And even here the classes of men reveal themselves. On holiday in Niagara Falls my partner and I went to Starbucks for cappuccino and pastries. First off they use a lot of stainless steel, large tinted windows and those damn high wooden stools that always set off my sciatic. So it felt like a bad day at work with good coffee and confections. The atmosphere feels a bit like work too. Yes those well dressed young people sans wrinkles in their shirts, even while on vacation and ever so confident in their menu choices-with eyes flicking back and forth in an all too familiar pattern that communicated calculations afoot deep within their minds, "yes I am aware that froth is fifty cents extra, I come here all the time." When you near the half century mark you don't begrudge youthful optimism as much as you are confident through life experiences that half a dozen call center jobs will eventually beat that out of them.

When the bill was presented for twenty dollars (about twenty-two U.S. at the time as the Loonie was hedging the Greenback on this particular outing), I realized that no, Starbucks isn't for my class. So asking directions and heading a little farther into the Great White North and tucked right next to Food Basics was Tim Hortons. Now this is a coffee shop that I could afford to be buried in. Not only did they make my coffee exactly as I like it with double sugar and cream but we got twice the pastries for around six dollars, (about seven-fifty U.S.). And you aren't troubled by that optimism here. Yes, the men in muddy jeans and pensioners aren't trying to climb the corporate ladder, they know where they are in life and they have arrived.

I guess that if I died on vacation, that peculiar condition that says, ah what the hell, it's okay to take a quarter of what I've been saving as a down payment for a house and book this trip and I had my druthers, I'd prefer my plot to be at Hortons rather than Bucks. And at least I'd be a little closer to Canada, a land of people and government that I admire and respect.