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MEET ME AT TIM’S

There is no corner coffee shop, or mom and pop cafe in the town I grew up in. I don’t know if there ever was. But there has always been a Tim Horton’s. The small store on the north-west corner of Whites and Kingston Road was apparently one of the oldest in Ontario. That is, until it was torn down and a drive-thru was put in its place. Around the same time, on the north-east corner, a plaza was built with a large Tim Horton’s and Wendy’s combination restaurant and drive-thru. You might think that two of the same fast food chain at one intersection would be excessive but not if the store is a Tim Horton’s. Both locations do a booming business. Every morning there is a line at both drive-thrus, and there are always people sitting with friends or alone with the paper at the tables of the larger store.

The Tim Horton’s/Wendy’s restaurant is only a short walk from my former high school. However, it was built after I graduated and left for university, so I never had the option of going there for lunch. Despite this, somehow it became the meeting place to catch up and hang out when my friends and I were home from our respective colleges for the weekend. We would call around on Saturday afternoon or shout across the table/bar/dance floor on Saturday night: “coffee at Tim’s tomorrow?” And we would all meet up around eleven on Sunday mornings, grab our double-doubles and timbits before sitting at a table, sometimes for hours, catching up on local gossip and telling stories of our exploits at school. There was a sign, posted on every column in the store that read: ‘ENJOY YOUR STAY WITH US BUT NO LOITERING PLEASE 20 MINUTE TIME LIMIT THANK YOU.’ The rule was never enforced unless patrons were disruptive or hadn’t made a purchase. Sometimes we would stay long enough that a late lunch from Wendy’s would be in order.

I would always try to sit facing the rest of the room so that I could watch the people who came in. There were always several different types that were clearly recognizable. The after-church crowd. They were usually dressed very nicely, sometimes with children, typically in groups of three or four. There were the singles, doing the hangover coffee run, who had either walked over, or decided the drive-thru line up was too long. And there were the people who would come in for a visiting box. A box of cookies, muffins or donuts to take with them to a friend or relative’s house, in order to avoid showing up empty handed.

When I was younger, and Sunday was considered a family day, we would sometimes stop at Tim Horton’s or Coffee Time after church on our way to visit my grandparents. On these occasions we would pick up a box of donuts to be shared with whoever else was visiting that day. My grandparents lived north of us, just outside of Port Perry. There used to be a Coffee Time donut shop along the 7/12 highway at the turn off to go into town. (Town being Port Perry, also known as Port). I used to love stopping there, and choosing which donuts went into the box. The Coffee Time closed down before I started high school and a burger diner opened up. It lasted just over a year before going out of business. The building was empty for awhile before a cafe and deli opened up. It lasted eight months.

We don’t drive up there very often anymore, but the last time I did, the building had been bulldozed and the empty lot had a for sale sign on the corner. I wonder sometimes if a Tim Horton’s with a drive-thru would have been able to survive there. The highway is a well-travelled route, especially in the summertime with people from the cities heading north to their cottages.