I put off going to the mall as long as I could, didn’t care to deal with parking and crowds, and everything in between like grabbing a shopping cart and rattling it loose. Sort of an act of violence. Still, a body’s got to eat, right? Nothing in the ‘frig except a boiled egg which I put in my pocket and took along in case of an emergency.
But indulge me…One day I got bored waiting in line at the checkout, and consulted my cellphone to find out who to thank for inventing the shopping cart. Turns out that Sylvan Goldman takes the credit, son of Nathan and Hortense, both Jews who’d emigrated from Latvia and France to raise a kid in Oklahoma who had a buzz in his head about how to sell more produce. Around 1937 Goldman hired models to push carts around his Humpty Dumpty market to convince everyone how these new buggies were the future. Safeway caught the drift, and bought him out.
Then there’s the shopping mall. Victor Gruen made that big hit, a socialist and Jewish refugee from Vienna who escaped Nazi Germany and arrived in NYC around the same time that Goldman was rolling out his shopping cart. Gruen was a sensitive soul who became an architect of environments, blazing show windows and artificial lights across the land, giving rise to a new wave of land speculation and inflated real estate prices. But Gruen thought of his malls as community centers, public spaces where families could take classes and listen to concerts just like the old days back in Vienna. But for all that, we owe Goldman and Gruen a thank you. They both tried.
Now I’m getting hungry. Haven’t eaten a real meal for several days. I might as well crack my single egg on the kitchen sink and parse it out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which I almost did, because I really don’t want to go to the mall. But a half hour later, I get into my car (Henry Ford’s name, unlike Goldman-and-Gruen’s, is well-known) and began my climb through parking lot levels, which also was a feature of Gruen’s shopping malls—offer them free parking, he told his investors, and they will come. Up and up I climbed looking for a spot as I passed the dented, the dirty, the newly leased.
I keep turning my wheel knowing that a parking spot must lie somewhere beyond the bend, but its hoods and tail lights all the way up. I’m at level 36 and cars are packed solid, and out of frustration, throw my egg out the window and watch it roll downhill. Follow that egg. An empty shopping cart comes clanging after it–a comedy of errors. Coyote and the Road Runner jump off a cliff. Everything’s on the up and up, but I doubt it. I keep climbing, wondering why I even wanted to come here; think about the long lines at the checkout counter. At this point, it doesn’t matter. I am determined to find a spot. After all, I’ve come this far. It has become a matter of some principal, which I can’t quite identify, only that I believe that somewhere on one of these levels, there’s an empty spot waiting for me. Judy Garland’s voice rings in my ears. I am the lion. Hear me roar.
Flash Fiction Hot off the Press: Holding on to the Fringes of Love
- Review of my poetry collection “Two Places” by Nina Serrano of Estuary Press.
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