I stumbled onto this site where they are selling some Jim Harrison art.http://www.joebuckalew.com/printdetail.asp?print=670
This painting of the old gas station/grocery is one of my favorites of his. It reminds me of my childhood. You could walk 20 minutes or ride the bike 10 minutes in any direction from our home and find a place just like this.
In those days families usually had only one car. The SAHM's would be stranded and pay me fifty cents to run to the store for them. I would have an RC Cola and a Moon Pie just to recover from the trip. Then I spent 10 to 15 minutes agonizing over the penny candy counter or Little Debbie cakes. I could spend 10 cents, the other 15 cents went into the bank for movies, records and magazines when I went to town on Saturdays.
Even now, over 50 years later, I can still remember the sounds and smells of those little places. Wooden floors were stained dark brown with a gorgeous patina. They creaked and echoed as you stomped around selecting your goodies. Some stores had concrete floors. The grit from the gas pumping areas would be tracked in so you crunched everywhere you walked.
What about the smells? The only smells in today's groceries is the chicken roasting at the deli. Otherwise it is cold and sterile. In those old stores there was no air conditioning. Just a big overhead fan or a giant fan in a corner that was cooling the register area and the owner more than the rest of the store. you could smell the fat back bacon that reeked like dirty socks. In many of the stores they would pull out a big tube of bologna and bricks of cheese to make sandwiches with Miracle Whip and mustard. In addition to the sandwich smells you got the bonus odor of the sweaty construction and road workers that stopped in to grab them for lunch.
My favorite item was the box cooler. You lifted the lid to get your soda but you could also dip your hands into the icy water to cool off. Many of us would even dip a cloth in to cool our necks and faces and no one said a thing about it. Yes, we dragged a soda out of there, popped the top and drank away without fainting or hunting for the Purell :)
If the Coke cooler was out of your favorite RC or Orange Crush, you could check the minnow cooler to see if there were some pre-cooling. No, we didn't wash those either.
Oh, and that old white fridge in the back? Well the top shelf held bowls of fresh eggs and tubs of butter while the bottom shelf held white round boxes filled with dirt and worms. If you were lucky there might be home made pies and cakes on the middle shelve that you could purchase by the slice. Yum!!
My least favorite thing was the jars of pickled eggs and pickled pigs feet by the register. Ewwwwww!!! They just seemed too nasty for me. A friend convinced me to have a pickled egg a few years ago and I was shocked to find I enjoyed it. Even so, I am pretty sure no one will ever convince me to try the pigs feet. LOL
Ah, such fun and lazy days.
hope your memory travels are fun too,
Linda B in TN:)
No comments:
Post a Comment