Sonny

Sitting in a Starbucks that is plunked at the end of a strip of franchise food outlets, standing in a row of other stores in a small, flat-roofed suburb mall is not a typical start-of-day for me. But these days, very little is typical, as I find myself in Ottawa lending a hand to my dad.

The neighbourhood where Paul, my father, still maintains his home is a circa 1950s suburb of mostly low-rise houses. The word bungalow, I discover, stems from a design of South African vacationer’s cottage and a derivation of a one-storey cottage style popular in early 18th century India. I often take morning walks through the enclave of winding streets in the ’hood. Now, new-fallen snow lends evenness to an already even streetscape.

The urban spaces I am partial too are more varied. I love the rugged patina of inner core city streets with houses and tenements sitting shoulder to shoulder with awaiting, quiet back laneways, corridors of long shadows framed by telephone poles and old board fences and verandas and stairwells that meander like poems through the heart of a city. For me, these spaces bear witness to the inventiveness of humans who want to personalize the simplest of spaces while creating sanctums of colour and invention.

So these days, on many a morning, I stop in for coffee during my walks. I favour one small table by the window when available, in a place where there are line-ups at the counter; where few look up from their smartphones and where baristas sing out over the hissing and whirring of machines: One Americano; a double-shot espresso; two tall lattes to go, extra shot: Grande Caramel Frappuccino! I just order coffee; in a mug; for here please.

Returning to one’s hometown to care for an elderly parent can open to more than anticipated. While coming to terms with care for our elderly I have become aware of how loneliness is a key factor. How we are designed as social beings. While we may chose to be solitary and private, all of us, I believe, are born with an innate need to be part of community, an extended family, whether consisting of two or 100 members. I attribute a lot of my centenarian scientist dad’s recovery to good food, sleep and having the stimulation of people around as winter had closed him in. Loneliness, especially with the elderly, is now identified as a significant factor in physical and mental wellness. I remember a farmer—he was someone I didn’t know—telling me if I was to have an animal, “be sure to have at least two of its kind. Animals,” he continued, as we sat up on the benches of a livestock auction, “is like ourselves, sonny. Not to be alone. Need company as much as anyone.”

By this time of morning, the January sun has finally crept its way over the parking lot, now mostly empty but for the bank of taxis clustered like pigeons at dawn; cabbies travelling in and out of the coffee shop for topups and washroom breaks.

Across the way, toward another section of the mall, people shuffle in and out of the laundromat, lugging heavy baskets. The hardware store guy is putting out a snow blower, now on sale.

Meanwhile, back at the coffee counter, the lady from the pharmacy is a little groggy-eyed as she orders her cappuccino. And noticeably—this being a town where the civil service is a main industry—many who come through here have ID tags about their person. Now the prisoner-transfer vehicle belonging to the OPP arrives. The co-driver gets out to await the coffee assembly. And mostly I feel like a fly on the wall; everyone seems to know everyone. Some sit for a moment’s chat, a smile, then move on with their day.

But there has been one single entity in all of this that has me curious every morning I have sat here. In what I feel to be a spiritually void and bleak landscape of a suburb mall parking lot, I am attracted to this particular table because just beyond the glass is a small maple tree. Hanging from one of the branches is a bird feeder, well attended this morning by chickadees and nuthatches and one downy woodpecker. It is an oasis of spirit. I have been curious of the thought and juxtaposition of ideals; of a spot like this taking time to install and maintain something like a bird feeder. This morning I got the answer.

I watched as one of the regulars arrived. Before coming into the coffee shop on this -40 celsius morning, he removed a small bag of birdseed from the basket of his battery powered mobile chair. With heavy mittens and a peaked cap with ear flaps pulled down tight, snot frozen to the tip of his nose, he shuffled over to the feeder, lowered it down and carefully refilled it before re-hanging the feeder for his anticipating circle of feathered friends. Turns out that Maurice, who makes the daily trek from his nearby seniors’ apartment, has instituted at his “home-away-from-home,” as he now recounts to me, “somethin’ to bring a smile on.” With support from the hardware store guy, Maurice installed the feeder two years ago. He shares his pension money with the birds, keeping them in good supply of feed, while at the same time offering his adopted family of morning-crowd coffee comers and goers a taste of the solemn beauty of the natural world set against the rigid backdrop of a parking lot in winter.