Scenes from a mall

On occasion, whether for the change in scenery or to avoid cold or inclement weather, I will walk at the local mall, Parkway Place. It's less than a mile from the house; on simply cold days, I will walk to the mall and do several laps inside before coming home. I see many other people walking there, especially a lot of seniors. What I have yet to see, however, is a bona fide mall-walker - fast pace, swinging hips and arms. I tend to walk pretty fast by dint of the music in my ears. But I don't mall-walk either.

Tonight was a very visually potent night at the mall. I had not walked there on a Saturday night before, and I left with several scenes in my head.

One
The mall might as well have been a farmer's market, for all the obvious county folks who had made the once-a-week trip into the city to sample the exciting sights, sounds and tastes of Parkway Place. The boys had poorly dyed blond hair, heavy work boots and dinner plate belt buckles. The girls mostly holding hands with the boys, were also invariably larger than the boys, with flat, limp, uninteresting hair. The only stores that seemed to interest them were GNC (boys acting butch for the girls), Brookstone (shiny things) and the Cookie Company (of course).

Two
I walked past one woman and her two small children several times. She was seated in a bench near an exit with a stroller and several bags of merchandise. Her nonchalant posture implied that she was waiting for something - a spouse? a ride? They two children each had a drink and a cookie from the Cookie Company. The drink cups were on the ground, and one had already spilled some brown soda on the floor. I wondered after each circuit passed her whether she would exhibit good parenting and citizenship by cleaning up after her children, or (gasp!) having them clean up after themselves. Finally, on the next lap, she was gone. So were the drinks. Well, at least the cups were gone. The drinks were dripped and splashed all over the walkway, with pieces of cookie randomly scattered and smashed into the tile throughout.

Three
I passed the central intersection of the mall, and from my left side I saw a woman and a man walking down the adjacent way. She was carrying a white and black Williams-Sonoma bag. But not for long. The bottom fell out of the bag, and out tumbled a sterling silver cylinder that looked like a coffee carafe, and its mated lid. I had the ear buds in ("High School Never Ends," Bowling for Soup), so I didn't hear anything, which was remarkable. Most of the heads I passed for the next several seconds were turned in that direction, often murmuring something to the other nearby heads.

Four
Weekends usually bring out the young people. Parkway Place has a policy prohibiting unescorted minors during evening and weekend hours. Teen and early-20s adults come there, too, and this includes the urbanites from the north part of town. Many times at the mall I have seen pairs and small groups of young men that are mixed race groups - blacks and whites, for the sake of simplicity. Never have I seen the men in the group all dressed like the whites. They are always all dressed like the blacks.

Five
Near the end of my walk, I was following two adults, with two boys and five or six small girls. The group seemed too large and the adults seemed too happy for them to have all been related. And then I noticed the shortest girl in the group, a blonde whose height would imply she was four or five, but whose behavior would make you think she was double that age. She looked remarkably like my eldest niece Maddie. But she wasn't looking at or noticing me. I kept watching her, but not for too long, because I didn't want anyone who saw me to think I was some lecherous man. So I called my brother-in-law, and he confirmed that Maddie and Jessie were both out with friends. So I called her by her full name, and she turned around and saw me, and ran to give me a hug. She pointed me out to her younger sister, and said, rather demandingly, "Give Uncle Frankie a kiss!". Jessie kissed me, too, and I introduced myself to the adults, apologetically. I told them that I had seen Maddie, but not Jay or Lena, and that it had just surprised me. (I did not tell them that I had called Jay to make sure it was Maddie I had seen.)

Six
When I see seniors walking in the mall, especially alone, I wonder if that will be me someday. Without a spouse or children, it is easy for bachelor, single, or gay men to be forgotten in the older age. It is a platitude to say that it couldn't happen, or that it couldn't happen to me, because I can see it has happened to some of them. I have plenty of time to avert it. But then again, when I broke up with Joe Little, I certainly did not think at that time that I would still be single now, eight years later.

Seven
Near the central intersection of the mall - where the woman's bag broke - is a sunglasses kiosk. For almost the entire hour that I was walking at the mall, this attractive man was shopping there. Each time I walked past, he was trying on a different pair of sunglasses. Tragically, he did not have anyone to provide him advice aside from the salesperson, which was to his detriment. Each look he proffered was out of reach for him, an unusual state of affairs for a handsome man. On some laps, I speculated that he might have noticed my passing frequently, and he was trying to choose frames that were more and more outrageous each time. When I saw him last, he had walked away from the kiosk, empty-handed.