The Stratfield Village Association, a group of regular folks in Fairfield, moms and dads, many of them, a mix of lifelong Fairfield residents, young transplants from Manhattan and LA and other points west, got together and put a whuppin' on Walgreens the other night.

It was a nice lesson in democracy, a line of two-dozen mostly ordinary people leaning against the wall in the auditorium of Fairfield Warde High School waiting for their chance to tell the seven members of the Zoning Board of Appeals why Walgreens doesn't fit in their neighborhood, why it doesn't belong in a vacant grocery store that was driven out by a Stamford-based landlord who prefers a relationship with an Illinois-based corporate giant.

When the lawyers went at it, the front of the room was awash in dots and dashes that would have delighted Samuel Morse, cascades of number of statutes, regulations, case law citations.

Paragraphs, subparagraphs, 12-dash-4-dot-5. Nine-dash-dot-dash-11 says you can sell toothpicks, sliced bologna and bread, but not ballpeen hammers, kumquats and diesel engines, and on, and on, and on, and zoning variances, according to dot-paragraph 14-dash a dash b dash c, carry with the property, and not the appellant, according to a ruling in Calamari versus Finnegan in 1959 and&. Oy vey!!

Representing Walgreens was Fairfield's own John Fallon. When it comes to parsing the dots and dashes of the town of Fairfield's zoning regulations, he has few equals. And when his 30-minute

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presentation to the board was over, it seemed clear that there really was no choice in this matter, the law simply required that Walgreens be allowed to occupy the vacant building at 1280 Stratfield Road.

It was, after all, one retail use replacing another, albeit a national chain department store that sells everything from ink-jet cartridges to mini-stoves replacing a grocery market.

A retail use is a retail use, Fallon argued, and if the zoners deicded true to the law — and, by the way, with the unflagging integrity for which they were rightly renown, he deferentially intoned — they would rule in favor of his client. No planning, no zoning, no nothing. A No-Brainer.

But thankfully, there is at the heart of every legal argument a principle.

And Joel Z. Green, a lawyer who lives in the Stratfield section and spoke on behalf of the Village Association, soon got to the heart of the matter.

The proposed Walgreens, he pointed out, is in an area called a Neighborhood Designed Business District. There are three in Fairfield: the Stratfield area in question, another at the foot of Greenfield Hill and the third in the heart of Southport.

The very purpose of such a zone — according to the dots and dashes, this particular one being 12-dash-five — is to "provide local neighborhoods with needed and desirable convenience goods and services in a manner which will not be detrimental to the surrounding residential areas. The uses permitted in this zone shall be limited to those which will primarily serve the local neighborhood.&" My wife has never called and asked me to stop and pick up an ink-jet printer cartridge on my way home from work. Should the right client appear, one can only assume that Mr. Fallon would argue with equal verve should the windows of La Colline Verte, a French restaurant at 75 Hillside Road in the Greenfield Hill zone go dark for some reason and Roy Rogers, say, decide they'd like to get a foot in the door in Greenfield Hill.

A restaurant, after all, is a restaurant.

There are, of course, layers to this fight.

Sally Parker is a woman of a certain age who grew up in the Stratfield section of Fairfield. She's lived there long enough to remember when part of the area was a Swedish enclave. Sally is not a dot-dash-dot person. Rather, she spoke to the board about "the sense of human scale," about notions for which dots, dashes and statutory citations don't allow. She spoke about clerks carrying elderly shoppers' bags out to the parking lot in the snow. She conjured a simpler time. As James Earl Jones told Kevin Costner in "Field of Dreams," the baseball field would bring people and remind them of better times.

Four hours after the hearing began, as he led the board into a "no" vote on one of Walgreens petitions, board chairman Robert J. Brennan, Jr. showed that he, too, had seen the heart of the matter through the flurry of dots and dashes.

"I think when they created this zone," Brennan said, "they had something in mind. They had in mind a store that fits the neighborhood."

Michael J. Daly is managing editor of the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6394 or by e-mail at mdaly@ctpost.com.