On the heels of my recent post about memory, I've chosen a poem that makes me nostalgic; I imagine most of us have similar recollections of the five and dime stores of our childhoods. (And I have no pictures on hand of pies or parakeets or multicolored thongs, but perhaps this bright bounty of yarn will serve.)
WOOLWORTH'S by Mark Irwin
Everything stands
wondrously multicolored
and at attention
in the always Christmas air.
What scent
lingers unrecognizably
between that
popcorn, grilled cheese sandwiches,
malted milkballs,
and parakeets? Maybe you came here
in winter to buy
your daughter a hamster
and were detained
by the bin
of Multicolored Thongs, four pair
for a dollar.
Maybe you came here to buy
some envelopes,
the light blue par avion ones
with airplanes,
but caught yourself, lost,
daydreaming,
saying it’s too late over the glassy
diorama of cakes and pies. Maybe you came here
to buy a
lampshade, the fake crimped
kind, and
suddenly you remember
your grandmother,
dead
twenty years,
floating through the old
house like a
curtain. Maybe you’re retired,
on Social
Security, and came here for the Roast
Turkey Dinner or the Liver and Onions,
or just to stare
into a black circle
of coffee and to
get warm. Or maybe
the big church
down the street is closed
now during the
day, and you’re homeless and poor,
or you’re rich,
or it doesn’t matter what you are
with a little
loose change jangling in your pocket,
begging to be
spent, because you wandered in
and somewhere
between the bin of animal crackers
and the little
zoo in the back of the store
you lost
something, and because you came here
not to forget,
but to remember to live.
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