Cigarettes and gas, two things you burn
Being in the class of people who need people (which makes me, according to an old song, among the luckiest people in the world), I have an interest in knowing where congregation happens.
Being in the class of people who need people (which makes me, according to an old song, among the luckiest people in the world), I have an interest in knowing where congregation happens. In my hometown of KenMore, a remarkable amount of it occurs under the aegis of schools and churches. The village has a good amount of both, and if your definition of a strong community rests on the influence of those two institutions, well, there is strength in KenMore. There are also social service groups galore, a volunteer fire department that never seems to lack for recruits, and thriving bars that seems to enlist softball teams by the dozen. As has been pointed out here in the past, the old-timers who once went out at night tend to gather in the daylight, for breakfast at burger shops, Tim Hortons and the like. While the village has some excellent restaurants, so do other suburbs (and so does Buffalo, of course). Few people seem to walk around the corner to go out to dinner; this isn’t “Seinfeld” or “Mad About You” in which characters spontaneously group at a down-the-street place to eat. KenMore restaurants tend to have parking lots, and they tend to be full. Then there are convenience stores, Noco, Wilson Farms, and the like — KenMore’s versions of Apu’s Quick-E-Mart. I can’t walk into one without observing a busy conversation between two or More customers, friends or neighbors who have just run into each other, and it makes sense. In our society, the most valuable commodity of which is time, an appropriate place to bump into people is a retail facility dedicated to the in-and-out, grab-it-and-go lifestyle we’ve somehow adopted. Unlike a bar, a patron is not encouraged to loiter, but somehow can manage a quick conversation, quick as anything else going on here. The goods for sale tend to be quickly consumable; you don’t come here to restock the kitchen, you come here for the stuff you need now. Gasoline. Cigarettes. Lottery tickets. Low-quality pizza, sold by the slice from a heated turntable. Condoms, cough drops and donuts. Six-packs of beer, and bottles of water. That stuff you’ll have for dinner tonight because you’re too tired, or too busy, to cook. A breathtaking selection of potato chips, cheese doodles and the like is available. Even the newspaper and magazine rack has a speed-reading ethos to it. Racing forms. The local papers and the papers from New York City. Celebrity tabloids, and periodicals about cars and fashion. Read it, dispose of it, and move on. I once considered the Department of Motor Vehicles to be the crossroads of American society, but now I’m opting for these places. At 6 a.m., the clientele at the Wilson Farms on Sheridan Drive and Elmwood Avenue tends to include those people on their way to Tonawanda’s industrial belt on River Road. Work clothes, pickup trucks, and short conversations that will lead to “Guess who I ran into?” stories later in the workday. By 8 a.m., the suit-and-tie crowd comes in, for coffee and the day’s necessities. All day long, it’s a stream of people — people who treat the place like others treat Wegmans, who pay for groceries with food stamps and WIC coupons and loose change, and who suddenly need a pay phone or a $200 money order. Take care of business, and move on, and be assured that despite the large and active parking lots, the customers do not all arrive in cars. Many take their bags in one hand, their children in the other, and walk somewhere. Home, presumably. Businesses such as these most likely exist to fill a need. One of those needs seems to be that fast “hey, how’s it going, what are you doing, say hello to them for me” that greases the wheels of society. If that’s what masquerades as conversation these days, the area’s convenience stores have unwittingly provided a place for it. Some local young people, I’m told, have found the antithesis to all this. Certain students at KenMore West High School meet around the corner at Dash’s Market on Colvin Avenue for after-school coffee and pastry. They sit at tables in a corner of the store and sip Spot Coffee, chatting and unwinding from their days’ chaos, as though they’re outdoors on a street in Paris. Will they eventually advance to that Barnes & Noble coffee shop mentality, relaxing with a laptop and high-test coffee at the ready, or will they join the rush in and out of convenience stores? Cigarettes and gasoline. Like time, they are things you burn. Ed Adamczyk is a KenMore resident whose column appears Fridays in the Tonawanda News. Contact him at EdinKenMore@gmail.com.