The Black Dog
Where do you tend to go, and want to be, when you've had a long day?
When the best laid plans turn rotten? When the world appears to be unravelling even more quickly than you feared? When the human comedy plays unseemly at best?
When you want to think it all over?
Or talk with someone, in a proper, unhurried manner?
Maybe you just want to soak in the atmosphere?
Hum along without judgement, alongside others,
doing their own hummings.
Embed yourself in the scene?
Sort out those crumpled notes in your pocket?
Perhaps you wish to do nothing so much as the sweetest thing of all, which is nothing, but notice what comes along, which is nothing, but watch the world go by?
Or read? Drift into a novel? Or a crossword puzzle? Or into that longish essay in Harper's you've been meaning to get to?
My barflyishness in such scenarios is well-documented. It’s no persona (Latin for “mask”); it’s me.
Earlier this summer, near the end of a piece in which a Bull Mastiff and two Chihuahuas had come to (critical) life, I paid homage to such a place. The Douglas on Sunset in Echo Park, a spot I savoured, “a fine place for a travelling soul,” summer me scribbled, a place “for things that start one way to end up quite another.”
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Well, with my words —and through my little cascade of photographs and paintings— I mean to entice you into another tavern now, this one on Whyte Avenue in Old Strathcona, my once-upon-a-time stomping grounds in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
The Black Dog Freehouse didn’t exist when I moved into this neighbourhood, aged 17, in the gallivanting early 1980s. (It opened in 1992.)
But The Black Dog feels as if it was around back then. Not really. And not with its “Wooftop” patio upstairs or its “Underdog” cellar down below . . .
But it feels like it just might have been there all the time,
in the ways that matter.
As a tranquil patch, a place to return to, a friend in wait.
Places like this won’t twist and shout, and they won’t command your or anyone else’s respect.
But amidst so much change in that old neighbourhood, and (I hazard) in yours —and far too much of the change a slip-slide, an unspooling “enshittification”1—The Black Dog and its like keep vital things alive.
* photographs and watercolours by Kenneth Mills
** special thanks and hugs to Robert W. Brown, referenced within and who appears in the final photograph.
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There's something beautiful about having a spot that isn't, technically, YOUR spot – in addition to yours, that is, but down the street or in a town you get to once every couple years, or for every spring training. The risk is they'll change the menu or swap out the barstools for something new and unfamiliar, but the reward is the times they don't and it's like you never left. Amazing grace!
Brilliant photos, Ken. I especially love the multi-color fence and the bright red Black Dog sign. Since you have asked, I used to have two favorite haunts here in Santa Cruz that I would go to for casual company, coffee-houses. One was in the 1980s, a small atmospheric upstairs place looking down over the water. A quiet atmosphere of "world music" and newspapers. The other was 1959 - a prototype, beatnik hangout with chessboards, candles dripping from wine bottles, cool jazz, Italian coffees Now I am old and I mostly frequent my Laz-e-boy.