The good place

 

I'm saddened tonight by the news that Nordstrom is shuttering all its Canadian stores. 

I didn't shop there—I was not their target market—but the restaurant at the top, Bar Verde, was one of my favourite spots in Toronto for seven years. 

Centuries ago, there was a wonderfully unpretentious restaurant on Church St. called Café California. The owners were friends of mine, and it was where I could usually be found, either dining alone, working on my journal, or entertaining friends. 

The staff likewise became friends over time, and the owners' daughter, Angie, became like a beloved niece. I watched her grow from a precocious little girl into a lovely, intelligent young woman. I wrote about her in Other Men's Sons in an essay called "Eloise on Church Street."

When the restaurant closed, I was bereft. The last place I ever expected to find its replacement was on the top floor of a American department store anchoring the Eaton Centre.

I must have been visiting Bar Verde since at least 2017, if not earlier. I can count the tenure of at least four managers, off the top of my head, and many more wait staff, all of whom I was on a mutual first-name basis with. A handful, I count today as actual friends. 

Every December, I loved to watch the Christmas lights in the mall from the restaurant's vast floor-to-ceiling windows towering above it, and it was always my first sense of the Christmas season. 

I have a particular memory of stopping by the restaurant for a later dinner on the evening of the launch of Best Canadian Essays  2016, which contained one of mine, and being brought a glass of champagne from the manager, to celebrate. 

Every January and February, when the restaurant was quietest, I re-read Peter Straub's Ghost Story while the snow fell outside in sheets. In the summer, it was a cool refuge from the heat and humidity. 

But Christmas always came again, and the coloured lights of the mall shimmering below my table had a bit of an Irving Berlin quality in the weeks before we left for Palm Springs, and our Christmas with the California family.

The staff always made space for me to read and edit manuscripts over carafes of Diet Coke and coffee. During COVID-19, I always felt safe dining there because of how luxuriously spaced the tables were. A dear friend of mine and I had dinner once a week, for years, and helped each other through some challenging times. 

Sunday has been a throwaway day for me since my boarding school years, and the perfect rainy Sunday late-afternoon was spent at the farthest booth in the back, adjacent to the bar, with only my own company and a great book 

When I got my cancer diagnosis last spring, my first get-well card was a massive one, signed by every member of the restaurant staff—with personal messages of love and support, not just generic signatures, and it was accompanied by two massive jars of their signature tomato basil soup, which they knew I loved. 

That summer and fall, I stopped by after each doctor's appointment and procedure (the hospital was ten minutes away) and did so after every "chemo Monday," when Flo 2 was unhooked, and I most needed to lose myself in a crowd of people, and just feel normal. Even thinking of it now, I'm in awe of each small but resonant acts of kindness along that route. A middle booth eventually became colloquially know as "Michael's booth," and it always seemed to be free for me, no mater what the weather, internal or external. 

I was dining there tonight with Jenny when the staff got an impersonal bulk email from head office, announcing the closure. Moments later, it hit the national news. 

The emotional disconnect between the cold, antiseptic language of the press coverage and the shell-shocked faces of the about-to-be-unemployed staff was heartbreaking. 

The CBC reported tonight that roughly 2,330 people will lose their jobs. 

I guess that sounds like a small, anonymous number—unless of course, you can put names and faces you love to that number; and especially unless you vividly remember some of them embracing you and shedding tears upon hearing the news that you were cancer-free, and all the genuine tenderness, softness, and affection during the dark months that you weren't.

We all make the places of our hearts that are not our homes—restaurants, bars, bookshops, galleries, and more—which are occupied by people who are not family, or even, necessarily, "friends" in the accepted sense of the word, but who are both receptacles and sources of kindness and goodness—places that we leave happier than when we arrived, and where we always feel welcome: the archetypical "good place."

To people who don't know me well, the only thing more bewildering than the fact that this latest iteration of my "good place" is a restaurant at the top of a department store is how genuinely sad I am that it's coming to an end. And I'm bad at endings.

When you're open-hearted, and open to people, and open to their lives and stories, they trust you with those stories. And, as any writer can attest, the sharing of a life story, or of life stories, is one of the most bonding of human experiences, and the listener and the teller become part of each other in some small way forever. 

That's colder consolation than I'd like tonight, but I'll still take it.