Yesterday, I visited the cosmetics department at the Bay. Not willingly, I assure you: I had been given the task of picking up some Christian Dior nail cream for my wife. As I would be travelling in a foreign country, my thirteen-year old granddaughter kindly offered to navigate for me.
I have the fondest memories of the Hudson’s Bay and Eaton’s Department Stores in Winnipeg. The latter fell prey to the wrecker’s ball some years ago, but the name lives on in the Canadian collective consciousness in recollections of the Eaton’s Catalogue and its utilitarian function in outdoor biffies. The Hudson’s Bay Building still stands, a sentinel on Portage Avenue at the beginning of Winnipeg’s downtown, but is now abandoned and fallen into disrepair. The Bay survives in some of the city’s outlying malls.
We entered the Bay at Polo Park and made our way to the cosmetics department. Well, it was no longer a department, of course, but rather a series of kiosks. (Navigating them reminded me of swerving around Winnipeg’s roundabouts).
My granddaughter led me to the Christian Dior kiosk. Alas, the nail cream was not to be found. However, there was another product we might like to try.
We moved to the Chanel kiosk. This particular product was guaranteed to banish cuticles forever. Would we like to try it? I declined, but my granddaughter agreed. “Perfect,” she said. We made the purchase.
Joanne was our consultant. The French have an expression: une femme d’un certain age. Joanne was a woman of an uncertain age. Her face was a smooth white mask and she wore a wig of long black hair. She had difficulty manipulating the credit-card-reading machine.
“I’m older than you,” she said.
“Bet you’re not,” I replied.
“I’m 82,” she retorted.
“Ah,” I said. “Just.”
This was her fourth stint at the Bay. Her first had been as a schoolgirl in the nineteen-fifties, in the glory days of the Bay. We reminisced about those times and I recalled my visits to the Hudson's Bay Company in the seventies, wandering from department to department and dining at the Paddlewheel restaurant on the sixth floor. Good for the Bay for employing such an interesting character! The store today may be a slick, sterile version of its former self, but here, at the Chanel counter, was a link to its glorious past.
Sic transit Gloria mundi.
The last time I visited the Victoria branch was about ten years ago, when I was looking for some egg cups. I drifted from display to display in the chinaware section but couldn't see any. Neither could I see any employees (sorry, "associates"). About to abandon my quest, I saw someone far off who seemed to be wearing a name tag, so I hiked the thirty metres or so through the otherwise unstaffed acreage and addressed her: "I'd like to know if you have any egg cups." Her empathetic response has furnished my friends with a lot of laughs over the years: "Yes, I'd like to know that, too." Needless to say, there weren't any.
ReplyDeleteOn an expedition to a different branch, I politely asked another "associate" in Linens if the Bay had any red towels. She looked at me as though I'd crawled out from under a rock, said "No," and resumed her much more absorbing chat with her fellow "associate." She certainly didn't wish to associate with me. I have since concluded that the Bay must perforce limp along without my patronage.
My dad, who worked for the Bay when we moved to Canada, would be rotating at speed in his grave. As Maxwell Anderson famously observed, "Going down hill is the way things run."