Calgary Church – Join a movement….

Suspicions confirming……………….where do you belong?

Eugene Stickland
Calgary Herald

Saturday, September 13, 2008 –> pick one up for the whole thing.

These days, there is a growing need for community, a need that increases as the size of the city increases, creating in the process higher levels of loneliness and isolation. It’s been said — and correctly, I think — that a big city can be the loneliest place on the planet. Perhaps for many, Calgary has truly become a big city.

Community, as I grew up with it, was organized along geographical lines, closely associated with the neighbourhood, including school and church — even to a certain extent the corner store. But those days, or so it seems, are gone.

When one moves into an apartment in the core of the city, as I did recently, one is not inconvenienced by a steady stream of neighbours bearing apple pies and bottles of wine, showing genuine concern about one’s back and other trauma resulting from the move.

In my own building, besides a couple of passing conversations with someone I already knew, I have had no contact with any of my neighbours, good or bad. Although I have had no less than three dinner invitations from a couple of my acquaintance who live a few floors up and a little to the west.

They are recent transplants from Toronto, which has made me rethink my attitude about Toronto, as well as my notion of “western hospitality,” which as far as I can tell is only a myth. On many levels, it seems to me that Calgary is becoming one of the least friendly cities in the nation, and probably one of the most violent.

Community, as I even understand it anymore, has become for me something that hardly exists outside the little black box I am typing these words into now. For all intents and purposes, the 563 friends I have accumulated on Facebook constitute the closest thing I have to community. At any given moment, I can find out how individual members of my community are feeling, what they are doing, whether they just started a relationship or just got out of one.

Some of them, I don’t even know. Recently, a man introduced himself to me in the downtown Co-op. “We’ve never met,” he said, “but we’re friends on Facebook so I thought I’d introduce myself.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” cried Alice.

One place that community can and does exist is in local coffee shops, and for many of us who live along 17th Avenue S.W., the unofficial community gathering place is Caffe Beano. Although I know there is another community that congregates in Good Earth on 11th Street, and another in Tim Hortons and another in Starbucks and yet another at the Ship and Anchor.

We seek out community because as human beings we crave it. Even a brief exchange about the weather can be a critical event in helping one get through the day. “Hits” they call them. Real-life hits. We all need a certain number of them or we simply don’t function well.

I know all about it from experience. Early in the morning, I like to sit on the benches outside of Caffe Beano and write longhand in my notebook. It could be anything — a scene from a play, a poem, even the first draft of this column. I could do it at home, alone, but I like the idea of doing it in public, where I might run into someone I know.

Over the summer, I was joined on an almost daily basis by an elderly man who seemed, as we might say, a little down on his luck. Although there was all kinds of room on the benches so early in the morning, he would sit quite close to me — close enough that I couldn’t help but be aware of him.

And yet, I never allowed him access to my personal space. I acknowledged him with a quick look, but I kept on writing. Day after day this went on. There we sat, close enough to touch, but never communicating a word to one another. Never so much as a “How do you do.”

The other day, I heard that an elderly man had simply keeled over off one of the benches. Those who know, those who have seen such things before, claim he died. The ambulance made a show of putting on the lights and siren when it drove away, but no one was really buying it.

It was my close-yet-distant companion from over the summer. You can imagine how I felt, thinking that he had crossed over to sing in the great celestial chorus without so much as a nod from me. I vowed to change, and yet, in a city that is constantly causing stress, from the traffic, to the steady influx of people who don’t necessarily have our best interest at heart, how can we help but to erect barriers?

Fortunately, further inquiries into the fate of the unknown coffee drinker would seem to indicate that much to everyone’s surprise, he pulled through.

What can I say? The next time, his coffee’s on me.