Little Joys of Life on the Road Between Two Places of No Special Repute

The Thanksgiving holiday for me has now come to an end.  Our annual November trip to London, Ontario is over.  What the trip is about is complicated.  Initially it was about avoiding the pain of loss.  That was more than 20 years ago. When the person you spent the holiday dies sometimes it is just too much to overcome. Since then the jaunt has morphed into just an escape from the excesses of Thursday the turkey rules and Friday the money rules. Eventually it just became tradition.  We go because we enjoy it.

What we do is relatively simple.  We get into town.  We go for a late lunch at the Church Key.  We settle into our room and then we go to a movie. Not a very complicated ritual but it is our ritual.  We try to see the lighting of the Christmas trees in Victoria Park.  This year it rained so we instead divided up into duos and went and got some food.  We shop a bit.  On Saturday, there is a trip to the London Farmer’s Market for French bread, for pulled pork and for various little treats.  Finally, there was a run to the Black Walnut down in Old South off Wortley for a frittata and really, really good coffee. 

Yeah, it isn’t much but it is our ritual.  It is a family ritual.  We like this period we spend together.

This time we added on a trip to a nondescript bar in Sarnia called Lizards.  We ended up there in part because the name of the place is the same as that of a bar we used to frequent in our college days in East Lansing.  The Lizards we loved is gone.  The Lizards in Sarnia lives on.  From the outside you got the impression the place was a dive, a total dive.  Parking was miserable and the door was so nondescript that we weren’t sure we should even go in.

But once inside the bar was clean and bright and a band was setting up for an evening set.  The bar was sold out for the evening.  We ordered a variety of salads and burgers The food was very, very good for bar food. 

It is things like the serendipity of finding a bar by chance that really turns out to be a gem that keeps up doing this.  Sometimes you have to find joy in the boring and mundane spaces of the world.