Let's Go To The Mall!

When I was a kid, going to the mall was a Big Deal.  We didn't have tons of money to throw at the Mausoleum of Commerce, and also, the mall we liked (The Arnot Mall, baby!) was an hour and fifteen minutes away.  I really didn't know any other mall.  We didn't go on vacation much when I was a kid, and the other mall within reasonable driving distance was in Olean, also an hour and fifteen minutes away, but it didn't offer as much stuff.  Early-early on, they had an AM&As, but that wasn't enough of a draw to lure us from the Arnot Mall.

I remember being instantly happy whenever we walked in the entrance at the Sears end.  We never parked at the main entrance.  I never understood why until I started driving.  We could get closer up by Sears.  Back in the day, when there were a lot of stores not filled up, the mall featured walls with a pen-and-ink cityscape, to make it look as though Big Things Are Coming Here! instead of "we can't fill our shops."

The way the mall smelled always made me happy, too.  There were a few leather stores sprinkled throughout, so there was always the rich smell of leather.  Not Wal-Mart leather, Mall leather.  Up and down the wide skylit corridors were big stone planters that you could sit on, and fountains that added a chlorine smell to the air.  It wasn't anything that would gag a (normal) person, but it was like when you walk by the hotel swimming pool when you're on vacation.  Great American Cookie Company somehow managed to make the entire gigantic building smell like cookies, and the newsstand on the Other End of the Mall sold pipe tobacco.  Vanilla Cavendish was always my favorite one to smell.  Back then, people were allowed to smoke in the food court and the common areas.  The smell of pipes and cigarettes just sort of spiced the air.  Either the ventilation was really good in the mall, or there weren't enough smokers to make the air feel close and choking like it can when somebody's smoking in a full car with the windows up.  Trust me, mixed with all the other mall smells, it all worked.

If Yankee Candle could make a scented candle that smelled like "Shopping Mall in the 80s," I'd buy it by the case and burn it whenever I need a lift. (I need a lift a lot sometimes)  The closest I can get to recreating the smell is a Yankee "Leather" candle (I think that one had a short run) burned simultaneously with a "Vanilla Lime" Housewarmer.  If I clean the bathrooms and kitchen with some Clorox Clean-Up, it gets it closer.

And then there were the stores!  What a cavernous Aladin's Cave of Wonders!  Besides the anchor stores: Sears, JCPenney's, Izard's, Hess's (their store sign looked like a giant wrote it on the wall in light-up red lipstick!), and Bradlee's.  The anchor stores were all right.  We pretty much only ever shopped at Sears, which accounts for my super-stylish Mainframe wardrobe, and Bradlee's.  Back in the day, the Arnot Mall had a Science Store.  It was my favorite, followed closely by Topkapi/Claire's.  I still have boxes and boxes of junk jewelry from there that I feel silly wearing but can't quite part with.  (Zoe, meet your inheritance!)  There was a 5-and-10 store called McCrory's, where you could buy just about anything you wanted.  Sam Goody sold sheet music, so in later years, I spent a king's fortune in there, as well as in the music store, where they sold pianos and band instruments. 

I bought my very first thing at DEB, which was a lot cooler and darker lit back then, in the tenth grade.  It was a dark blue velvet off-the-shoulder semi-formal for homecoming that year.  It was 1993.  Off-the-shoulder was where it was AT.  I loved that dress so much that I wore it to homecoming the next year too.  Nobody paid that much attention to what I wore to stuff to have it matter.  I still have that dress.  I wouldn't be able to zip it up now, but I have it, and I'm not getting rid of it, ever. 

When I was in sixth grade, we bought our first family computer, a Tandy, at Radio Shack.  Errrrrmagerd, typing that sentence just made me laugh so hard I almost peed my pants.  Go ahead and read it again and have a chuckle, yourself.  And plus, that baby had a dot-matrix printer.  FROM RADIO SHACK!  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhahahahahaahah!  But think about it.  In the late fall of 1989, even a Radio Shack Tandy with a dot-matrix printer was a pretty neato piece of computing equipment, and not everybody had one.  This was our big splurge purchase for the family that year, and I remember we bought it on a Sunday.  I remember this because we got home from church and changed and piled back in the Voyager and headed to Big Flats.  Wouldn't that just smack of preciousness if we'd not changed out of our church clothes before we went?  Oh, man.


My love affair with the mall continued through high school and college.  There were other malls, the Susquehanna Valley Mall and the Lycoming Mall, but the Arnot Mall was still "My Mall."  Things changed over the years.  Anchor stores came and went.  They remodeled and took out the planters and fountains and put in a new, less impressive fountain at Center Court.  The Mall looked brighter and shinier, but it wasn't the same experience.  Some of the magic was lost.  More and more storefronts emptied.  I went to graduate school in Philadelphia and lived ten minutes away from the King of Prussia Mall, an ENORMOUS shopping mall, double decker even, with snootay stores alongside more modest ones.  I loved going there as an escape after I got home from class.  I worked for a short time at Bath and Body Works at the Plymouth Meeting Mall, a smaller double-decker mall that was even closer to my apartment. 

I think that's when I started to sour on malls in general.  There were new shopping centers popping up all over the place then.  There was a particularly beautiful one, the Metroplex, on Chemical Road, and it featured Target, and Barnes and Noble and DSW and a Giant- the Eastern PA version, not like Giant in Wellsville.  Everything was right there, right off the Blue Route. My drive home would all but deliver me into Target! 

Maybe it was all that retail overload when I was in graduate school, or maybe it was the rise of online shopping (which I am passionate about), but by the time we moved home, I could happily go for months without setting foot in "My Mall."  Things around the mall had grown up enough that I could get everything I could ever want or need at the new plazas, and I wouldn't have to haul my bags around while I walked through the mall.  Shop at Old Navy, park at Old Navy's plaza, bring out your bags, when you're done, move the Jeep down the line to Barnes and Noble's part of the plaza, then dash across and hit all those stores on the WalMart side.  My world was complete when Target came in.  If I went to the mall at all, it was for a specific thing, in a specific store, and in I'd go, but my specific thing, do a hot-lap around to see which stores were still there, lament the ones that were gone, and look around with something of a sneer at the empty storefronts.  I wouldn't linger.  I thought it was so much better to drive to the plazas, and move the Jeep whenever I changed stores.

Then something happened to make me almost love the mall again: Zoe came along.  The first time we took her to the mall, she was a week old.  Literally, seven days old.  I was in the very depths of something post-partum-y, beating myself up during all the sleepless hours for sucking at being a mom, sucking at keeping the house presentable, just sucking in general.  I felt like getting out would maybe help me breathe again, and we needed to have some work done on our Challenger at the dealership, so Shane drove Zoe in the Jeep, and I drove the sassy car and listened to my music on the hour-long drive.  While we were waiting on the Challenger, we took Zoe and the Jeep to the Mall.  Shane was after a tool box, a big one like mechanics use, and he wanted to check out Sears.

I was on pins and needles the whole way from Chilson-Wilcox to the Mall.  So was Shane.  He was so nervous about week-old Zoe waking up and screaming that we drove around Arby's and ate the tepid Beef'n'Cheddars in the parking lot of the old Ponderosa.  He didn't want her ruining anybody's lunch.  As it was, she slept the whole way there, the whole way around the mall, the whole way back out to the Jeep, and all the way back to Chilson-Wilcox, where she woke up, insistent on being changed and fed (awkward, because she wasn't on the bottle just yet).

But back to the Mall.  It was our first trip out with the baby carrier and the stroller.  We opted for the travel system, so the carrier was supposed to snap easily into the stroller.  And it would have, if I'd have RTFM before we headed out.  There was a little learning curve on that bit, but we eventually got it!  And it was great, because Zoe could go from vehicle to stroller, and into the Mall we went, where she could slumber in peace while we leisurely roamed the mall.  I noticed a lot of other parents with strollers that day at the mall.  I even saw a couple moms changing their babies and nursing, right in the corridors!  They had the same Hooter Hider I did!  Wow!

I wasn't quite "there," even with the Hooter Hider, but hey, there were other parents at the mall, and they looked like they were doing all right!

On a more extensive trip to The Mall a few weekends later, Shane and I learned what a pain in the ass it is to constantly snap out and snap in that baby seat in the Jeep, when we traveled the plazas.  The mall didn't make us do that.  Just one snap, and we could wander for hours if we wanted to!  This was GREAT!

As Zoe got less content to ride around in the bucket seat, and we started leaving it in the car and just strolling her around in her stroller, we really have come to appreciate the ease of mall shopping when it comes to that stroller, not to mention how fabulous that big basket on the bottom of that stroller is, all those places to hang bags, in the mall.  When we want to get out and go somewhere, we can take Zoe and the stroller to the mall, and make a day of it, minimizing taking her out into rain, or burning sun, or traffic.  She gets to people-watch, we get some exercise, and eat, all right there.

So now, when someone asks me what I want to do on a day when we're all bored, my refrain is the same as it used to be, Let's Go To The Mall!