seeing what i need to hear

“Any closer, any wiser and you would be dangerous” he said to his daughter- a tiny bald baby in a car seat.

I wanted to hit him but since I was another car and not driving I couldn’t.
Nor could I be sure that is what he said but while we were both sitting there, waiting for the light to turn green, green against the grey sky of summer weather, a rain storm to disrupt barbeques and baseball games I thought I could read his lips. I thought I could sense what asinine things he would be saying to her, her whom I assumed was his baby.

When the light changed and my friend started driving again I said to her, “Did you hear that?” to which like a sensible person she replied, “heard what?” We were in a silent car with not much noise coming in from the outside. Anything for the most part that our ears were picking up was urban white noise and not much to notice. “Well I guess you couldn’t hear it, “ I said “but that father in the car next to us was already berating his baby daughter with sexist remarks”.

By the time I got the sentence out of me and it hit her ears I was over it and pretty sure I was wrong. Now my mind was wondering and I was thinking about an old dollar store I use to go to in a mall I once worked in. the Dollar Store was near a tailor shop where the owners had a photo up of them with Elvis Presley. It was an enlarged photocopy of the photo really that it its self had already gone yellow and flakey but still it was exciting and provided a good prompt for small talk while the foreign workers who worked for the tailors would collect the repaired garments.

It was one of many dollar stores that existed in the mall. 1 of 3 actually at the time. Now it along with the other two are closed and in its place is another one, a mega one with seemly countless isles with product placed together with no rhyme or no reason.
At first when it opened I was glad for it. Before when there was more than one store I use to have to go to all 3 to get everything that you wanted and even though they were called dollar stores they all carried things at slightly different prices- the cheekiest among them, a family run dollar store use to charge as much as $9 for things.
The mega dollar in the food court changed all that. Now there was one stop where everything was a dollar.

A friend of mine who I always mean to call says that dollar stores are a sign of a blue-collar community and sinking economy. He says a lot of smart things because he is smart but more than that he is a reader, and understander and a thinker so when he says something I am not afraid that I am hearing recycled ideas I am hearing the real deal from the horses mouth. When it comes to his theory of dollar stores I agree.

Across the street from me was a dollar store in the new urban strip mall that was actually a perimeter of 1-story buildings that surrounded a parking lot. Aside from the grocery store that had good cheese buns, the best cheese buns there was also a great dollar store that for me replaced the 3 dollar stores in the mall long before they closed and the mega dollar store opened up. It was all-cheap, though not all a dollar didn’t smell like cheap candles (wasn’t open long enough to) and had everything I needed.

Soon after I mover into the neighborhood and begun taking the place for granted it shut down. For the longest time the space it once took up stood empty and I took it as a sign that if the area couldn’t even sustain a dollar store than it would never make it.
Not soon after that thought came the new business that would take over the space- Marble Slab- an overpriced ice cream shop that caters to those who think they deserve to treat themselves.

While the dollar store was never busy the ice cream shop was never really dead- even in the winter when it was too cold to be outside people would wait in their cars and stare into the shop not going in until there was enough to form the line inside and not outside like the summer.

It was during the winter and witnessing all the idiots idling for ice cream while I schlepped my groceries home that maybe my friend was wrong. Maybe dollar stores are just markers of a time. Maybe the truth was the area couldn’t sustain a dollar store because it thought it was better than cheap Chinese made goods. Maybe the neighborhood wanted overpriced empty calories in stead. Not having to pay for bad choices was the providence of the rich so I guess my area was moving on up

In the summer the ice cream place is such a hot spot that people park their trucks and cars backwards and treat the parking lot like a park, which is sad because there is a park right behind the ice cream place but people either didn’t know or care about it or want to be by their cars.

I guess a season after realizing that my neighborhood was changing I realized that I was becoming disenfranchised with it. I use to feel like I lived alone in the area, like woman in Wigginstien’s mistress who thinks that she is the last woman on earth and basically writes that on the streets in front of the Louver in Paris.

Seeing people hang out in parking lots made me realize that whether or not I liked it I belonged in the neighborhood because by being- even if I was never acknowledged or liked or thought of I still existed in the same space and there for still was a part of…

Full parking lots typified the overall dissatisfaction I was having of no longer being able to convince myself that I was all-alone. While I use to actually love parking lots because their emptiness as proof of man gave me hope, seeing them filled with lard chomping idiots filled me with doom.

Same thing happened when all the cranes on main street disappeared and where once stood derelict buildings and then gaping holes with cranes emerging now stood forgettable impenetrable buildings of banality lacking in imagination and humanness- not to mention humor.

I stayed here for so long because I thought it was going to become something that I could believe in. I thought because I had spent so much time scaling its walls and traipsing through its streets it might in the smallest and most magical of ways reflect me or at least on some level serve me but it doesn’t and it hasn’t and it won’t.

Getting out of the car as my friend drops me off I feel bad for spending our last few minutes in the car daydreaming about how miserable I am, acting like a disappointed hippy father whose kid grows up to be a model or politician walking around begrudging my own youth, wondering where all the time went and craving the dirty past that probably never existed the way I wanted it to.

Ted