It’s Toby’s world, we just live in it.

I was shelving books at Our Town Books one afternoon when I came across the title The Five People You Meet In Heaven, and I thought to myself, if you were to meet five people in Winchester that embodied who we are as a community, who would they be? Over the next few days I added names to, and struck names off, a short list of people to meet in Winchester. During this listmaking I trekked to Scotty’s multiple times to buy emergency cans of Coke from Toby. It occurred to me that if a person were just passing through town and stopped for gas, Toby is likely the only person in town they would interact with.

I sat on that thought for a long time, I carried it with me as I interacted with others in this town, the people that had made it to the ‘short list’ of people to meet in Winchester; the people that would consider themselves representatives of this community, the people in elected offices, people hired to manage local services, people that see me as ‘the barista’ getting their “coffee, black”. As I navigated my community, I took note of the people that created community, the people that left me with the feeling of belonging, and of the people that had told me to leave.

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

-Maya Angelou

I realized that since this is my list of Five People You Meet in Winchester, that I can put whoever I want on it. The Winco Project is the story I am telling of my community, and I choose the cast of characters, and if I want to start with Toby, I can. I don’t think that Toby is still working at the gas station, but while his boombox pushed out Tom Petty or Creedence Clearwater Revival over the Scotty’s parking lot, Toby would distract you from the outside world with a bad joke, and sometimes a good joke.

He would never judge how many cans of Coca-Cola you might purchase in a day.

If a kid was looking for nightcrawlers to go fishing, he gave them canned vienna sausages, telling them they work just as well. (They did, Toby was right.)

With no election, no committee, no social media, and no midnight city council meeting, Toby was the de facto town welcoming committee, a job he was never thanked for.