December notebook

The view from booth four at Jimmy’s on the main drag of Trenton looks onto the street entrance doors. It’s in booth four that I sometimes sit.

Jimmy, at age 94 holds camp down near the restaurant’s kitchen. Booth 10 is Jimmy’s office. “I come in at five o’clock in the morning. I make it the soup: Each day. For 50 years I make it the soup. That’s me!”

Jimmy has been known to take the odd, well-deserved nap while in his ‘office’ and will tell many people the soup legend when they inquire how he is. But we know Jimmy is more than soup. He has run a successful business in Trenton for half a century, following a move from Montreal which came after a move from Greece with his family when he was 10.

The pay phone by the front entranceway; the table jukeboxes at each booth: While they haven’t run in a while, they tell a story with the song listings, a story of years of patrons coming and going through life progressions. The crimson and white checkered tile floor marks their path. The ‘today’s special’ sign, hand written on cardboard and taped to the expansive plate glass window out front also speaks of time.

On Christmas Day: ‘Hot Turkey Dinner with dressing and dessert’, it’ll be and Jimmy will be overseeing things from booth 10 just as today. His regulars will also be there; the many without family near, or simply alone. They’ll drift in here because the place is home. Strangers at first, maybe at the beginning, but certainly not for long: ‘Jimmy’s’ becomes family.

So the jukeboxes sit quiet, there are no espresso machines whirling or orders being shouted for exotic coffees. Nor is there music pumping from speakers. One of the best things, in my view, is that there are also no television screens shouting out the ‘daily noise’. If there is news to be had, it will be gathered from a friend in a neighbouring booth or from any one of the servers who have earned career badges at Jimmy’s.

The patrons are mostly from the non-texting generation, which leaves an easy quietude of a people gathering in the moments. They sit face to face and talk. You could say that here is a shelter from the rumble of the world. Especially on a day like today, where the fever and expectations of the ‘holiday season’ run high.

The coffee is hot, a fried egg sandwich on a December slate grey afternoon and my notebook in hand…all is well. Formerly known as the Olympic Restaurant, the place is Jimmy’s creation and I like to come here because of its soul.

It took me awhile to recognize why I am drawn to places like Jimmy’s. For one thing, places like this have a truth about them. From a writer’s point of view, a place can be textured with the stuff of life, warming to a passerby’s heart. I learn from every stop here.

‘Rod’ is one of the patrons I recognize. Decked out in his cowboy outfit, his horse these days is an electric scooter with a flag of the Toronto Maple Leafs flying high from a back antennae. Rod will dismount his ‘hoss’ outside and saunter in and plunk himself into booth six. He gives a nod to a server and before his ass is in the seat a bottle of beer is set down before him. From that point on, he’ll slowly sip away, chew on his moustache and ponder things as he takes one dime at a time out of his pocket and stacks it on the table until he has covered the cost of his beer. Now finished, up and out he goes as I watch him ride off into the winter’s day.

And then there is ‘Tom,’ who I picture as the night watchman who must live above one of the stores nearby because around three in the afternoon he’ll show up in a T-shirt looking as if his day is just starting. “Tomato macaroni” he calls to a server, this being the code I figure for a fairly regular dinner order. There are teens and families, a cross section of people who come and go through it all.

A thought that occurs to me as I finish my coffee, is that Jimmy’s and places like it are like a quiet eddy in a rushing river. The slack water here occurs because trend has never landed. ‘Branding’ has never occurred. It is a place that just is.

To ‘eddy out’ on a canoe run in fast water allows a moment to consider the journey before rejoining the stream. I guess that’s what today has given me.

Important the more I think about it is that today is also winter solstice; A turn of the earth’s orbit where the days will begin to grow longer; a part of us in the nature of the universe. That’s why our ancestors celebrated the coming light with festive dances and fire lit ceremony, and why I have taken in many such gatherings in places where I have lived.

Solstice carries for me the true meaning of the season. While I fire up the wood stove and a few candles tonight I will think of the lessons of light and humility I learned from booth number four at Jimmy’s on this solstice day.