New Perspective - Omniscient Narrator

LIVERPOOL AND FINCH

The Maple Ridge Shopping Centre is located eight houses north of the intersection where the Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall rests on a slight rise above the sidewalk. The ‘strip mall’ is home to some of the typical suburban amenities; including a pizza parlour, tanning salon, dry cleaners, variety store and barber shop. The Pizza Shack is right beside the Custom Cutz barber shop, so anyone ordering or picking up a pizza has to walk right by the shop’s entrance; which usually looks deserted, as the blinds are always pulled down, blocking any view of the interior.

Most days a group of young men can be found loitering near the front of the shop. They lean against the dull brown brick or stand around in the parking space directly opposite the entrance. These young men are probably in their late teens or early twenties, many of them smoke, as evidenced by the multitude of cigarette butts littering the ground around them. They wear big jackets and baggy jeans. One has a Toronto Blue Jays ball cap on, turned slightly to the side, while the others all sport the black and white NYY on their heads.

From inside the pizza parlour, it is possible to watch them joke around with each other and text on their cell phones. Once in awhile a car will pull up into the space in front of the barber shop. A silver Explorer is pullin out now, adn one of the men in the Yankees caps is walking back towards the curb. No one got into or out of the SUV while it was stopped.

There is a row of houses that back onto the plaza’s parking lot. Two storey detached homes with brick cladding on the ground floor and horizontal siding above. These houses have shallow back yards with a run-down wooden fence that runs the width of the plaza’s parking lot and service road. The brown paint on the fence is peeling. If the homes were built before the plaza, would the developer have had to disclose the fact that the adjacent land was to be commercial? It’s possible that the buyers were able to purchase the homes for a lower price than one block over due to the potential noise, fumes and garbage that the residents would eventually have to endure.

Another car is parked in front of the barber shop. A brand new black Malibu with a baby-on-board sign in the back window. The driver doesn’t get out of the car, but waits as the man in the Jays cap approaches his window. Their conversation is brief. The driver of the car reaches out and shakes the other man’s hand before he starts his car and the man in the ball cap turns away to rejoin his companions on the walkway. The Malibu is gone. The parking space is empty. A woman gets out of a sports car three spaces away and goes into the tanning salon. By the tone of her skin, she is likely a regular customer. There are shouts from the opposite end of the plaza, near the convenience store. The local public school that’s just around the corner has let out and a group of students has arrived for their afternoon snacks. Two boys split off from the crowd and head in the direction of the group of guys still lingering at the end of the building. They’re laughing and showing off for the girls watching behind them. As they near the end of the walkway, they grow quiet. By the time they reach the door of the Pizza Shack, they are completely silent as they hurriedly go inside, all the while glancing furtively at the group of smokers.

The brown-painted vertical aluminum siding above the shop signs no longer makes the strip of stores look uniform and structured, but dark and out-dated. The rock bed in front of the two centre stores only serves to highlight the fact that there are no trees or flower beds. From the street, driving by on the way to work, or the gym or the grocery store, no one would ever notice the cars that pull in and out of the lot without anyone entering a store. It is not evident to passing motorists who live two blocks down or one block over, that the plaza containing their dentist’s office and dry cleaners is also the site of daily drug deals. Perhaps the houses backing onto the parking lot put up with too much.