Taking a trip down memory lane for some takeout

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/12/2023 (885 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Charlotte’s Take Out serves up generous helpings of nostalgia along with the fries, dressing and gravy.

It’s been a landmark in Norman’s Cove-Long Cove (population 647) in Newfoundland and Labrador for 40 years, even before the side road it’s on had a name.

When I was a teenager, it had a snack bar as well as fast food — a place where you could hang out with kids your age and smoke illicitly, play pinball and pump a steady stream of coins into the jukebox.

Walking into Charlotte’s last month after an absence of more than 40 years, I expected to hear the sexy bass line of Nick Gilder’s 1978 hit Hot Child in the City instead of the contemporary songs blasting from the radio.

I had felt like a hot child myself back then — hot in the sense of burning with restless energy and excitement. Beneath the black mascara and strawberry lip gloss was a teenager excited to get on with life, ready to embrace new things I could not even quite imagine. Though still a youngster, I felt fettered by the confines of Newfoundland outport life and yearned for the faster pace of a city, any city; anywhere but there.

The jukebox and the pinball machines are long gone, the takeout quiet but for the chatter of three girls seated in a corner and the steady ring of the telephone as people call in their last-minute orders on this Saturday night.

The décor is understated — four tables draped in red-and-green plastic Christmas tablecloths and those orange moulded-plastic stacking chairs that you’d find in high school gymnasiums.

The menu, posted on the wall in marker on red Bristol board, includes hot turkey and roast beef sandwiches, Land & Sea (chicken and fish with fries) and “mess” (fries with ground beef, onions, mozzarella cheese, dressing and gravy). The prices haven’t changed much. You can still get a hamburger for $4.50, and you can specify white-meat fried chicken at no extra charge.

Charlotte is still the life force behind Charlotte’s. She oversees her culinary kingdom from a chair in the corner, bickering good-naturedly with her son in the kitchen as he gets orders ready for bagging.

“I needs white meat for that two-piece!” she says, hustling him along.

Apart from being a little slower on her feet than I remember, Charlotte has not changed much in four decades.

“Well, it wasn’t yesterday that I saw you last,” I say to her, knowing my husband and I are conspicuous strangers to the other customers. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

“You look like one of the Framptons,” she says without missing a beat.

The food is as tasty and comforting as I remember it, a favourite with locals after a night at the club.

My husband and I are in town for a party to celebrate the recent marriage of my oldest friend — so old, we were baptized together — and her partner of 27 years.

The last time I darkened the doors of this nightclub was 30 years ago or more. But within minutes I am hugging people I haven’t seen in decades and my husband and I are waltzing to Stan Rogers’s 45 Years.

“And I’m sitting with friends, where 45 cents will buy another glass of beer…”

(The bar prices aren’t that good, but they’re pretty cheap compared to those in the city.)

When you’re a child, you don’t always appreciate the benefits of life in tiny rural communities, a life spent with kids whose siblings and parents you all knew, whose youth and whose victories and losses you shared in a place where the back roads were as familiar as the contours of your own face.

But there’s plenty to be said for small towns and the oldest of friends. Friends who grew up with you — sprung out into the world like the metal balls of a pinball machine — never knowing exactly where you’d end up or who you’d become. People who could still pick you out of a kindergarten lineup, who remember your 13th birthday party and where you liked to sit on the bus.

On this night, in this place, there is mutual affection that goes without saying.

Watching my friend dance with her new husband, I am carried away on a warm wave of nostalgia, and I think about John Mellencamp’s Small Town from 1985, and my heart feels full to brimming:

“No, I cannot forget from where it is that I come from / I cannot forget the people who love me / Yeah, I can be myself here in this small town / And people let me be just what I want to be.”

Pam Frampton is a freelance writer and editor who lives in St. John’s.

pamelajframpton@gmail.com X: pam_frampton