From the Archive:  
  Saturday, September 28, 2002

Would you think there could be a place of such hubris as to call itself “Mount Pleasant” even if it is not a mountain at all but just a big enough hill to be really intimidating to cyclists and rollerbladers and maybe the odd wheezy geezer, though great fun to roll down, though it is devoutly to be wished that they repair the damn cracks in the road before I end up eating pavement? I think not. Where were we? Oh yes.

Mount Pleasant is another in this blog’s cast of characters; the neighborhoods have names, but the neighbors don’t. Actually, for a Vancouver neighborhood it’s really pretty neighborly and low-key. The Gucci quotient there is quite low, and the one and only time a Ferrari was parked outside the Starbucks it turned out to belong to Barry Neidermier, a skank who was making a living off smuggled cigarettes and smuggled 14-year-olds. One of the teenaged whores refused to testify until the cops went to her pad and rescued her teddy bear. No lie.

But most of the people around there are from the deeper end of the gene pool. Mount Pleasant runs south along Main from Dysfunction Junction at Broadway right up to the peak of the Mount itself, which up around King Ed, in Queen E Park. Broadway is actually Ninth avenue and King Ed is twenty-fifth, but nobody calls them that; it would be like calling John Wayne “Marion.” It’s a nice, working-class place with neat little old houses, maybe in need of a coat of paint or two, and big, rambling Victorians with truly elaborate gardens and lowrise apartment buildings full of Filipino immigrants and poor families who all gather on the patio at the cocktail hour for a little ballroom dancing. It’s quite a sight, I tell you; looks like a really, really casual wedding every single night. Jeans and sweats are good enough for most, and some of the youngest have been known to waltz in Speedos, at least when the sprinkler is going on the lawn. The middle-agers are the best dancers, but the expression on their faces makes them look like radio-controlled evil clones or something; lighten up people!

The centre of this little universe is not the Community Centre, though it’s lovely. It’s not the general store, there are too many. It’s not even the yoga studio. It’s the Starbucks.

But wait, you say, Starbucks is a synthesized, mass-produced global fast-food organization. Sure, you’re right, sometimes it is.

But sometimes it isn’t.

Sometimes it’s something else completely.

They say if you stand at the door of the Ritz-Carleton long enough you will see everyone on earth pass by. Well I say if you sit at an outside table at the Mount Pleasant Starbucks long enough you will see everyone in the neighborhood at least once, and probably at least one person you haven’t seen in twenty years, no matter where you’re from. It is the centre of the cosmos, at least on a very microcosmetic scale. There I learned all about how Pugs aren’t the snotty little wretches they seem to be; a woman tied her tiny FooFoo to one of the tables and the little critter was so game and friendly that it dragged the table thirty feet around the corner so it could say hi to everyone. Remember, this thing is the size of an ankle boot.

Once, I was there with my sister from back east; doesn’t matter where, it’s all “back east.” Could be Paris, could be Plum Hollow, it’s all just “back east.”

So there we were, so of course we went to the Starbucks. They hadn’t landed back east yet, so it was a new experience for her. We got in line behind a couple of cycle cops, also an unfamiliar sight to her eastern eyes.

“No doughnuts? What’s up with that?” she asked, incredulous. I believe in Ontario you aren’t allowed to sell coffee unless you sell doughnuts as well. I think you get three years.

The cop ahead of us reached the head of the line. He was still wearing his helmet, along with the military-geek shirt and the spandex shorts they wear. He asked the barista, “Is that bran muffin low-fat?”

No, it was not.

“Okay, then I’ll have a multigrain bagel, dry, and a tall non-fat latte.”

My sister turned to me and asked, “What the hell kind of cop is that?”

I walked in one day, having the kind of day where everything seems to be going my way for no reason at all, which is one of my favorite kind of days. I think I was going to get some coffee, though come to think of it there may have been snacking somewhere on the agenda, but just in a really casual sort of way. I walked in. I listened. Oh, oh, it’s one of my favorite songs! I turned to the barista and asked, “Steve! Is this the Committments tape?”

Steve, a musician when not baristicating, gave me a look of unutterable scorn, the kind of look a pediatrician would shoot Goebbels, and he said:

It’s ARETHA!

I so white.