Let me begin by apologizing to my friends who work for the competition. I’m sorry that I’m here and not there. “Here” represents a small chain of donut shop called Tim Horton’s. Tim’s is known for its sensible pastries, bathrooms being called washrooms, and an overall sense of a beige. It is a happy place for me. First, they brew decaf coffee on request. Second, it smells like Canada.
If you’ve not been there, you’re just like me from 12 years ago: taller, more hair, and without any kind of exposure to the great North. Canada is like the United States; The United States are like Canada. Both peoples use fabric softener. Both use electricity to illuminate their homes. Both find it difficult to take the metric system seriously.
But there are differences.
One example is the smell. Canada has a certain smell, kind of like a mix between an older lady’s house and a wet afghan draped on a freshly groomed basset hound. They say that the olfactory sense (olfactory is a word that sociologists use to denote the shuttered manufacturing building on the other side of town) has the strongest tie to memory. When we smell, we remember. As I sit in this Tim Horton’s, going over plans for Christmas 2011 and teaching schedules for the Fall, I can’t help but remember a delightfully Canadian Free Methodist campground nestled between a soybean field and a tributary stream. I want to drink some peach juice, eat a WonderBar, ask for some cutlery and pour some milk from a bag. It’s a delightful trip to be on, all the while a bunch of Michiganders are sitting across the dining room talking about the pros and cons of Sarah Palin and how “dat tea party don’t got nuttin to do wit tea”.
Someday Emily and I will go back to Canada, to breathe her air and eat her All-Dressed potato chips. I can almost taste them now. Something is very wrong with this coffee.
(R) Adam Davidson 
What’s wrong is drinking brewed DECAF on demand!
My only comment on decaf so-called “coffee” is WHY?
Many many years ago, Donna & I were in Angola, Ind. We had run away to get married. But that’s another story. In 1977, we returned to the scene of the crime. We walked into the Five & Dime….that would be an SS Kresge’s up north. The old wooden floors creaked and sagged when you walked down the aisles. There was the familiar candy counter with gazillion choices of sweet delights. Off to the side was the “soda fountain” If you ain’t had one…it has seltzer or soda water, vanilla ice cream and flavored syrup of your choice. The yard goods and Simplicity Patterns were towards the back. I’ll bet they even had a fish tank for kids to buy goldfish. All those things are not what threw me back in time. Well, they really were….it was the collections of smells, the creaking floors and the layout of the store that threw in the time machine and stopped in 1950. What a treat you have done for me Adam. another memory pops into this short-term memory losing gray matter.