“So you have lived here for 55 years?” I was asked. But it was true, and the first signed lease dated 1969 proves it. So let me rewind and look back at all those years I have lived here, right up to the present.

The beginning: When my parents, arriving from Hungary, joined me here in Canada, our first apartment was in the West End of Montreal. It was a small apartment on the ground floor of an apartment building looking out on a back alley. Here the living room converted into my bedroom with a Hide-A-Bed sofa. But one day my father met a fellow Hungarian named Tony who had a tailor shop nearby and lived with his family in a much fancier seven-storey apartment building on a main street, not far from where we lived at the time.