Mike and I went back to the “old neighborhood” for an ice cream the other day – it was Monday afternoon around three-thirty, and beautiful outside, so I took a break from work when he got home and we drove over to the ice cream shop, just two blocks away from where we shared an apartment when we first lived together.

We go to this place a few times a year, because the ice cream is fantastic. Home made, with fabulous, different flavors that I’d never think of making up, like apple pie and cream, or drumstick. The ice cream is good enough that I’ll go for a cone even though ice cream doesn’t like me very much, and I usually spend the next 24 hours writhing in agony.

The last few times we’ve been, we’ve noticed a definite change in the neighborhood. It’s surrounded on all sides by a hot new development – old army land that was originally supposed to be affordable housing, but is now a series of extremely expensive houses and townhomes that attract Calgary’s new “upper crust”, or whatever they are. I’m thinking they’re really Calgary’s nouveau riche. You know – the type who drive up in Hummers and wear fleece vests everywhere. The women are perfectly coiffed. The kids are often poorly behaved and poorly named. They are the kind of people who can buy a $400,000 house and knock it down to build another one.

We don’t live over there, so it shouldn’t stick in my craw as much as it does. But it makes the ice cream experience a lot less enjoyable. The neighborhood used to be fairly blue-collar – it was all old Army housing, multi-family homes. There were families everywhere. This time, we stood behind a teeny tiny nanny and her two charges, and watched as they sat across the lot from us and ate ice cream beside their thousand dollar stroller.

Perhaps it bugs me because it’s everywhere in our hot market – everyone here seems hell-bent on conspicuous consumerism. I’ve never really understood the appeal of having so much stuff – of having the right car, and the right house, and the right clothes to impress everyone else. Sure, I like nice things, but I like what I like because I get to enjoy it, not because I want someone else to approve of me and slot me into a category.

Maybe all those people at the ice cream shop are like that, too, but somehow I doubt it. They’re too busy knocking down old houses and telling people which neighborhood they live in, or what deal they’re brokering now. Who their big clients are. I think next time we’re going to try a different ice cream place – one that doesn’t make us feel sad about what’s happening to where we used to live, or intense relief that we didn’t try to buy there after all.