A Look Back: Commerce Place (sally)

(As we wind down our days at the edmontonian, We’ll be looking back at some of our favorite posts, stories, items, etc from the last 2+ years).

One of my favorite series of posts was Doorwatch ’09 – a string of posts about the broken door at downtown shopping centre Commerce Place.

Out of order for a year or better by the time I wrote about it, the posts about the Commerce Place door rank among my favorites for a few reasons: first, they gave me a means to vent my unholy fury about how much I hated the fact that no one cared enough to fix the door.

Second, I was fortunate enough to be able to find a lot of other people who had just as much of a deathwish for that door as I did. It’s a powerful thing to experience, a whole group of people saying “You are not taking crazy pills, and we feel your pain” – even if your pain is as inane as the mild inconvenience of having to walk a half-block out of your way to get to work.

When I learned that other people found Commerce Place to be just as hilariously frustrating as I did, I realized something that I hadn’t during my days working in “real news” – that stories don’t have to be big or dramatic or tragic to matter.  I think it’s easy to forget, in a world with so much tabloid journalism, celebrity culture and the pervasive attitude that “if it bleeds, it leads!” – but what you do, what you experience, and who you are matters .   Your story is important – even if isn’t dramatic, or glamourous or likely to be made into a W Network movie of the week (p.s. watch for Barbara Hershey in “SALLY’S DOOR: A WOMAN’S JOURNEY OUT OF COMMERCE PLACE” next fall).

There are no small stories. Thanks for teaching me that.