The peculiar catholicity of The Hudson's Bay Co.'s building at Portage Ave. and Memorial Blvd. in Winnipeg

Dear P___ -

Thanks for the newsflash. Wow. I knew Winnipeg’s flagship Hudson Bay was in trouble, and I accepted (at least in theory) its imminent closure. But a closure of this magnitude is momentous, isn’t it? Shakes the soul just a bit.

You ask if I have memories of The Bay. I could fill a book, you sly devil! But here are two in particular.

The first is a Christmas memory, probably from 1985 or so when I was just launching into my 20s (35 years ago — yikes). 

I was working in a camera store with my childhood buddy Kaz, who’d got me the job. Our boss, BT, was a super-sharp guy maybe a decade older than us. BT wasn’t so much happily married as he was ecstatically married. At a time when vanity plates were a rarity, BT’s Volvo had plates engraved with his wife’s first name. As he sorted out the business, he’d check in on the status of our suitoring, or lack thereof. BT encouraged us to get out there, sharpen our skills and make something of ourselves so we could do as well as he had — in the marriage department, that is. There was never any doubt among the three of us that he was the only one with any business savvy.

Every once in a while he’d find some reason to bring in his younger sister-in-law, Sara — a girl our age. She was, of course, very lovely, vivacious, terrific fun to be with. Kaz and I idly wondered if BT wasn’t attempting to set her up, but the point was moot — we both had enough self-awareness to realize that next to her we were, if amiable enough company, utter laggards. She was an artist, a sharp wit, the youngest child of Viennese émigrés. To be sure, Kaz and I held to the delusions of grandeur that possess any lad in his early 20s. But we both knew beyond any doubt whatsoever that until one of us could offer yearly trips to Vienna neither of us was anywhere close to Sara’s league.

This particular Christmas Kaz and I closed the shop then walked down Portage Avenue to The Bay to check in — at her own request — on Sara. She was working the perfume counter on the main floor, and when she saw us shuffling over and grinning from ear to ear she lit up. 

Literally. She was a smoker and we were her smoke break.

We kibitzed and flirted and it all seemed so incomprehensibly glamorous and adult. The Bay Main Floor was an adult place where one encountered adult finery — furs, suits, footware with Italian names etched into the soles, perfume. Expensive stuff, all of it. Including Sara, who was being impossibly generous and kind.

I don’t know what Kaz and I did after that. Odds are we hoofed it through the bitter cold and spent an hour or two at one of the neighbouring arcades, letting go of money we were never going to spend on a trip to Vienna.

The second memory is of the same vintage, probably my final year of studies at the University of Winnipeg. Between classes and work I drank a lot of coffee, more often than not with Terry, also a childhood friend from the 'Bach. For a change of scenery Terry and I would occasionally leave campus and head for the coffee shop in the Bay basement — “the Bay am Kjalla,” in the vernacular of our tribe.

Though separated by only a single floor the Bay am Kjalla was the ramshackle Yin to the Main Floor’s rarefied Yang. We understood from childhood already that the Bay am Kjalla was where a person could buy a single shoe, or underwear that had been re-packaged. If a can of soup was too rich for a student’s blood we could drop a quarter for a bowl of it in the Bay’s basement cafeteria.

No soup for us — Terry and I were there to drink coffee and bear one another’s family travails, while casting glances at customers sorting through dishevelled wares.

“Hang on. Isn’t that D’s mother?”

I looked. Sure enough, over at the Malt Shoppe stand was an elegant woman in a fur coat, ordering a plate of cheesy nachos.

I was floored.

D was a high-school buddy, and whenever we visited his home his mother would present us with deceptively simple fare for us to nosh on. Just one example: split croissants, with lox and pickled red onion. This was nothing like the tuna melts we enjoyed at other friends. Her food was always a revelation.

Watching her receive a paper plate of reheated corn chips smothered in processed cheese was also a revelation, one discomfitingly intimate — like witnessing an Anabaptist foot-washing, or a communicant’s reception of the Host.

Both these moments kinda set me up for adulthood, in a way. The dance, the negotiation for balance. Aspire. Accept. Give pleasure. Accept pleasure. Be humble. And always be generous — always. All in this one physical space.

I hope kids these days have a similar physical space somewhere — a place to observe, and observe yourself observing. Or maybe that’s just my reflexive nostalgia slipping into high gear. I mean, the place was a frickin’ STORE, for crying out loud — it wasn’t a cathedral or art gallery.

But that’s probably what set The Bay apart from other shops. Folks who shop at Harry Rosen’s do so because Harry Rosen sells one particular tier of goods to one particular tier of customer. The Bay sold some of that. The Bay also sold irresistibly cheesy nachos. It was, in this sense, a catholic institution.

I miss it already.

End-note: I thought the bit about “a single shoe, or underwear that had been re-packaged” sounded troublingly familiar, so I did a quick search. Lo and behold I’m plagiarizing myself — somebody cancel me! So: was the incident with D’s mother in Eaton’s, or the Bay am Kjalla? Probably the Bay, to be honest (Terry says he remembers the moment). But the two cellars were nearly identical, and Terry would often visit me at Astral Photo in the Eaton Place Mall. We would go to Greenjean's for the draft beer, Buffalo Chips and ees schmaunt (did someone say, "Hats Off"?).