“Wanna go to Queen’s?” My father’s invitation was to go to Dairy Queen, and it was a rare summer treat. There was one Dairy Queen in our city, as far as I remember, and it wasn’t open year round. We used to drive past it in winter and I used to look for signs that the boards over the serving windows were coming down, a better sign of spring than any natural phenomena.
Summers in Northern Illinois are short, so the opportunities for a trip to the Dairy Queen were limited. My father or mother or both often had meetings in the evening, and my mother didn’t drive, all of which limited opportunities even more. The rarity of the trips made them all the more exciting.
I usually had a cone dipped in chocolate, sometimes a Dilly Bar or a hot fudge sundae. Once in awhile, I had a Mr. Misty and—just once—I had a Peanut Buster Parfait; I didn’t like it. I can remember my choices, and the way they tasted, with complete and vivid clarity, as if the last 40-odd years had never happened. But I can’t remember what anyone else had.
After we picked up our orders, my father would ask, “Should we go look at the pretty ladies?” We always agreed, and we’d head downtown to look at the mannequins in the shop windows. They stood looking stately, the display light glowing brightly in the darkening evening. Their gaze was always fixed somewhere above the heads of people passing by, as if they had a bored indifference to those marvelling at their style, class and elegance.
Once in awhile we’d park and walk down the street, looking intently at the pretty ladies. I wasn’t terribly interested in them, but I was fascinated by the sidewalks: The concrete had little shiny bits mixed in and I thought it looked like the sidewalks had tiny diamonds in them. In some places, small glass squares were embedded, providing light, I learned years after we’d moved away, to a delivery area under the sidewalk; big steel doors in the sidewalk provided the access.
We moved away when I was nine. The last time I was in that city I was in my twenties. The department stores, whose brightly lit windows had provided free entertainment, were empty or boarded-up. There was hardly anyone around what had been a vibrant shopping area. The people had moved on to the malls on the edge of town, and in the years after that some would move even further to the big box retailers.
But most of those impersonal bargain barns have nothing in their windows except sale banners obscuring views of checkout lanes. Certainly they have nothing to entertain small kids with dripping ice cream cones: Their sidewalks have no diamonds in them, nor any mysterious glass squares. Their bland windows have no attraction, and certainly no pretty ladies, with their elegant poses, staring out into the evening. The bored indifference now belongs to the staff and the patrons, and to little kids who no longer get trips to Queen’s on a warm summer evening, followed by a trip to look at the pretty ladies.
4 comments:
I thought this was a great post. It remeinded me of my mother taking my sister and I to taco bell and then the library when we were practically babies.
I think that times have certainly changed from when I was a kid. When it was safe to play outside with little supervision. When you could go to teachers and police officers with out any element of distrust. I think we have made ourselves so affraid of the bad things in life that we don't enjoy the good. Hence the disappearence of simple things like taking a walk to the library, getting a cone from "the Queens", looking at the displays in windows at the local store. The mannequins now a days don't even have faces. Now that I think about it, I can't think of one store that has a window display.
I completely agree with you that "we have made ourselves so afraid of the bad things in life that we don't enjoy the good." We Americans have a reputation for being paranoid, and I'm not sure it's undeserved though, in fairness, at least some of this is in many Western countries. Things like you mentioned—not being safe to play outside, not being able to trust teachers or cops—are irrational fears, whipped up by media obsessed with scandal and sensationalism. Crime statistics show that the times now aren't necessarily any more dangerous than they were before, and in many cases increases in crime rates are the result of better reporting, not more crime.
So, where does that leave us? I don't know. We have to stop being afraid, but can we? Of all the things you mentioned, one thing really stuck out for me: The faceless mannequins. Maybe they've become a physical metaphor for modern people. If so, we obviously have a lot of work to do to re-connect to each other.
Lord, it's posts like that these that make me scared of what I'll bitch about when I get old.
"Back when I was a kid we had to wait 25 minutes over a shitty dial up connection for a 1 megabyte TIFF file to download. You kids with your internet2 don't know anything about patience!"
In the meantime, I hate it that all the delightful little exurb malls with their bright colors demanding for me to tell my dad to buy me things are being replaced with stupid urban store-fronts that are cramped and have this reflective shit in the sidewalks that refract light around my sunglasses.
Oh, I'm not bitching about it. Things are the way they are because, apparently, that's what people want. C'est la vie. I was just documenting something that's now gone, in the same way my dad used to talk about stealing bits of ice off the horse drawn ice wagon when he was a kid. In my case, though, In the case of what I talk about, I'm not sure that what's evolved is always better than what we had, even if it often is, but people can decide that for themselves.
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