John Patrick Kelly: Inventor. Animal lover. Iconoclast. Neighbour. Born Feb. 27, 1941, in Verdun, Que.; died Jan. 18, 2024, in Montreal of heart failure; aged 82.
John Patrick 'Jack' Kelly and his dog Shadow.Loreen Pindera
Jack Kelly spent a lot of time last summer talking to his neighbours in Quebec’s Laurentians about his sagging porch steps. He worried he might trip or that his closest companion, Shadow, might hurt a paw on a rusty nail.
The rotten steps were dragged onto a teetering pile of other rotten stuff. Jack spent weeks sawing and hammering and when the sturdy new steps were pounded into place at last, he reckoned they would hold up for a couple decades – unless they were blown to smithereens in a nuclear war started by some nuclear-bomb-wielding tyrant.
The day the stairs were done, Jack disappeared into the cluttered little cabin he’d built by hand, over decades – the home-sweet-home with no indoor plumbing in Arundel, Que., where he slept next to Shadow, cooked on a wood stove and listened to American talk radio late into the night. He emerged with a couple of cold beers and a fistful of pages ripped from Popular Mechanics, to which he always found the money for a subscription. He’d spent his working years as a draftsman and his crisp, clear handwriting filled every millimetre of the margins of every clipped article, up the side of one column and down the other, arrows pointing this way and that, key sentences thrice underlined and starred.
Ever the insistent teacher, Jack was always ready to help you fathom his thinking and follow his logic. An intuitive recycler, he folded tin cans into the shapes of model weather vanes that might generate electricity, model stoves that might save on firewood and on hand-welded bicycles with three chains that might make pedalling up hills easier. He nailed thousands of can lids in neat rows onto the outer walls of his home to hold Styrofoam insulation in place.
Earlier in the year, Jack had tripped while making instant coffee and scalded his right foot. He tended to it himself, cleaning the wound with beer (“alcohol is a disinfectant”) and spraying it down with WD-40 “to keep my ankle joint flexible,” fashioning a boot out of cardboard and duct tape. To no one’s surprise, the wound got infected. “Please, no more construction materials on that foot, Mr. Kelly,” a nurse instructed. Jack grudgingly admitted she might be right, acquiescing to the neighbours who took turns driving him (and Shadow) to the clinic to have his foot tended to properly.
Just before Christmas, Jack dropped in on one of those neighbours for breakfast and a hot shower. Cleaned up, he showed off the baby pink skin on his ankle, healed at last. Over black coffee and pancakes with maple syrup, Jack regaled his neighbours with stories about growing up in the 1950s in the hardscrabble Montreal neighbourhood of Verdun, about all the times he’d come to a fork in the road and had to choose between doing good or doing harm. He named friends who found homes in gangs and spent time in penitentiaries. Jack admitted his fair share of mistakes.
Some had cost him dearly. Better not to talk about it.
“Had things been different, I would have loved to have been a scientist,” Jack said, slipping a scrap of pancake to Shadow. “But I’ve had a good life, better than I ever could have imagined.”
Nothing foreshadowed that this would be the last time David and Loreen would hear Jack’s theories on Chinese expansionism, on why we all should build bomb shelters and the inevitability of hydrogen-powered bicycles and cars. There’d be no more outings to Le Snack Shack down the highway in Weir, where Jack had a standing order for three burgers: two all-dressed for him, one (no onions, no ketchup) for Shadow.
Over Christmas, Jack grew worried about a tingling in a leg and called his friend Jane, who ferried him to St. Mary’s Hospital in Montreal. It turned out he’d had a heart attack. Then he had a stroke or two in hospital.
David and Loreen called him and found it hard to equate his weakened voice with that of the Jack Kelly they loved, the one that would bellow with rage at some imagined slight, the one preserved on the voice mail belting out “Happy Birthday to you” with an Irish lilt true to his Verdun roots, as strong and youthful as a choirboy’s.
Jack died not long after, a month shy of his 83rd birthday.
Shadow has found a home with Jane. Jack, who over the decades had adopted more cast-off kittens and unwanted pups than anyone can count, would be relieved and content.
David Gutnick and Loreen Pindera are Jack’s neighbours.
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