Our Town

 I’m sitting behind the wheel of a car tentatively parked at an “Official Parking Only” spot (whatever that means) on one of the faux side “streets” of a large, outdoor, meandering mall, a marketplace designed to look nothing like the town square it was meant to evoke. It could be anywhere in America though this one happens to be in Westchester, and as in all such places everyone seems to be running. The day is cloudy and overcast, which somehow adds a welcome and almost noir touch to the scene. Other drivers of sound mind and fully functioning hearts and limbs have parked even more boldly- a notch up the risk category- in those hallowed handicapped spots, almost flauntingly in fact.

There is not an available, illegal, outside space to be found! I lucked out because I was cowering in the fire zone before the miscreant in front me sashayed back to his car like an insouciant mafia don and languidly pulled out, allowing me to creep up into the area’s last non-spot spot a notch down from the emergency vehicle lane. We rebel outliers have decamped here on the faux streets of the faux town because either we are sociopaths with total disregard for sign warnings, or more likely we wish to avoid the monstrous cave of a garage that swallows drivers into its gaping maw then frustrates the hell out of you as you try to get it to spit the car back out- in large part because the scanners never work. Some of the more devil-may-care insurgents simply walk away from their illegally parked vehicles on the street and nonchalantly stroll to their destinations. Most people run. I am out here waiting because the person I am with “ran in” to make a purchase. Run, run, run. . . .

Even those who come stumbling out of the multi-leveled, dark cavern of a giant parking structure with an assured “legal” spot seem to be hurrying in a kind of semi-somnambulant state. The air is filled with a sort of droning background noise passing itself off as a "song" that’s a simulacrum of the original Muzak simulacrum (remember the tunes of the Beatles homogenized to a cool whipped, barely recognizable melody in a freezing supermarket as you checked out the eggs? That would be like Beethoven compared with this stuff). The track or channel or outer space station from whence this horrible sound blasts a wavy, repetitive series of dissonant grunts, unintelligible moans and repetitive lyrics- some fast, some agonizingly slow- cuts through the sporadic rain slowly beginning to gently splatter the windshield and wafts overhead.

Visitors wander back and forth under the spell of the sleep inducing, indecipherable beat, trance-like and weary, weaving or running toward one or another of the stores on the snaking trail of wares stacked horizontally and lining the way; it’s a series of neat corporate igloos with brand names. I think people think they’re having fun. Well, maybe not. But they’re definitely acquiring stuff.

Like everyone else, I too like to acquire stuff and throw it out. But why can’t this happen like in those earlier, twentieth century Hollywood comedies and romances that take place on a fashionable New York avenue? Cinematic shopping outings with well dressed, perfectly coifed, silly women in little hats, elegant suits and impossibly high heels who breathlessly balance a stack of gorgeously wrapped and festively ribboned parcels in their arms as a doorman suddenly appears out of nowhere to graciously open a taxi door. So relaxing, so much fun! A kind of languorous shopping, no running! Can you imagine such an extravagant bout of retail therapy, at full price no less, with doting shopkeepers clucking over you and the most pretentious, smarmy, Fifth Avenue department store adding a touch of shock and awe; or much less envision squeezing your bunions into those painful, toe pinching “pumps” of yesteryear. . .  and yet it still seems a much more desirable fantasy!

Or perhaps a classic “Shop Around the Corner” jaunt in slightly faded black and white would be more to your taste, where the staff is like a family, the owner the mustachioed, beneficent patriarch, the setting a quaint little pre-WWII European town, the longtime salespeople comically competing; a place where Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan fall in love with each other in and out of the stock room by means of  some wacky pen pal plot device, where there are no parking garages because people walk everywhere, and personal attention is paid to each and every shopper, no matter how obnoxious the customer or small the purchase . . . .

I am whisked back to reality as I continue to wait and the rain drops start to hit the glass methodically like seconds ticking away in a Hitchcock film. Some of the people in the simulacrum shopping town I observe through my windshield- a goodly number of them mildly or wildly overweight and not very well dressed- are carrying little and bigger bags with recognizable brand lettering stamped across the stiff paper. These wrappings with the company names proudly ensconced on them make the purchases seem more important than they are; but the bags are all recycled and not nearly as glossy and shiny as in the good old days of planet destruction. Somehow this makes me sad.

But really, what are my choices? Spending hour after hour blearily sitting in front of a screen at all times of day or night, obsessively browsing and doing the work of store employees by typing in scads of  style or “sku” numbers, addresses and credit information? Then weeks later desperately hunting around the house for tape while grappling with the repacking of a hopelessly and messily torn open box, after you’ve even forgotten you ordered the damn thing in the first place because it took so long to arrive.  And all this so that you can run to the post office and return the defective merchandise as you curse out the seller and swear never to order online again???

Oh wait- gotta go!- a fifteen minute loading zone just opened up and I need to run in for something. . . .