‘Tim Horton’s? What’s all the fuss about?’ This is what I asked myself last year when Canada’s newest doughnut shop opened in Slave Lake. I didn’t get it. However, I checked it out. I had a cup of tea. I sampled a muffin or two. I chewed on a bagel. I still couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Meanwhile, the drive-through line-ups were five to 10 cars long, pretty much constantly, and counter business was on the brisk side, any time of day or night. One of the first times I went into Tim’s late at night was on the occasion of a fatal car crash a few kilometers west of town. I was out there waiting to be allowed to get close enough to photograph the vehicle that got the worst of it. A detailed investigation was underway, and it was cold. Pretty soon up drives another police car. Out pops an officer with large hot beverages from Tim Horton’s for everyone. Now that made a lot of sense. But generally, my skepticism remained. A cup of coffee is a cup of coffee. A muffin is a muffin. What’s the big deal? I’ve been working on it for about a year now and I think I’m getting to the bottom of it. Or closer to the bottom it at any rate. A couple of my co-workers were always going down to Tim Horton’s. ‘Can I bring you anything from Tim’s?’ was the familiar question. Once in a while I’d order a tea, but the tea itself was not so special. Okay, but how much better can a cup of tea made by pouring hot water over a teabag be? You get the point. Lately though, I’ve found myself drawn to the place. I’ll be out taking photos of something, or doing an interview somewhere in town and I’ll end up going into Tim’s, drawn there as if by some invisible force. When I realized this was going on, I had to stop and ask myself why. I keep seeing people at Tim’s that I don’t see anywhere else. And they’re always in a happy mood. There’s a lot of that going on – people meeting and chatting over a hot drink. It’s nice having a place where you know you’re almost always going to meet someone who is happy to see you. I think that’s the secret. It’s the modern equivalent of what the Greeks call the ‘agora’, the central meeting place where citizens (only the men in ancient Greece) got together to drink whatever they drank in those days and debate politics and other hot topics. Coffee shops have long served that function in our communities. There’s seems to be a strong desire to meet, under casual circumstances, with hot drinks and jaw about this, that and the other thing. It’s nice, it’s fun and it’s probably a lot more than that – an essential part of community life. This isn’t news, of course. But it is to me that Tim Horton’s has somehow managed to almost corner the market. Other places sell the same products, but Tim’s has the whole package. It’s too bad, however, that here in Slave Lake you have to drive out to the edge of town to get there. A meeting place of similar convenience would be great right in the middle of town so you could just walk there instead of having to fire up the old carbon-spewing, globe-warming internal combustion engine just to get cup of coffee. However, that’s the world we live in, at least for the time being. Heck, we even have people from High Prairie and Wabasca coming down for Tim Horton’s.

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