Québec has a few chains of its own, some of them real standbys. I don’t say I go to the drug store, I go to Jean-Coutu. For coffee there’s Café Depot, and for overpriced beer, chips, and basic groceries there’s Couche-Tard, usually visited after midnight. The name means someone who stays up late, and its emblem is a big red owl. Just the owl’s head, actually, but that’s big enough and it’s very expressive. The childhood me would’ve been fascinated. It appears to be winking, white features against the red, one eye open and the other shut. The open eye draws your attention. It’s open so wide that it’s oval; it’s lunging for wherever an owl locates its hairline.
As a kid I never saw it, since I was busy drinking Tang down in the United States. But now I’m a transplant, and for a while I lived in a neighborhood where hearing English was a bit of a surprise. Rosemont’s a French kind of place and American chains are scarce there. Instead I’d walk past a Couche-Tard on my way to a mediocre Chinese restaurant, a good schwarma place, a variety of mom-and-pop stores, and a very distant supermarket (Provigo, billed as L’Épicerie Canadienne). I liked M. Wang’s dépanneur, or corner store; this was partly because of the prices, partly because of M. Wang himself, and partly because one of his daughters might be working the counter. But he closed at 11, so there were nights when I walked to the big red owl and bought my carton of milk or stick of beef jerky.
This particular store didn’t just have an owl sign; a cutout of the owl, body and all, hulked by the door. I remember it as five-feet-high, with its winking and non-winking eyes correspondingly great. Couche-Tard said the sign. The white letters marched along with a bit of a tilt, and underneath there was the big owl and its eye gymnastics.
One of my neighbors spoke English. He’d grown up with an English (meaning English-speaking) father and a Québecoise mother, so he’d known both languages since forever. We liked to chat, and one time he told me about dashing out the other night to buy some tuna fish for a recipe. The point of the story was that he hadn’t planned, hence he had to brave a hard rain and the prices at the Couche-Tard.
“The what?” I said.
“The Couche-Tard,” he said.
I was still at a loss. He described its location, which was just a block south of us and in a direct line to the neighborhood’s main drag. You know, my neighbor said, you can go there to buy potato chips or lighters or a few staples—
“Oh,” I said. “You mean the 7-11.”
The point of this story is that you can take the boy out of America but you can’t take America out of the boy. The follow-up is that I’m now compiling a list of American-owned outfits so I can avoid them. The reasons are obvious if you follow the news. Emailing someone I know who’s good at finding Internet resources, I said I needed a list of places that look “foreign-owned” but really aren’t. By foreign I meant the country I’m living in, which is Canada. That’s me, still American. But for now America’s on one side and I’m on the other.