Soup and Sandwich
Soup and sandwich. Ask yourself when was the last time you tucked into that classic combination? Was it yesterday or forever ago? Tim Horton's or a Sloppy Joe's diner somewhere?
It was yesterday for me. It was in the midst of the blizzard of the winter of the century (so far) in the old Hudson's Bay Company outpost at Phillips Square in Montreal. The timing could not have been better for stumbling into a fifth-floor department store diner that I'd believed was long gone into history.
I'd first heard about the double-horseshoe woodgrain formica countertop with the bright blue stools way back when I was a university student in Montreal in the early nineties. It was a rumour then, and over the years it became a myth. A lunch counter in the Bay, in this day and age? It got shadowy. It slipped in and out of being real - I went looking for it more than once, and couldn't seem to find it.
What floor was it supposed to be on again? Could it be that loud, plain cafeteria on the seventh I'd investigated only a year ago, a place so uninviting it defied legend? Not possibly. Maybe they'd torn it out and replaced it with an inferior version. That is often the way things go, after all.
Not this time. Yesterday at about 2 pm, feeling peckish and weary after a Secret Excursion into the depths of the underground city on a blustery day with an eleven-year-old spirit guide, a maze of intuitive turns and a long series of escalator rides brought us up to to Boys Wear in the Bay. A sign stuck to the wall with Scotch tape caught my eye: "Soupiere," it said, with an arrow pointing back in time... and there at long last... where it has been forever, apparently, was a little lunch counter dressed up for dinner in bright blue and shiny brown.
We each had a soup and sandwich. They have a fine selection of both and not a whole lot else. I had a coffee and my spirit guide had lemon marangue pie with vanilla ice cream. We ate in the quiet hush of lunch counter patrons everywhere, and walked out into the wind again with full bellies and red cheeks.
People were wandering around lost and lonely, cursing the winter and slipping in the snow. They don't know nothin' about a soup and sandwich, is their problem.
Those poor people.
It was yesterday for me. It was in the midst of the blizzard of the winter of the century (so far) in the old Hudson's Bay Company outpost at Phillips Square in Montreal. The timing could not have been better for stumbling into a fifth-floor department store diner that I'd believed was long gone into history.
I'd first heard about the double-horseshoe woodgrain formica countertop with the bright blue stools way back when I was a university student in Montreal in the early nineties. It was a rumour then, and over the years it became a myth. A lunch counter in the Bay, in this day and age? It got shadowy. It slipped in and out of being real - I went looking for it more than once, and couldn't seem to find it.
What floor was it supposed to be on again? Could it be that loud, plain cafeteria on the seventh I'd investigated only a year ago, a place so uninviting it defied legend? Not possibly. Maybe they'd torn it out and replaced it with an inferior version. That is often the way things go, after all.
Not this time. Yesterday at about 2 pm, feeling peckish and weary after a Secret Excursion into the depths of the underground city on a blustery day with an eleven-year-old spirit guide, a maze of intuitive turns and a long series of escalator rides brought us up to to Boys Wear in the Bay. A sign stuck to the wall with Scotch tape caught my eye: "Soupiere," it said, with an arrow pointing back in time... and there at long last... where it has been forever, apparently, was a little lunch counter dressed up for dinner in bright blue and shiny brown.
We each had a soup and sandwich. They have a fine selection of both and not a whole lot else. I had a coffee and my spirit guide had lemon marangue pie with vanilla ice cream. We ate in the quiet hush of lunch counter patrons everywhere, and walked out into the wind again with full bellies and red cheeks.
People were wandering around lost and lonely, cursing the winter and slipping in the snow. They don't know nothin' about a soup and sandwich, is their problem.
Those poor people.
posted by David Newland at 9.3.08
3 Comments:
Nice!
I remember when the old woolworth's in Cobourg had a lunch counter...I think I used to order milkshakes a lot there when I was a kid. Pity they replaced it with a liquidation store.
It's nice to know that some of them still exist though. ;)
Ghosts of years past! If I'm not mistaken, that is the very same lunch counter I would occasionally haunt back in the 60's and 70's. I wonder if the staff have changed? They always made me feel like I was sitting at their kitchen table.
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