We were looking for somewhere to buy a boom box to play CD music for our elopement ceremony in Niagara Falls, and someone suggested Canadian Tire. Incredulous, we had to ask why an automotive service center would have such a thing and were met with an amused look and explanation that the store carried much more than tires. And indeed, it had apparently morphed into a big box with garden center, sports equipment, kitchen items, furniture, cleaning supplies, seasonal items, and electronics. They also gave us Canadian Tire dollars with each purchase.
The dollars sported the face of a man with moustache and plaid tam, connoting a thrifty Scot (google tells me he was “Sandy McTire”). They came in small denominations of a few cents up to a dollar, a tiny fraction of the value of your purchase. They were accepted like cash at the store and might add up if you spent a lot. Once we moved to Canada, we had a place on top of the microwave that accumulated small stacks of these dollars, which we generally failed to redeem, and turned out to be not worth as much as we hoped anyway.
One day at checkout, I got no Sandy McTire money. Instead, I was offered a plastic card that I only had to activate and it would magically store all my rewards. It was the 21st century after all. I took the plastic and groused to myself about the death of cash, the tracking of every purchase, the targeted advertising, the information my phone gives constantly, the loss of privacy. I still remember COINTELPRO, know of the evils of power and distrust big data.
And so, in my own quixotic way, and not that it makes any rational difference, I have never activated that card.
When I was growing up we lived on a shady street in the Bronx. Several doctors and dentists had offices on our block and my dad was one of them. He was a GP who practiced on the ground floor of our three-story house and we lived on the two upper floors “over the store”. (See The Puppy in the Waiting Room and The Corpse in the Office)
For many years a dentist named Ben rented space in my dad’s office. Ben was a wonderfully kind and gentle man, and he and his wife Eleanor became my folks’ lifelong friends, and Ben of course became our family dentist.
Then at some point Ben took a larger office down the street in a house with a beautiful chestnut tree in the front yard.
One day when I was 9 or 10 I went down the block to Ben’s office for my dental appointment and he told me I had a cavity – my first! He said he’d give me laughing gas to relax me while he filled it.
Laughing gas sounded like fun and I sat still while his nurse put a mask over my nose. Then Ben told me to lie back in the chair and look out the window at the chestnut tree.
I did, and Ben filled that first cavity.
Ben was my dentist until I moved out of my parents’ house, and over the years I’ve had a few others. All of them have been nice guys and fine dentists – but none gave me laughing gas, or had a beautiful chestnut tree I could see from the dental chair.
