A Doll Goes Shopping at Walmart
For weeks, I had been reading up on Walmart, absorbing everything from Sam’s biography to reports about how the global chain was destroying labor guarantees put into place by the New Deal. I wanted to understand how Walmart had evolved from a variety store to an international behemoth hated and loved by all. Call it […]
Walmart is a Big Box
I made a pilgrimage to the heartland of Walmart in Bentonville, the same day the conclave of cardinals named a new pope. White smoke rose up from the Sistine Chapel. Along the highway, an egret or a plastic bag? I remember John’s Bargain Store on Soundview Avenue, a place with cheap stuff stacked in plastic […]
Song for Guns & License
Paper mill town closed down. Sporting goods store the big draw. Hunters shop for camouflage, a new barrel gauge. Deer season. Six months here, I’m in a red chair with a red number, clutch a California driver’s license, my ID for forever. Insurance says I have to turn myself in, time to cheer for the […]
Was John’s Bargain Store a Model for WalMart?
The John’s Bargain Store I remember was located at the Soundview Avenue stop of the “IRT” line. Soundview Avenue was an “elevated” subway stop. Rather than climbing up the stairs from an underground station, I climbed downstairs from a platform through the turnstile leading outside to the street. The newsstand was at the corner with […]
Living Around the Bayou
Down the street, rather along Highway 165, I turned off at Cross Keys Bank to open an account and deposit a check from West End Press in payment for my trip to the Albuquerque Cultural Conference. (Maybe my life is changing.) Cross Keys is a local community bank with origins in St. Joseph, Louisiana and […]
Welcome to the Sterlington, Louisiana Dirt Track Races
Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined I’d be living in the rural south. When I say never, I really mean never. I’m a city girl whose horizon has always been shaped by buildings, never trees; secondly, I’m a Jewish girl, which means that large urban centers are the places where the majority […]
M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I
I found the Sterlington, Louisiana Library, a new building only five years old, located a hop, skip and a jump away from where I now live. A big rig got impatient with me looking for the right turn and blew his fog-horn honk up my jeans, gave me the startlement treatment, while I thought, what […]
Standing at the Pizza Altar
Walmart in Monroe, where I walked through what seemed like a hundred brands of everything and anything before I found, in between the frozen chicken and packages of lasagna, the frozen pizza aisle. Full disclosure here. I’ve never shopped for food at Walmart, maybe in search of a light bulb or toilet paper, but not […]
Plane Time
I dreamed a silicon chip looked like an Aztec mask, a great yawning blackness where a mouth should be. A dying vampire awoke in a pool of perspiring blood cared for by a young woman with a baby. A Dallas waveform appeared. A shine on Bachman Lake, sun sparks on oil floating? The flight is […]
Sterlington or Bust
Traveling 2,000 miles from Oakland, CA to Sterlington, LA, on every highway I chased unbeatable savings, followed a road where free and fast never go out of style. Shifted lanes eastward past the Chiracuhua Mountains, camel-colored assemblages of rocks, windmills and ghost towns of pecan groves with orchards of plastic bags caught on branches. Dollar […]