There is good in every neighbourhood...St. Patrick’s Day at Jane and Finch: Irish music played by 50-year resident

In her kelly green coat and shamrock scarf, Catherine “Kitty” Gosselin, nee O’Sullivan, doesn’t stop at her favourite coffee shop or dollar store in her beloved Jane and Finch Mall. Her walking stick in hand, she heads straight to the main office to confirm plans for the big day.

That would be St. Patrick’s Day. Don’t ever say “St. Paddy’s Day” because she’ll correct you. “St. Patrick deserves his full due,” says the 82-year-old native of Ireland, who still speaks with a brogue.

On that day, the fiddler’s daughter, who wants to keep Irish music and heritage alive, will play her accordion and bodhran, a small goatskin drum, and Irish tapes and dance a jig in the busy mall as she’s done for the past three years. “I’m not an entertainer, dear,” she explains. “I just hop around. Honest to God.” Call it leprechaun-lite.

So there she’ll be in the special events area, down the corridor from the African shop, near the Vietnamese florist, close to the store selling Indian movies and Hindu religious art.

Caught up in Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ral and Danny Boy, she never pays much attention to the audience. “They all look the same to me: black, white, brown,” says Gosselin, who has lived in the neighbourhood since 1963. “I love my Jane and Finch, dear.”

That’s an understatement. She won’t tolerate a bad word about her Jane and Finch, a neighbourhood known more for crime than ceilidhs. She lives in the same brick bungalow that she and her husband, Roger, a Toronto police officer, moved into when the area was the back of beyond, nothing but trees and farmers’ fields. Her three children skated on the pond where the Jane and Finch mall now sits.

When one child came home saying the area was filling up with immigrants, Gosselin lined up the three of them. “I said, ‘Look at me. I’m an immigrant. I came here for a better life too.’”

But while she left Ireland, Ireland never left her. On a warm afternoon, Gosselin sits on her front stoop playing When Irish Eyes Are Smiling on her accordion. An Irish flag graces the door.

In her kitchen, the counter is piled with tapes and CDs of Irish music that she plays all day. Gosselin demonstrates a jig’s fancy footwork. One hand on a chair back steadies her, while the other hand daintily holds out her skirt hem as she dances.

At the mall, she’ll start with jig music. “That’s the appetizer to draw them in,” explains Gosselin. “The old Italian guys will try to dance.” Then she’ll play some polkas, reels and hornpipes. “It’s a mixed grill.”

The grandmother of 11 is a bit flustered about being interviewed, not wanting to seem like a big shot. “Ah, they’ll be taking me to Hollywood, to Jay Leno, or Jerry Springer,” jokes the Celtic charmer.

A picture of her childhood home, a thatch-roofed white cottage in Ardfert, County Kerry, hangs on the kitchen wall along with a photo of her father and brother, both named Patrick, both respected fiddlers. Her brother played the fiddle in the movie Ryan’s Daughter.

Other fiddlers always converged on their house. “When I was a child in bed in Ireland, I’d be dancing with my two big toes,” says Gosselin, the youngest of 10 children. “They’d all be up fiddling until 2 a.m.”

As a young woman, she left her Emerald Isle-idyllic home, lured to London by her older sisters. “They’d visit home with their styles from here to the heavens, their nice clothes and pale faces. We were always rosy-cheeked.”

In 1953 she and a sister came to Toronto as housekeepers. She landed in a big Forest Hill home. “I was so green,” laughs Gosselin. “The woman said to me. ‘We’re Kosher.’ And I said, ‘I’m Irish.’ I thought Kosher was an island off Newfoundland.”

She switched to nursing then married Roger, a French-Canadian from Timmins, in 1956.

Around their home, she played the Irish music. Her eldest daughter won medals as a child dancing the Irish jig. Her son and his daughter now fiddle.

In her sixties, Gosselin took up the accordion. When Roger was battling cancer, she found refuge in the instrument and composed Roger’s Waltz and My Cup Is Empty. He passed away in 1987.

Four years ago, on one of her near-daily trips to the Jane and Finch mall, she noticed that H & R Block was decked out in shamrocks. She chatted with a manager who invited her to bring her accordion on March 17th – and Jane and Finch has been reeling and jigging ever since.

Saturday afternoon, the mall will be prepared for her, green decorations and a chair to brace herself as she jigs.

“Whatever she needs, we’ll set up,” says maintenance worker Tarig Abdelkarim. “She’s awesome. Always friendly. She hands us drinks, saying ‘You guys work so hard.’”

All the tenants and staff know her.

“We’re very diverse here – West Indian, Indian, Asian, Spanish,” says mall marketing director Oneil Johnson. “Many people don’t know about St. Patrick’s Day. A lot of kids will be up dancing and playing instruments. At the Jane and Finch Mall, she is St. Patrick’s Day.”

A receptionist asks her, “Will you be wearing your green hat?”

“Oh, you haven’t seen anything yet,” teases Gosselin. She’s got a halo of shamrocks ready to go.

March 16, 2012 16:03:00
Nancy J. White      
Life Reporter