Common bonds thrive without heavy-handed prompting

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/07/2024 (429 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We enter through the back door, passing the old men standing in a single line smoking cigarettes in the sunshine, and head into the darkness.

As my eyes adjust to the lower light, I greet the gaze of the folks scattered through the L-shaped room. They look at me expectantly, but finding an unfamiliar face, smile politely and return to their conversations.

There’s a band on stage this Saturday afternoon at the Nicolett Inn bar. They’re here to host a blues jam, which is shaping up to be more of a karaoke session with live backing. Anyone can jump up and have a turn.

Currently on stage is someone announcing that today is their 64th birthday, drawing a round of cheers from the assembled and seeing a bucket of beer delivered to his table.

A couple of pool tables are in a corner. A homemade plaster light fixture, in the shape of sombrero, is affixed to the ceiling over a table of eight.

Oblivious to the musical aspirations on the stage, the pool league members drop their loonies through a slot in the lid of a jar and someone shakes it noisily, directing the players between sombrero and snooker.

Another bucket of beer arrives, another name is shouted.

“This is their Vegas,” says the man across from me. “I don’t think they ever go home.”

The bar door swings open and in swaggers the enigmatic Winnipegger who lives a double life impersonating Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean character Jack Sparrow. He takes the stage, in character, but forgets the words to the song, and tells us all to remember not to expect too much from free entertainment.

He needn’t worry, for no one here does.

The rattling loonies, the incomprehensible singing; this unlikely assembly is simultaneously disorienting and comforting.

Mid-song, a few folks shout greetings toward the back of the bar. City councillor Ross Eadie has just arrived, and it’s about this time I realize I have landed somewhere between a Billy Joel song and a Hunter S. Thompson diatribe — and not a moment too soon, for now the addition of Coun. Eadie to this unlikely crowd seems more than expected. A chair is pulled up for him and the scene rolls on.

There’s a robust but unspoken agreement in this Saturday afternoon dive bar: judge not, lest ye be judged. There is an equalizing and acceptance.

Here, we need no reminders to recall our duty to one another.

Here, where the pirate and the tax collector raise a glass together, where the gamblers toast the birthday boy, there is an unlikely reminder of our Winnipeg traits of resilience and the ability to care for one another.

We don’t need a city monument to remind us to be good to one another, and certainly not an alienating and faith-based Ten Commandments monument, the likes of which Gail Asper is calling to see reinstalled at Assiniboine Park.

The original was removed to make way for The Leaf, itself a gathering place that beckons us to be kind to ourselves and our city. In sermons delivered on butterfly wing and delicate petal, we are reminded of our interconnectedness.

In beer halls and botanical gardens alike, we surely have not fallen so far as to need stony reminders to do the right thing.

Instead of dusting off one we don’t need, we should be finding ways to preserve the places and programs where we already come together and recognize one another’s humanity.

City council’s alarming push to defund, privatize and close our public gathering spaces takes a chisel to our values as a city. Places like St. Boniface’s Happyland Pool and West Broadway’s Art City are not just neighbourhood amenities, they are life-sustaining cornerstones of a healthy city.

No monument will stir my soul like the artwork of children and the laughter at an outdoor pool during a hot Prairie summer.

We have values as Winnipeggers that are too full of life and too numerous to ever be etched onto one tablet.

Too warm for cold granite, these are the commandments our city should remember to live by, creating a place where the gambler, the pirate and the tax collector meet at the same table to strategize a city resplendent with places where we all feel we belong.

rebecca.chambers@freepress.mb.ca