It’s 10 minutes before midnight as I step back into my car and head home with our very late, unplanned fast food dinner.
It was a day when life’s script was set aside, when we learned yet again why health is the only thing that truly matters. And as is often the case when ERs are visited and entire days are spent waiting in one plasticky chair after another, we eat where and when we can.
And so I found myself looking for an open McDonald’s in the middle of the night. Because I’m silly, I didn’t bother looking anything up when I left the house: just jumped in the car in my flustered rush and assumed everything would be open.
Um, no. Which is how I pulled up to our local McD’s, only to realize it had been closed for hours. So I parked beside the darkened windows and frantically searched on my phone for the nearest open outlet, only to realize the only one still serving was nowhere near home. Which meant it was time for an unplanned cruise through the darkened streets.
This isn’t just any McDonald’s. When it opened its doors in 1968, it was the first restaurant for the iconic brand in Eastern Canada. It has since undergone a careful rebuild that somehow managed to respect the spirit of the original.
I stood in the parking lot and thought about the countless stories that must have played out here over the ensuing decades. The pit stops after the game. The tiny moments marked with ice cream. The family meetings after a hospital visit. All I could do was imagine the history, the echoes pinging through my head amid the pale yellow glow.
I appreciate the prevailing opinion of a place like this, that it’s little more than a stupid fast food joint, hardly worthy of a second look let alone a soft-focus tour of our shared history. But that’s the thing: pieces of almost everyone’s life play out here, or in places just like it. Not every backdrop to every story is storybook.
And I felt that trigger as I carefully walked under the shadowy lights, appreciating the silent fact that I was adding another unplanned chapter to my family’s story in a place we had all come to strangely appreciate.
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