Shoppers return on first day of Stratford mall’s reopening
For the first time in three months, shoppers in Stratford went to the mall on Monday.
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After a soft opening over the weekend, M.J. Thomson, the Festival Marketplace’s property manager, said the retailers who have so far survived a three-month shutdown of their brick-and-mortar locations were busy while they and their patrons adjusted to the realities of in-person shopping during the pandemic era.
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Those include physical distancing of at least two metres, mandatory mask wearing in bathrooms and in some stores, and signage encouraging frequent hand-washing or sanitizing.
“We’re excited to be getting back to what this new age of shopping is and we hope our customers respect that we’re trying to keep them safe,” Thomson said. “People need to be prepared for all scenarios, depending on the comfort level of the company and the employees.”
For now, the mall is open 11 a.m. to 7 p.m Monday to Friday and 11. a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. There are two places to enter and exit – the main doors at Hart Home and Fashion and at Sportchek.
People who aren’t feeling well are being asked to stay home, as are mall walkers who liked to get some exercise at Festival Marketplace prior to the pandemic.
“It’s not that we don’t love them, we just don’t want them right now,” Thomson said.
Not every retailer in the mall is currently open and that includes Winners and Bath and Body Works, a couple of the stores Stratford shoppers were curious about on social media Monday.
Thomson said Winners is expected to open Wednesday while Bath and Body Works has plans, as of Monday, to reopen some time in July.
What Will Become of the Pandemic Pets?
There’s a lot of talk of a looming separation-anxiety crisis, as unsocialized, spoiled hounds encounter a new era, in which the humans go through the door thing to earn the bread that pays for the kibble. Andrea Tu is a behavior veterinarian in Manhattan, which makes her the equivalent of a psychiatrist: she can prescribe medications, including, but not limited to, popular S.S.R.I.s such as Reconcile (doggy Prozac), sertraline, and paroxetine, as well as a range of fast-acting basics like trazodone, gabapentin, clonidine, and various common benzodiazepines. “We’re looking at three-month waits,” she said. “We’re seeing a ton of cases where people are in over their heads. Now they can’t leave the dog alone for ten minutes, much less for ten hours.” Many vets are concerned that shelters may begin filling up again.
Cats, meanwhile, are often disturbed by not being left alone. “They’re not used to having to share space with people all the time,” Tu said. “We’re seeing a lot of stress-induced cystitis—cats getting U.T.I.s, basically, when they’re stressed.”
I’m a dog person. My childhood diary, abandoned after a few weeks, was a chronicle of the family Norfolk terrier, who had one testicle and the soul of a poet. Eight years ago, my wife, my sons, and I adopted a mutt allegedly from Tuscaloosa, Alabama—mostly black, long-haired, about fifty pounds, a herder with a retriever’s webbed paws. The boys, who were ten and eight at the time, chose him from an ever-shifting array on Petfinder, and changed his name from Zayn (the shelter apparently employed a One Direction stan) to Kiekko (which, according to their research, is Finnish for “puck”). He came north in a truck that was bound for a shelter in New Hampshire and disembarked at the Vince Lombardi Service Area, on the New Jersey Turnpike. We took him home to our apartment and surrendered very quickly to the premise that he was a member of the family.
Who knows what Kiekko was thinking? We often tried to imagine it by anthropomorphizing, pooch-talking, speech-bubbling. Kate Perry, the trainer, classifies four “canine-ality” types: the workaholic, the sensitive artist, the methodical thinker, and the party animal. It seemed to us that Kiekko could be any or all, as of course could we. We bathed and brushed him, plied him with rawhide and Greenies, invited him onto our bed, and also occasionally called him a crackhead, for his single-minded huffing for scraps. Such hunger. You’d think we weren’t feeding him. When neighbors, making elevator talk, remarked that he looked heavier, we took offense. It’s the undercoat. Our younger son, a mischievous live wire, had been getting in some trouble at school, and the dog mellowed him out: petamorphosis. But Kiekko was himself a bit of a shit-stirrer. He menaced people carrying tools, men with odd gaits or hats or uniforms or floppy shoes. He stole sandwiches out of the hands of small children. One Thanksgiving, a thud from the kitchen announced that he’d wrestled a carved turkey to the floor.
We walk him at the north end of Central Park. Before we adopted him, I had considered the dog people in the Park to be kind of nuts. Once we had him, I got to know how. Before 9 a.m., in parts of the Park, dogs are allowed off leash—a nice libertarian touch, in a jaywalking town. There are a lot of dogs out there in the morning, doing dog things, while their humans do their dog-human things: the scofflaws, the hall monitors, the ladies with the slobber-stained pockets full of treats, the shambling elders in dog-safari vests stocked with accoutrements. The dogless must doggedly pick their way through. We fell in with a group who got dogs around the same time we did. Behavioral noninterventionists, mostly, we congregated around a bench that now bears a small plaque with the names of an older couple who own a collie-husky mix that, for a while anyway, Kiekko, a gelding since Alabama, felt compelled to mount. For a few years, we all talked about having dinner together sometime, but by now it’s obvious that we won’t. As it stands, we see one another more often—and tell one another more about ourselves—than we do anyone else.
Over the years, I’ve had some run-ins. There was the unhappy gent, a ringer for Van Morrison, who often stood near the 103rd Street transverse, with what seemed to be a dire wolf on a rope, and yelled at anyone who allowed an unleashed dog to come near. One fine April morning, by the Park’s mulch depot, Kiekko wandered over, and Van Morrison barked at my wife, “Fuck you!” She blurted back, “Happy Easter!” There was also the aardvark of a man with a pair of enviable dachshunds who, after Kiekko had run up on him too aggressively, shouted at me, from six feet away, “You’re an asshole!” He might have been onto something. Or else he was projecting. Happy Easter.
A pet, you could say, is an animal that lives in the home and has a name, and that you don’t eat. People dine on rabbit but generally not on the pet rabbit. One of the earliest uses of the term “pet,” five centuries ago, described a lamb that was raised by hand and kept as a favorite; it’s hard to imagine that such a creature didn’t become food, and that someone in the household didn’t become sad. Over time, sentiment evolved. A University of Denver history professor named Ingrid Tague did a survey of pet elegies in eighteenth-century England, finding the incidence, even then, of deep mourning, snickering double-entendre, and totemic carpe diem, such as “On a Favourite Thrush, That Was Killed by Accident” and “On the Premature Death of Cloe Snappum, a Lady’s Favourite Lap-Dog,” whose fur, postmortem, was apparently converted into a muff:
Now Clo’s soft skin—dear, precious stuff!
Adorns fair Delia’s fav’rite muff:
Still glistens while ’tis gently press’d,
And fondly by the nymph caress’d;
. . .
But stop—methinks I’ve said enough—
Oh, happy-happy-happy muff!
The rise of dog breeding, in nineteenth-century England—with its emphasis on purity over purpose, and its echo of eugenics—ushered in a more intentional age. Here was something we could design, rather than merely tame and train.
The Harvard literature professor Marc Shell, in a 1986 essay titled “The Family Pet,” explored the exceptional status of the pet, as something half man and half beast. Gesturing to Genesis, the Eucharist, Freud, and Penthouse, he performs some rhetorical twirls, of questionable sincerity, in order to equate pet ownership with incest, bestiality, and cannibalism, and to call attention to the peerless anthropocentrism of Christianity: “If one wishes to avoid or sublimate both literal bestiality and literal incest—as who does not?—one way to do so would be to seek out a ‘snugglepup.’ ” The word “puppy” may derive from poupée, the French word for a doll (from the Latin pupa); it made the leap to canines in their incarnations as lap accessories for the women of the aristocracy. “Puppy” sounds playful enough, but, in light of its origin, also a little creepy, suggesting that the pet remains in some respects inanimate in the absence of its owner’s projections.
With the right kind of distance—a brain on science fiction, or a sativa gummy—one can start to feel a little queasy about the leashes and collars, the tugging and heeling, the sudden bursts of anger and reproach. This institution of cuddliness contains a trace of tyranny. Out of nowhere, a Park Avenue matron woofs an angry “No!” like Caesar in “Planet of the Apes.” The other day, I saw a middle-aged man sling a leashed corgi toward the curb and grab it by the scruff, the dog squealing as the man roared; apparently, the dog had got hold of a bread crust or a tasty turd. Why you so mad? If it had been a son, I might have called child services. I also saw a woman chide a doodle for sprawling on its back in the dirt, legs splayed: “That’s not very ladylike!” Nor is allowing an animal to lick your face; no one, or let’s say few, would tolerate such a thing from a fellow-human.
Vallee is PPC candidate for local riding, party’s executive director says
The executive director of the People’s Party of Canada has weighed in on the dispute between two riding associations that both claim to have a candidate in Chatham-Kent—Leamington.
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Daniel Tyrie, in an email Saturday, said the party’s headquarters recognizes the Chatham-Sarnia Regional Association, but hasn’t recognized the organization called the Chatham-Kent—Leamington Electoral District Association since January.
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He said the Chatham-Sarnia group, which also includes the Lambton—Kent—Middlesex and Sarnia-Lambton ridings, held a nomination contest for local party members Saturday, and Liz Vallee is the party’s candidate for Chatham-Kent—Leamington.
A news release dated June 15 from the Chatham-Kent—Leamington Electoral District Association had named Greg Wilford as the candidate.
“Greg Wilford is not recognized by PPC (headquarters) as a legitimate candidate, nomination contestant or approved applicant,” Tyrie said in the email. “Mr. Wilford did not apply to be a candidate and did not receive approval from PPC (headquarters) in accordance with our candidate selection process and will not be included in the ongoing nomination contest.”
In a Friday email, Iain Schofield, the CEO of the Chatham-Kent—Leamington association, said his organization is the official electoral district association.
“There are some people who are attempting to run a parallel party organization,” Schofield said. “They claim an authority that (they) do not have. We view their attempts as illegitimate.
“As with other parties, the (electoral district associations) are in charge of candidate selection for the locality. As such, we held a vote in the (electoral district association) executive and this is how Mr. Wilford was selected.”