I like walkable cities and walkable neighborhoods. I prefer walking or biking to getting into my car and driving. I’ll be honest, part of me feels a bit smug about this and all the good I am doing the planet/city/neighborhood by leaving the car at home. Still, aside from any moral or environmental benefits, walking is just nice for no other reason than it feels good to be outside doing what our bodies are engineered to do.
I currently work near a mall in the suburbs and have lately taken to going for walks during my lunch hour despite the nightmarish traffic and frequently puzzling and seemingly arbitrary decision on which blocks get sidewalks and which blocks do not. The other day I headed toward an open air “shopping center” across the street from where I work to start the walk. Although the temperature was cold, the wind was not blowing and the sun was out. I decided to take the sidewalk next to the businesses while I was out to see what was in the shopping center. Needless to say, not many persons were walking about. With the exception of one person, everyone I saw was either making the trip from car to store or vice-versa. The thing is, though, this is kind of an interesting place if you go slow and pay attention.
I walked past a dance studio that caused me to smile, thinking of the gentle scam that convinces some lonely folks to come back again and again because of their undiscovered talent or the couples dutifully struggling through a foxtrot so they can learn to dance for their wedding (which will be deejayed by someone playing cheesy pop hits from the last three or four decades, few or none of which will be conducive to foxtrotting, waltzing, or cha-cha-ing).
When I was in law school we studied a case involving a dance studio in which the plaintiff claimed to have been fraudulently induced to spend money based on the studio’s representation that she was talented. The judge used the phrase, “Terpsechorean arts” at one point in the opinion and made a few of us laugh. I still smile thinking of it.
I admit to being slightly disappointed that no tall, slender, bleach blonde-haired woman with a slightly husky voice and an unidentifiable Slavic accent did not bump into me as I walked by to try and seduce me into believing I was, despite appearances to the contrary, the next Fred Astaire (or whomever the equivalent contemporary figure is, if indeed there is one, which I am inclined to doubt). Of course this would presume a coeval cultural currency between us that would be as weird as this wistful vision of mine is.
As I approached the all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant, a car pulled up. An old couple tottered out of the restaurant leaning on their respective canes and made their way to the car. Another older couple walked slowly ahead of me for a moment or two before turning into the parking lot to get to their car. The scene was melancholy. Perhaps it is the fact that this restaurant has reduced food growth, preparation, and consumption to a mechanized event devoid of the unique, the real, and the spontaneous that did it for me. A caloric Eden amid a nutritional desert sold at prices that cannot honestly reflect the actual costs involved, which must be borne on the backs of impoverished farmers and migrant workers and other cheap labor, that is borne on the backs of us all in the farm bills that subsidize the growers and processors and agri-chem companies and shippers and truckers and who knows who else. While a part of me feels the guilt of snobbishness, I am still overwhelmingly convinced that the buffet restaurant is symptomatic of the depressed state in which the American middle class finds itself, part of the downward spiral of Wal-Martification, union busting, and wage suppression that has been going on for two decades or more.
For further proof I didn't have to walk far. There is it was, that box of societal sorrow, defeat, and despair - a dollar store. Advertising frozen chicken nuggets for a dollar. A woman carrying three full plastic bags out of the automatic door. Difficult. Dolorous. Determined. As if she is not trying hard enough. Obviously we should further erode her pride and force her to urinate into a cup to keep receiving the meager support the government gives her so she will not have to go hungry. It only makes sense, right? It isn't wrong to assume that if she's poor and needs some help that she's probably a drug user, right?
Next door is the high-end tea shop with clever lights and displays selling organic and specialty and fair trade teas that make you feel like a hero for purchasing them. With appropriate implements necessary for the experience to be authentic and rare. And commodified. Like everyone else. Aristocratic dreams.
The fabric store. God-awful memories of my youth. There can be few worse places in which to be a boy while accompanying one’s mother shopping than a fabric store. Even the imagination has its limits and the fabric store tests them. The rolls of fabric may entertain for a few minutes: feeling the faux fir, checking out the sports themed racks. But then what? The soul-sucking begins. The barely audible fluorescent light hum would be hypnotic if it weren't enervating. The vinyl tile floor lacks the comfort of the carpeted department stores in the mall so you have to stand. And that is basically all there is to do. Stand and watch your mother look at fabric and patterns and thread while the light fixture hum bores a hole through your spirit. Emptiness without nirvana. Boredom that lacks the panache of ennui. Time slows unbearably.
Then there is the record store that miraculously survives without being a head shop, selling new vinyl and old vinyl and rare vinyl. The record store beckons me. Contrary to the horrors of the fabric store, the record store conjures up fond memories of my teenage years and my many sojourns to the record store in my home town where I would pore over Clash and Cure and REM albums amid the always changing but ever-present incense aroma. Sometimes I would talk to the owner when he was working. He was a scrawny dude with heavy metal hair and innumerable concert tees. Once when I was fifteen he sold some weed to a friend and me, though it wasn't at the store. We burned a bowl and went to the county fair glassy-eyed and ridiculous.
The hearing aid store makes me think of my father who died nearly eight years ago. He wore hearing aids, though he spent years denying that he needed them while we shouted our objections. I miss him often and am grateful for things that bring him back to me if only for a short while.
Eventually I make my way past the last store and return to my usual route through the neighborhoods in the area, alone in the midday winter sun and happy I didn’t drive a block-and-a-half for a burger and fries.
