Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Newfoundland Boy, part memoir, part anecdotes, and all about the Canadian province of Newfoundland. This is episode 4: “You Should See the New Ones We Got Comin’ In.”
After my sister-in-law and I finished our excellent lunch together on Wednesday at a great Chinese vegetarian place called the Peaceful Loft, we went across the street to get some greeting cards at the Tickle Trunk. First, a word about the restaurant. Neither of us is vegetarian, but the food was excellent. And the owner/server: oh my Jesus, as they say here in St. John’s. High-energy, extraordinarily customer-oriented, open, and just the personification of welcoming. It was the first time there for both of us so we weren’t sure what to expect. We picked dumplings for the app, my sis-in-law had Singapore noodles, and the owner told me I should have the Kung Pao mushroom dish. Hey, who am I to argue? While we waited he brought and refilled glasses of high-quality green tea. And a little soup. And an appetizer, with a regular and a hot sauce. It was as if it was illegal to be hungry for a minute in the place.
The dishes were great. My sister-in-law had enough noodles left over to feed her husband dinner, and the mushrooms (not my favourite veggie) were great, like giant scallops. And a great spiciness and hotness. (See some photos in the show notes.) We left happy and like we were leaving a friend. His authenticity was equal to the authenticness of his food: just amazing, outstanding. As I speak this, the place has almost 600 Google reviews and a rating of 4.9. That tells you something.
So. The Tickle Trunk. Partly a Newfoundland souvenir store, and partly a store with all kinds of interesting little things in it (and none of them cheapsy crap). She was looking for a card for mother(-in-law)’s day and I was just looking at cards. I loved the sign on the top of the card rack, and I may not be getting the exact wording wrong, but it was something like: PEACE, LOVE AND SARCASM. Again, see the show notes for the ones I bought, but in case you don’t get to it, they are:
○ “Sorry for calling you old. I thought you knew.”
○ “I hate everyone but you”
○ “The only man a girl can trust is her dog”
○ “We never liked him anyway”
These were all good enough, of course, but the co-owner, I think it was, spoke up a little sheepishly at first when he saw we were interested in the cards. I think he wanted to gauge if we were wokely oversensitive to slightly incorrect humour, or whether we were folks like him. When he saw we were laughing, he said, “You should see the new ones we got comin’ in.” Well, buddy, I’ll definitely be back to check those out.
The experience there was similar to the experience at the restaurant in its sincerity and genuineness. The co-owners were definitely not on the scale at Don’t help the customer until they’ve picked out some stuff and are ready to pay. And they were absolutely not at Let’s be friendly in a perfunctory and superficial way with these customers and it might help sales. We just started chatting with them, and laughing at the cards and commenting on the other great stuff in the store, and in minutes it was just four people having a great laugh and conversation about all kinds of things. It’s a gross understatement to say we felt welcome there. It felt like we had dropped in on some people we knew who happened to have some cards for sale. Just really incredible, and one of the things I love about St. John’s. I am not denigrating my former beloved city of Ottawa, but it’s hard to imagine the same thing happening there. And for the record, Ottawa has many and varied other charms: it’s a lovely city where I still have some great friends.
And for the other record, that is, the end of my outing with my sister-in-law, we went next door to a consignment shop called Model Citizens. And it was there that she bought a lovely dress that I suggested (hey, there’s a photo of that, too, in the show notes). It was colourful and wispy. I told her that the English word it reminded me of was diaphanous. Not a common word, so here’s the definition from Oxford: “adjective (especially of fabric) light, delicate, and translucent.”
Every person’s feeling about a city is unique and personal. Some people love the country for nature and the peace, and other people fidget because there’s not much to do there. Some people hate New York City for its busyness and the traffic and the rude people on the street, and some people love New York City for its busyness and the traffic and the rude people on the street. St. John’s has the feel of a small town, but it’s a small city. It has over 200,000 people. I wonder what the factors are that make a city feel like a small town, apart from size. Are there characteristics about the people, about their history? Does a city that is not a financial hub have a better chance of having a small-town feel? Is there some breaking point at the size of the population? Mexico City has over 20 million people so it’s likely out of the running, but it seems at least intuitively (I’m not sure about scientifically) true that the greater the population, the less chance of feeling like a small town.
I’m hoping that as I do more “research” this summer—by which I mean travelling around the Avalon Peninsula where the city is located—I might start to find out a few things. As I’ve mentioned before, St. John’s is anomalous population-wise in Newfoundland. Wikipedia says that the least populous town in Newfoundland (and in fact in all of Canada) is Tilt Cove, which has five people living there. That’s anomalous too of course, but there are lots of communities in Newfoundland and in Labrador (the non-island part of the province) that have a few hundred or a thousand or so people. I’ll report back on them during my travels.
And that’s all for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And please join me again on Tuesday.