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In my neck of the woods, Blue Monday — Oct. 19, 1981 — was a personal as well as a public downer.

My marriage had collapsed. I had taken a job in New York City and had returned to Montreal only to finish closing down my apartment before I left. The apartment was almost bereft of furniture — a mattress, a couple of chairs, a table, a small black-and-white TV set.

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It didn’t matter, I was only going to be in Montreal for a couple of days. But then I came down with pneumonia and a couple of days became a couple of weeks. I lived on chicken soup and the support provided by Dr. Sam Shuldiner, who ambled down from his office to check on me — a rare event in medicine, even then.

But necessity can become virtue. I was sustained from one day to the next by the Expos’ dramatic playoff run, the one that ended on Blue Monday with Rick Monday’s dramatic home run off Steve Rogers.

Devastated, I walked down to the pharmacy on Queen Mary Rd. to get a prescription filled. I waited with a group of elderly women who were as despondent after the loss as I was. Blue Monday cut wide and deep. It seemed that all of Montreal felt it.