chain reaction: shop locally

Before you go shopping for that special gift for someone you love or like or are obligated to lavish with pretend affection, ask yourself, first, whether it will be truly special and, second, where your money might do you the most good. You’ll no doubt give some to Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, and you may have a significant portion of your purchases delivered to your door in boxes marked Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Target and Walmart will also catch you coming and going more times than you’d like to admit.

But the chains don’t need you like you need you.

If you can shop in your neighborhood—whether it’s for groceries or liquor or flowers—do it. If there’s a jewelry shop or a camera store or tiny burger joint near your house, buy something there. Because here’s what happens when you stay in your neck of the woods: your house retains its value.

It works like this: open, busy shops attract people, and people deter crime. Buildings are less likely to become vandalized and are more likely to become fixed immediately if they do. Bustling commercial areas in small neighborhoods make those neighborhoods appealing to potential home buyers, especially those with families. Your house—just up the street from a coffee shop, book store, hip happening hairdresser, hardware store, restaurant, pub, and fabulous boutique—retains its value—not only monetarily but personally. Your quality of life is vastly improved by community. (And remember Snowmageddon? It's a lot less dismal when you can walk to a place that's open because the owners walked there, too.)

I’ve heard before from people—even those with a good deal of disposable income—that they don’t get as great a “value” from shopping locally; that is, the books cost a little more. But when I buy a book at the Red Canoe, I visit with my neighbors and friends, chat with the owners, taste a sample of the newest muffin, and get a cup of coffee that’s roasted so locally I can smell it from my house. I learn the latest neighborhood news (and scuttlebutt, which is a little more fun). I am treated like a person, and that makes me feel good. I give my money to a friendly college student with good taste in music and a knack for making a killer sandwich. That, my friends, is value, and it radiates for blocks. It’s what the credit card company means by “priceless.”

If you’re not lucky enough to have a strip of independent stores in your neighborhood, come to mine. All up and down Harford Road you can find things that are truly special, one-of-a-kind items that no one else owns.


Studio C Jewelry & Gifts
410-444-7979
4337 B Harford Road
10-5 T-Sat., 10-3 Sun
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Constance Scott makes gorgeous beaded and tin jewelry and accessories, and she carries some of the coolest stuff around: letter hooks; pearl pens; bottle stoppers with golf balls and antique door knobs; funky locally-created clothing (made by converting two items into a single unique top or skirt!); magnets; hats; soaps; a whole line of gorgeous serving items from Swirl; and so much more. How can you resist a $4 package of the strongest magnets in the world or fancy bookmarks that fit in your daughter's stocking? You can’t leave without finding something special for someone special.


The Red Canoe
410-444-4440
4337 Harford Road
7-5 T-Sat., 9-3 Sun.

Betty White may have put the fun back into talking about muffins, but Peter Selhorst put the fun back into eating them. They are the best muffins anywhere. If you want a sweet muffin, pick the cranberry chocolate chip or everyone’s favorite coffee cake muffin. Maybe you want a hot, crusty muffin, with spinach and cheese, gently heated and slathered with butter. (Dare I say "moist"?)

But Red Canoe is more than the sum of some of its muffins. It’s coffee and soups and sandwiches (try the Zacker—a grilled force of panini to be reckoned with). And, of course, it's books—for kids and grownups, with a huge selection of local authors' books. (Rumor has it that the Red Canoe carries a certain someone’s calendars, too.) Nicole and Peter support authors and artists as book-signing-party hosts, sellers, and wall-art displayers.


Koco’s Pub
410-426-3519
4301 Harford Road

For the universe’s best crab cakes, with all jumbo lump and rarely a speck of filler, it’s Koco’s. Joanna, the owner, once told me she used a loaf of bread per twenty pounds of crab. If you find a piece of it, save it; it’s a little like finding a pearl in an oyster. Koco’s is on my speed dial.


The Chop Shop
410-426-2300
4329 Harford Road

You need cool hair? Baby, she’s got cool hair. Visit Our Coiffed Lady of the Locks, Lisa Hawks, for hip happenin’ hairdos and trusty tresses that will make you the belle of any holiday ball. And you get some spicy shop talk, too.


Beth’s DIY
443-708-0786
4321 Harford Road

Hey, just because it’s Christmas doesn’t mean you don’t need a key made or a window rescreened. Beth knows what she’s doing, and she can show you, too.



The Chameleon Café
410-254-2376
4341 Harford Road
5-9 T-Thurs, 5-10 Fri.-Sat.

Steak and lamb and scallops and vegetarian dishes and charcuterie—nothing in this restaurant is short of delightful. The space is sweet, and the food is as local and in season as it can possibly be. Brenda and Jeff Smith have created a heavenly foodie haven that’s been applauded by all the local magazines and newspapers. There’s even a prix fixe menu for those of us whose income is broken!


Lou’s Liquors
4516 Harford Road
410-426-5645

Lou’s has a good selection of craft beers (and the usual crap beers, for those who like that sort of thing), as well as big jugs of Manischewitz. It’s also great for Lotto, cigarettes, and shorties.


Up the Road

Further north up Harford Road, you can find other hunks of awesomesauce:
· Zeke's Coffee (4607 Harford Road) has those fabulous, roasted-right-here (in the alley between the Chameleon and Safeway) beans and lots of coffee-related merch;
· Lakein's Jewelers (5400 Harford Road) for watch repairs and sterling chains and an ear piercing (really? you'd let a teenager from Claire's pierce your kid's ears?);
· Clementine (5402 Harford Road) for the yummy sandwiches and meals and fancy cocktails (best: chicken salad with havarti and lemon jam);
· Hamilton Vacuum (5421 Harford Road—buy it here once or repair the ones you didn't buy here each year;
· Hamilton Arts Collective (5440 Harford Road), because art is essential, not optional;
· Big Bad Wolf's House of Barbecue (5713 Harford Road) for your big bad appetite for barbecue;
· Shockers Smoke Shop (7110 Harford Road), for all your bong needs;
· Fenwick Bakery (7219 Harford Road) for donuts, cake, and pie (my husband buys a dozen cinnamon bismarcks here every week!);
· a strip of antique shops;
· Mueller’s Delicatessen (7207 Harford Road), for German goodies;
· Dead Freddies (7209 Harford Road) to watch the game while eating their shrimp salad on pretzel bread—best I've ever had;
· Home Discount Tile Center (7350 Harford Road) (a little like a car dealership, but more colorful).

Get your Christmas tree at the fabulous Walther Gardens, 4715 Walther Avenue (and, in the summer, Baltimore's Best Snowball, with ice cream on the bottom, thick chocolate syrup in the middle, and marshmallow on top; shop in the greenhouse, too, for herbs, annuals, and veggie plants). Those people are so nice, and their dog is good.

Move over to Old Harford Road, and find cool stick candies, wreaths, and greens at Poor Boys. Then get your Christmas facial and brow pluck from the beautiful and divine Gina at Giuseppe's (also in my speed dial—2616 Taylor, 410-665-4490). Finally, because you're gonna need it after all that shopping, ask for some Resurrection at the Liquor Pump (8535 Old Harford Road, 410-668-1820), and tell owner Harry Mehta that Leslie the Beer Goddess sent you. It's one of the nicest liquor stores ever, with a huge variety of fancy craft beer. The place holds tastings, too, so look for them on Facebook.

You don't have to be rich to shop locally, but if you shop locally, you will be rich. It's in the cards. If you don't trust me, go have them read at this place at the corner of Overland and Harford, between your rockin' crab cake and your bitchin' hairdo.

Broken

Bur first, an interview with the Ripstick Queen, two and a half years ago.





Note: the helmet and wrist guards, the mother running beside the daughter to check for cars.




It was common knowledge that you didn’t have breakfast at the Morning Edition near Patterson Park unless you had three hours to spend. It’s not that it was too crowded—it was, but it was a narrow first floor of a rowhouse and held fifty people or so in church pews and wobbly, cast-out chairs. But it was quirky, and the food was delicious, and sometimes you were willing to wait, even though service was so bad it was obscene: a server would bring you a cup of coffee, set it down at your table, and look at you surprised when you asked for cream and sugar. Then she'd walk back for the cream, set it down at your table, then look at you surprised when you asked again for sugar, then walk back for the sugar, then set it down at your table and look at you surprised when you asked for a spoon to stir it all, then walk back for the spoon and only sometimes return.

Now imagine that you’re not at the Morning Edition for some ridiculously decadent French Toast but at the ER for x-rays and stitches after a terrible accident. You’d expect a little more from nurse. You get nice. You don't get efficient. There has to be a better way.

I'll back up. I had just turned dinner on, poured a Resurrection into a fancy glass, and sat down with my guitar to learn Radiohead's "No Surprises," when Marty came back too early from the park. Serena had fallen from her ripstick. Yes, a ripstick is a horrible piece of shit wheeled toy that I like to call “a skateboard—only dangerouser,” and she went speeding down a hill, sans helmet, sans wrist guards (not that either would have helped, as only luck spared her from a broken wrist and a brain injury). She was going too fast and dismounted, her left arm—her fret-playing arm—breaking, literally, her fall, and then her face stopped it the rest of the way. When we arrived at a local hospital's ER at 5:45, the waiting room was full. I’d forgotten what it was like here—hundreds of patients using the hospital’s emergency facility as a primary care physician—mostly because this hospital saved my life when I was in anaphylaxis after taking a dose of penicillin, and because of the hand clinic. If something was wrong with her hand, she needed to be at this place.

Serena’s face is bloody, her nose bruised, her jaw and arm too sore to move. I sign in, noting on the form next to “reason for visit” that she suffered a terrible fall in an accident. She was triaged quickly because the pair of young nurses was caught up, and she was given an ice pack for her face and told that she’d get a room as soon as one was available. More than an hour later, at 7:15, I started listening more carefully; everyone was told the same thing. So much for keeping hope and patients’ spirits alive.

The woman at registrar had told us to sit at her desk; she’d taken pity on Serena and was making phone calls trying to get her Tylenol and a room. She tells us we are going to “flex care,” as if that were some special kind of white-table-cloth restaurant that takes a little longer but has much better food. But we are still at her desk at 7:30. Finally, she gets up and cleans three rooms herself—the first (and only) sign of real initiative at the hospital—and takes us back to the Flex Care waiting room, where we wait after another fifteen minutes until the nurse comes.

Serena is given a preliminary glance—asked what hurts—and sent to x-ray. We wait there for ten minutes or so, and then Serena’s arm is x-rayed, and we are delivered back to the tiny cubbyhole to wait another half hour or so for the pediatrician. He is a cheerful Dutch guy who is pleased to tell us he studied under Serena’s pediatrician twenty years ago. The tools in our cubby don’t work, so he stretches them from the room next door, where a girl who’d had strep for more than a week and has been waiting for a doctor just a little longer than we were is being seen. That girl has had asthma since birth, and the doctor is incredulous that the mother has no asthma medicine at all, not even an emergency inhaler. The teen is told that her throat looks like strep, but test results would take two days, so she’s getting a shot of antibiotics. Two days? The ER doesn’t have a 20-minute strep test like every pediatrician’s office and Patient First on the planet? Really?

Our doctor says that Serena’s x-rays indicate a fracture, but he is waiting for confirmation from an orthopedist. He tells us a nurse will come and clean Serena’s wounds, and goes to sit at his desk and eat. He sits there for a good thirty minutes, while the nurse, who sees me lurking in the hallway and apologizes each time, saying, “I’m coming,” finally does come with an armload of stuff to clean up the blood that’s dripping from her chin and head.

I had to remind myself that the nurse was not the waitress. Yet she came to us with the coffee but not the cream, sugar, or spoon. She came with her hands full of things she needed, then left in search of things she forgot, gone a good ten minutes between, apologizing along the way. She wondered whether the triple antibiotic ointment she brought contained penicillin, despite the fact that it said “active ingredient: bacitracin” on the packet, and left for another ten minutes to find out. She put on the ointment, and we reminded her that she’d not cleaned Serena’s scraped knees, so she went back for the peroxide and water. And then she left to get more ointment. I don't blame her; she was the only nurse! It's the hospital's fault.

Where’s my fucking French Toast?

Last week, at Alonso’s, a popular restaurant and bar where I’ve been a customer nearly once a week for two years and have been treated kindly by most of the wait staff, we sat, on a busy Friday night, at a sticky, filthy spot at the bar for twenty minutes, unable to get the bartender’s attention—after taking twenty minutes to get served a beer—so I went behind the bar, grabbed a wet rag, bused the dirty dishes, and wiped the bar. It took seconds. The bartender hollered at me. Why? Because customers are not allowed behind the bar.

So how could this whole scenario been improved? I could've cleaned her myself. Marty’d already cleaned her before we arrived. This was three hours of bleeding. What about one of those triage nurses? Couldn’t they have cleaned her wounds after they took her blood pressure, in the room where they had all the equipment to do it, in a room that wasn’t being used by anyone but us because they were all caught up? What about the pediatrician in ER? Couldn’t he have done it quickly, before sitting down to dinner and waiting for the next underage patient, who didn’t show up until 9:30 p.m.?

There’s a bleeding, broken kid in the ER, and it’s just like a bad restaurant. Where’s my fucking coffee?

At 9:00, three hours and fifteen minutes after we had arrived, we are still waiting for a phone call or a visit from the orthopedist, and Serena is finally glowing with sticky ointment. I am blotting the blood drips from her chin with a tissue brought to us by the guy cleaning the rooms. At 9:30, we are sent for more x-rays, this time of the elbow, and the receptionist is talking on the phone for the first ten minutes, until I mention to Marty that no one would even know we were here if she didn’t finish her call. She hangs up and takes us back. She is the tech. She obviously doesn’t know that ER patients have been sitting for hours and hours before they reach her care.


We are back in our cubby at almost ten, and I’m threatening to leave. My back is killing me, my husband is asleep on the stretcher, and my daughter is crying again and saying fuck a lot. The doctor tells us, again, that the ortho “is coming,” but she’s been coming for the past hour, and the hospital’s not that big. It takes the nurse to tell us that “she’s in surgery, and we have no way of knowing when she’ll be finished.” But! But! You all keep saying she’s coming! As if she’s actually walking toward us! She’s not coming! She’s in surgery! Aware is different from coming! I understand aware! I want to leave, but the nurse reminds us of all the time we have invested. Do we invest ten minutes more or two hours more? Probably somewhere in between, the nurse tells us.

Is all this done to give the patient hope or shield them from the verbal hostility of frustrated patients? Is this the waitress soothing the ire of her hungry customers by telling us again and again that the food will be out shortly, that it’s next up, that she saw it back there, that it’s on the way out to us, even though the kitchen is short-staffed and has its attention on the six omelets that were easier to make than your fancy French Toast?

At last, the ortho arrives, and she spends nearly every moment of the next two hours working on Serena, stopping only to locate a cast saw because the one she had was overheating too quickly and burning Serena and to send us for a third and final, we hoped, x-ray. Fortunately, her break was set properly, and we are discharged. At midnight. Six hours and fifteen minutes after walking through the door.

Serena is just one patient. Some of the people who had arrived before or during our stay were parked on stretchers in the hallways with black eyes and bloody noses or zombiefied or comatose or just slumped over in alcoholic or drug-induced stupors. Or maybe they were just exhausted.

Let me say right now that everyone has been nice, kind, gentle, and generous. I know they were doing their best. And let me add that I haven't a clue about how to run a small business, much less an ER. I'm just a frustrated parent who saw countless missed opportunities to keep someone from waiting an hour for a glass of water. A woman got locked in the bathroom, and an alarm sounded and lights flashed, and the clean-up guy had nothing with which to open the bathroom door! He finally, and not in any real hurry (I guess he knew it wasn't a true emergency), located a screwdriver and opened the door. So I know they're understaffed and overworked (that same guy complained to us he was going on his twelfth hour of work, to which I replied that he was getting paid, and we were paying—not the same thing). I know they have a system. But things don't work this poorly at other hospitals, many of whom have hired independent consultants to fix things. I'm just suggesting that this is a hospital that needs fixing.

So what if the nurse helped one patient from start to finish, handing that patient over to the x-ray tech after cleaning the dripping blood from her chin, x-ray tech then handing the patient to the doctor while the nurse attends to the next patient, on and on until everyone is out of there or in the care of the appropriate specialist within an hour or two? Instead, there’s a waitress walking in and out of twenty cubbyhole rooms taking all the drink orders before putting a single one in, not returning to take the dinner orders until the drinks are up and delivered to each table. Where’s the manager? The food here is not worth suffering through the service.

The Morning Edition eventually closed, but we can make our own breakfast. We can’t stitch our own cuts, take x-rays, dispense pain relievers, set breaks, make casts. Still, it seems like the people who can would want to do it for grateful people, rather than tearful, weary, angry, powerless ones who feel so defeated by the system that they’re ready to walk out with serious injuries to become a drain on somebody else’s emergency room or worse—sit in the halls taking up space and being treated like they’re used to being treated—as though their lives don’t matter, which they believe. They are mostly alone and have no one to fight for them.

When we go in an ER broken, we do not expect to be broken even more. We don’t deserve it. So we either fix the ER (I am looking for a job!), or we wrap our children in foam peanuts and bubble wrap.