James Fox-Smith
Like lots of people, we have spent the last few months working, if not actually from home, then a lot closer to it than we used to. As St. Francisville residents (by zip code at least; more on that in a minute), this has definitely been a silver lining in our personal, coronavirus-shaped cloud. Having spent the best part of twenty years commuting two hours a day between our home northeast of St. Francisville, and Country Roads’ main office in Baton Rouge, the sudden, unexpected need to quit doing this is a perk. We haven’t been working from home, but rather from a tiny cabin in the 3V Tourist Court—a 1920s-era motor court that houses a combination of funky overnight accommodations, and casual office space for a motley collection of small businesses, behind St. Francisville’s Magnolia Café. Why, when the rest of Country Roads’ staff have proven perfectly capable of working from their houses, would Ashley and I still choose to get up and put on actual clothes to drive to an office where we are the only occupants? Internet, of course. There are many nice things about living in a remote farmhouse twenty miles from anywhere, but reliable high-speed Internet isn’t one of them. So while the rest of white collar America has been hitching up its collective pajama bottoms and commuting no farther than the kitchen table, each morning Ashley and I still sit down in the one-room cabin (two desks, a tiny bathroom, and excellent Internet) otherwise known as Country Roads’ global pandemic headquarters. It might not be home, but situated in the middle of town right behind the Magnolia Café, it’s the next best thing. So last month, when the Mag finally reopened after six months of pandemic-triggered closure, no one was gladder than us.
Much ink has been spilled on the subject of the Magnolia Café so I’ll resist the temptation to add much here. Suffice it to say that during the course of its near forty-year run the Mag has come to occupy a central place in the collective social landscape of our town: variously its default lunch spot, weekend gathering place, celebration venue, and evening watering hole. You might say it’s been a kind of community living room—the sort of place where it’s OK for families to pull tables together and socialize on Friday nights while their little kids roam the restaurant in packs and take over the dancefloor. Once those little kids grew into teenagers the Mag served another vital role: giving many of them their first taste of “real” employment. Last month, when the Mag finally reopened after a half-year hiatus that left St. Francisville feeling a bit like a home without a living room, our fifteen-year-old son Charles landed a weekend job there as a food runner, becoming the latest of those former little dancefloor kids to come full circle. After having been stuck at home and penniless with his parents for six months, it’s no exaggeration to say that he is thrilled.
His parents, who cut their teeth in restaurant jobs and actually met while working at a dodgy Irish establishment named the Bad Ass Café half a lifetime ago—are thrilled, too. Not only that their kid is getting an introduction to the satisfactions and responsibilities of making his own money at an early age, but also because in doing so Charles gets to be a small cog in one of the vital engines of his community. Each day through the long, strange summer just gone, our little office cabin meant that Ashley and I had a bird’s eye view over the Mag’s eerily silent parking lot. Now that the parking lot is full again it’s clear that a vital element of community life went missing for awhile. And that, so often in life, we don’t realize what we’ve got until it’s gone.
