Beside me at the bar at the Roy Pub sits a couple that have come in for dinner. They’re not looking for anything fancy, just some decent comfort food. Probably around 60, they have the look of people who like to go to sunny, vacation resorts when they travel, and rarely miss any of their grandchildren’s hockey games. Having spent over 30 years together, they didn’t seem to have much to say to one another as they ate their meals. Men that looked like they spent their days selling things out of offices, leaned confidently against the wall, drinking pints.
Innocuous jazz music, the sort of stuff you’re not supposed to notice, played, while the one television set behind the bar was set to CNN. The carpet was a paisley that suggested a kind of decorum, without the interference of taste or personality. The shelves were adorned with the sort of homey props you might see in a Waspy retirement home, and the staff all had a professionally cheerful manner that was simultaneously comforting and alienating.
It reminded me of a different era, this place, and as I sat there I thought of driving across America with my family as a boy. We usually stopped at motel restaurants to eat—places called The Bulldog or The Beefeater– and they all had a similar feeling of middle-class safety. You’d find familiar food there, nothing weirdly regional or spicy. And so, beneath an array of Anglophile decorations, we would sit in red booths, picking flagged-toothpicks out of club sandwiches and sipping fountain Cokes.
They were kind of surreal places, stages constructed to house an idea of our grandparent’s world. A kind of a ghost world, and even though it was just a weird shadow of home, these places, and The Roy, too, at least try to suggest home, and sometimes, I guess that’s all you need.