For the last time last night, Sue and Grant visited the Albertson's grocery store that is just a stone's throw from our back door. The shuttering of several Albertson's stores in the area was announced last month and there are but a few days left before our local source of milk, baguettes and pharmaceuticals is no more. With the shelves mostly empty, and the pharmacy, deli and bakery sections now boarded off, the once familiar shopping environment was transformed into an eerie movie set of the much feared Zombie Apocalypse, where the commercial world is vacant and beset my zombies wandering around the city waiting for a buy-1-get-1-free sale on sweet breads.
In addition to the zombie apocalypse feeling from the nearly vacant aisles, the few and peculiar assortment of items that remained on the shelves offered the sense of walking into a time warp, "Look, a can of shaving powder! - I didn't think anybody has been able to buy a can of shaving powder since 1959. How long do you think this has been sitting on this shelf?" Like an extreme low tide that reveals the hull and masts of an old sunken sailing ship from a bygone century; such was the character of merchandise revealed after a tide of bargain hunters swept away the standard stuff at 50-80% Off!!.
When we first moved into this house, Albertson's was then Skaggs Alpha Beta, a brave little store on the growing edge of town. For just a few needed sundries, we could grab our ruck sack and walk across fallow cotton fields and use the farmer's old culvert to stay out of the ditch and then skip across two lanes of light traffic on Highway 78 to do our shopping. The cotton fields have long since sprouted 4 bedroom homes and Hwy 78 is now 6 lanes with a dividing median strip. Luxurious Kroeger stores and Super Wal*Marts have come to town and the retail cycle has moved past humble Albertson's, where we were on first name basis with Karla the pharmacist. Where once when shopping for pampers and formula with by baby daughter strapped into the shopping cart seat, an elderly woman approached me an intoned some important words in Mandarin (or was it Taiwanese - I don't recall), I smiled politely. A younger woman came and translated, "My mother-in-law says 'your baby girl with big eyes looks like a beautiful doll". I smiled a bit wider and then nodded my thanks for the compliment. It was just a few years later, when "Big Eye Doll Baby's" mother was paged by the cashier; "Would the mother of Snow White please come to the front of the store", after Inga had slipped away while wearing one of her favorite Disney dresses, apparently to cull the poison apples from the produce section.
The local grocery market will depart the world of retail in just a day or two, but it will leave behind some memories of well-worn daily shopping routines and we will miss the smell of 4 o'clock hot French Bread, fresh out of the oven, a temptation we seldom passed on purchasing. In their last trip up Aisle 3 and down memory lane, Sue and Grant did make some final purchases at 80% off - beside the milk they originally came to buy, they got a great deal on a small jar of caviar and a pack of animal cookies in boxes shaped like school buses.
I don't know about your plans, but as for the Suneson's, once the real Zombie Apocalypse comes, we will lock the doors, close the blinds and survive on caviar and animal cookies.
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