Once, a long time ago, I was walking through an affluent Toronto neighbourhood when I saw a man who looked as out of place as I did: he was deeply suntanned I recall, like someone who spent a lot of time outside, and wore a working man's clothes.
The most memorable thing was that he carried a hand bell, which he swung back and forth in a nice, easy rhythm with one hand, while pulling or pushing a small cart with the other.
The scene left me to impose a narrative: that maybe, in his dotage, he'd left his small town in Palermo or Catalonia or the Algarve, to live with his son or daughter and their family in Toronto.
I imagine life in Hogtown not being what he thought it would be. Maybe the grandkids didn't have much time for Nonno. Maybe a double espresso and a game of boule down at the European club wasn't enough of home.
So, out of boredom he began plying his old-country trade, that of the mobile knife sharpener.
I bring up this old reverie because of something I read on Twitter this past weekend: a woman — millennial-age I'm guessing — from Brooklyn, N.Y. had been lamenting for months how she should have gotten her knives sharpened.
On Sunday she tweeted, “A travelling knife sharpening truck just pulled up on our block and rang a bell like a scene out of 1950.”
The magical ice cream truck for grownups is called Mike and Son! I am teary! https://t.co/e9cFNrnXcv pic.twitter.com/aETsSXiGkD
— Emmy Bengtson (@EmmyA2) May 23, 2020
That prompted a wave of wistful responses from folks calling for the return of the milkman “with glass bottles,” the egg man and the bread man, of fondly recalling “the travelling vegetable truck and rag man,” of peering back through the fog of time in search of the “ancient man who would come around every week in a horse-drawn cart pulled high with junk, calling out 'Any old iron?'"
Someone from a New York hamlet called Balmville wrote “my nana used to talk about the fruit and vegetable man, the dairy man, etc. coming through Sullivan St on a daily basis. I wonder if the past is our future.”
I think/hope we will see a lot of businesses trying things like this- my nana used to talk about the fruit and vegetable man, the dairy man, etc coming through Sullivan St on a daily basis. I wonder if the past is our future
— Chekov's Camtono (@CalculusThief) May 24, 2020
So do I, person who goes by Chekov's Camtono, so do I, because what business seems to better embrace the possibility of the post-pandemic world than a business that brings what you need — whether some necessity of life, or a service that makes existence a little more convenient and comfortable — right to your door.
They were part of my life growing up in this city: the red truck delivering Ben's Holsum bread, doughnuts and cinnamon buns; the Farmer's milk truck that arrived at some ungodly hour in the morning, to drop off the milk and pick up the glass bottles containing their payment.
When I was of an age for such things my friends and I once camped out in a backyard in the summer, and snuck away in the middle of the night to steal the waiting milk money.
I'm loath to admit that now because, a few years back, I spent a couple of days riding shotgun with one of the last milkmen plying his trade in the Halifax area.
He would have been working my old neighbourhood when we were on our nocturnal raid.
Nearly half a century later he still toiled hard for his money. Bill had a few years on me, but scrambled from driver's seat to refrigerated storage compartment, then humped the bags and cartons of milk, juice and yogurt, up the front steps, like a high-school running back hitting a hole.
It was never a cushy life. But I remember a time when those old vintage Detroit Industrial Vehicle Company trucks that delivered bread, milk, laundry, merchandise from the Eaton's catalogue and who knows what else were a fixture on the streets of Halifax, and, I imagine, any other city of any size in this country.
My parents told me, before that, about trucks and carts delivering ice and fish.
And I have it on good authority that more than a few family enterprises in this province began early in the 20th century with someone newly arrived from Europe, trudging door to door with a pack on their back filled with all manner of sundries.
What I mean to say is that the kind of thing that got the Brooklynites all excited is an old tradition here. And you just know it is going get big again in the new socially distanced era.
Let's leave the monoliths like Amazon and Shopify, who don't need any of our help, out of this discussion.
I'm talking instead of the little Buy Local commercial enterprises who used to populate this corner of the economy.
Let us, then, keep our eyes open for the next truck to turn the corner. Something unexpected might be in there. The person behind the wheel, I'm sure, will be happy to tell us all about it, just like in the old days.
