The town Starbucks forgot

National Post (Toronto) ^ | June 25, 2002 | Christie Blatchford

[Clive]

The town Starbucks forgot

Like John Mellencamp, who famously sang about it, I grew up in a small town.

Unlike him, if I can arrange it, I will die smack in the heart of a teeming city, preferably in a stark but well-appointed loft in an architecturally respectable low-rise development, surrounded by my child substitutes, vile cats who will pretend to be washing themselves and not counting the minutes until they can feast upon my fashionably wasted carcass.

This realization came to me over the course of the last weeks, as I have been temporarily living in St. Thomas, Ont., a small town just big enough that its citizens indignantly demand it be called a city.

There I am ostensibly covering a child-protection hearing but in fact am reduced, by dint of the whopping publication ban imposed upon the proceeding, to writing at hideous length about matters ancillary to the actual court case, such as the history of the Mexican Mennonites -- something which, I should add, has not escaped the attention of the National Post's readers, a few of whom from time to time snap themselves out of the stupor I have induced long enough to drop me a line to correctly accuse me of being a monumental bore.

There is much to be said for small towns (and cities). Their charms have never eluded me and they do not now.

I arrived fresh from a vacation, and was thus still in the mood to offer crisp, Protestant, morning greetings to strangers, a habit which in Toronto causes young mothers, or rather their nannies, to snarl aggressively and gather the children close. In St. Thomas, such children are often accompanied by their actual mothers, and the mothers are confident and sturdy and reply in kind. I find this stupidly moving.

A while back, at a meeting connected to my story, I arrived ridiculously early out of my ever-present paranoia and was thus in place to watch everyone else enter the joint. It was like sitting in a lovely bath: To a man, people walked through the front door into the hall proper and began nodding madly to the huge number of folks they knew.

I remember that feeling. I still seek it, or a version of it, on the job; it is one of the reasons I so adore the courts which comprise my beat. These cases, like the lawyers involved in them, go on and on, with the result that the players get to know and like one another, everyone takes the same seats, the corridors and loos and quirks of the building are soon like old friends, and, by the end of any given trial, I am always stricken to leave.

I like that children in places like St. Thomas still run relatively free, ride their bicycles without so much protective equipment they look like spacemen, and can go home for lunch -- not so different from my own childhood, wild and unstructured by modern urban standards. I like that the other night, when I went out for dinner, I closed the sliding-glass door of my ground-floor hotel room but didn't bother locking it. I like the level of involvement ordinary guys, like the fellow I met in the home renovation business who is a volunteer or member of a half-dozen civic boards and commissions and thus a not insignificant force, can have.

But for all that, at my core, I am a city chick now. If I had to live in a small town, I would be one of the crazies with an absurd number of guns. The sheer number of complicated traffic lights in St. Thomas -- there are advance greens and left and right-hand turn signals galore, and they go on forbloodyever-- would render me barking mad within a month. When rush hour consists of a dozen vehicles, all doing a robust 15 klicks an hour, is it really vital to give each one its own special minute-long signal? Why is the stop sign on that one street positioned so that if you were to obey it, and a train actually was approaching, you would be parked precisely in the middle of the tracks?

Jogging has been popular in North America only for a quarter-century; at some point in the not-too-distant future, will motorists in small towns cease glaring at us and yield a quarter inch of road? If a pair of sneakers and a sweat-stained T-shirt are when worn at dawn proof positive of communist leanings, why do they draw not so much as a glance in the Zellers at mid-day? And the police cars, Jesus wept, they're everywhere in a small town; I've seen more of les boeufs since I've been in St. Thomas than I do in any given year in Toronto, and every one of them appears to regard me with deep suspicion, as though they know very well that I am one of those smartypants who will tear through the streets at the speed limit.

A group of us, from Toronto and London, Ont., which in St. Thomas and environs is akin to Sodom, were talking about this very thing at lunch last week, well sort of, we were. I may even have started it, though I can't be sure; I do recall whining that I could not live in a place without at least a single Starbucks.

We were at the local tea room, our favorite place, and were worrying over what to order. One of the London contingent had tried the curry the day before, so one of the Toronto boys ordered it. "You did say it was good, right?" he asked, after the waitress had run off.

"Well," said the London guy, "it was adequate."

"Now you tell me," said the Toronto fellow, wounded. "How was it, really?"

"It was fine," said the London guy. "You know -- fine. It wasn't a real curry."

Then followed a protracted discussion about the arcane spices available only at proper markets, and how you might settle now and then for using curry powder, you know, in a pinch, but really, you'd want the fresh coriander and whatever. That led to another lengthy conversation about Thai food, and the various things one needs to cook it up. One of the Toronto fellows, throughout, was picking off from his exquisite navy jacket bits of cotton fluff from whatever are those trees which give off cotton fluff, and recounting how, during a recent cycling trip through southwestern Ontario, someone, on spotting his several earrings, had cruelly yelled out to inquire where his boyfriend was. That led to one of the London contingent regaling us, to much horror on our parts, about a recent visit to a restaurant there which actually serves something called "Homosexual Coffee." Perhaps it is flaming? Perhaps it is served with an earring on the saucer.

I believe it was when everyone requested separate bills, and receipts, that I was transported back to my Rouyn-Noranda roots, and realized for an instant how we must have appeared -- as the effete urban knobs we undoubtedly are.

But, as one of my great friends always says, know who you are and be that thing: I am an urban knob, and though I was born in a small town, urban knob I must die. Frankly, I'm not at all sure the cats will have me.

[Clive]

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[TightSqueeze]

BUMP for a great read.

I can relate, having recently moved from Urbania, to what was viewed originally as quaint and quite, in three months, turned out to be dullsville. Funny thing is, back there I was pigeonholed a right-wing Christian conservative, were I to share my perspective here, the message would be deemed as radical, pagan and pinko. Still I may have the last laugh as property values are continuing to soar, just might end up selling this money pit back to the hayseeds and buying a grander pad back in good old metropolis.