something important to do.

We needed a place to live.

The baby was on the way, although almost nobody knew it yet. At that point, my mother was the only one in my family who knew Joyce was pregnant.

Money was tight.

I was making about $75 a week, and I was driving a beat-up, rusted Ford. The floor was so full of holes that in places you could look down and see the road going by underneath you.

It wasn't much of a car.

And we certainly weren't rich.

But we were starting a family.

We got lucky and found an apartment we could afford in Ville Saint-Laurent, about fifteen miles north of downtown Montreal, on Ouimet Street.

It was a basement apartment with two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen.

It wasn't fancy, but to us it was going to be home.

We could move in on May 1, 1969.

We had our first place.

Now we had another problem.

We had nothing to put in it.

We needed furniture, and we didn't have the money to buy it.

I remember seeing advertisements in the local paper, the Victory. Furniture stores were advertising package deals aimed at young couples just starting out.

For around $1,500, you could furnish three rooms — typically a living room, bedroom and kitchen or dining area.

Fifteen hundred dollars might not sound like much today.

When you're making $75 a week, it was a fortune.

We couldn't walk into a furniture store and put $1,500 on the counter.

So we did what many young couples did in those days.

We bought it on time.

We went to Major Furniture in St-Eustache and arranged to make payments. You had a payment book and paid a little at a time until the furniture was yours.

That's how Joyce and I got started.

Our parents helped too. Both families gave us things from their homes that we could use in the apartment.

There had been no wedding gifts yet.

There had been no baby shower.

Nobody knew there was going to be a baby.

We took whatever we could get and slowly began putting our first home together.

We didn't have much.

But we had a place to live, some furniture, two jobs and a baby coming.

Meanwhile, the wedding was getting closer.

Joyce's parents were busy making the arrangements in Lachute.

In the beginning, her mother hadn't particularly liked me. She tolerated having me around the house, but I don't think I was exactly the young man she had imagined her daughter marrying.

My mother was different.

My mother loved Joyce.

They worked together at the Bank of Commerce, and they had gotten to know each other there long before Joyce and I were married.

Now the wedding invitations were being prepared and sent out.

This wasn't going to be a little wedding.

The reception was going to be held at the Lachute Golf and Country Club.

About 225 people were invited.

For two young people who had started with practically nothing, it was going to be quite a day.

And August 30, 1969, was coming quickly.